Target Audience

By Dhruti Gandhi

14 min Read

December 2, 2022
The advantages of a target audience are becoming more and more clear to businesses as outbound marketing makes way for inbound initiatives. You may make sure you’re investing money wisely by focusing each of your advertising efforts on a certain group of consumers. When deploying tailored content, marketers saw a 20% boost in revenue.

Organizations nowadays are aware that diverse groups of individuals may not respond the same way to all communications. Your marketing efforts are more effective when you identify and appeal to your target market.

What is a target audience?
The exact group you intend to target with your marketing is known as your target audience. These people are frequently similar in one or more ways, which makes them ideal customers for your goods or services. You may market more effectively and efficiently by restricting your focus and just addressing a particular group of people who will be most receptive to your message. 

Researching potential customers’ demographics and developing a customer persona are excellent ways to begin considering your target market and audience. A fictionalized version of your ideal client, known as a customer persona, can help you better understand the demands of your target audience.

Start defining your target audience by imagining the sort of individual you believe would most profit from your good or service and asking yourself:

  • What is this person’s age?
  • Where are they based?
  • What type of work do they do?
  • Which hobbies do they enjoy?
  • What are their wants, and how will your offering satisfy them?

Start with broad categories and narrow them down if you’re having trouble coming up with answers to these questions. For instance, you may start with “millennials” and then take into account factors like work and gender.

If you sell items to businesses or consumers (B2C or B2B), your target market will seem different. You will market to a customer in a specific life stage or economic range while doing business with consumers (B2C). Selling to a buying manager or even a CEO is more common in business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Although the marketing strategies are comparable, a business’s needs are probably not the same as those of a single consumer.

Types of target audiences
Based on a variety of characteristics, you may identify your target audience. Your audience may be segmented based on factors like gender, age, education, and income, to name a few. Divide these audiences into the three categories of demography, interests, and purchase intents for the best research outcomes.

Demographics-based audience

Individuals are described by their socioeconomic characteristics or demographics. Age, education, location, gender, income, and other characteristics are examples of demographic variables.

Purchase intentions-based audience

Purchase intention data is extensively used by e-commerce companies. To comprehend the purchasing intentions and interests of potential clients, they must own this vital information.

For instance, researchers categorize people based on the things they explicitly view or express interest in. This enables them to better target certain people and gather their feedback on the products and services to meet their expectations.

Personal interests-based audience

Hobbies, passions, conduct, subjects of reading, and objects sought after are all a person’s interests. A few examples are dancing, novels, vehicles, and music genres, to mention a few.

For instance, you might give a fresh action movie to fans of the genre and ask them for their opinions based on various criteria you’ve established to gather real input.

Target Audience
How to Find Your Target Audience
The next stage is to locate the material that targets these particular groups after you’ve built personas. A few starting points are provided here:

Media kits

Media kits from publishers give a clear image of the audience segments they aim to reach. Depending on the brand, these might be categorized by occupations, income levels, or interests. Marketers should take care to exclude secondary audiences from these totals when deciding where to allocate their advertising budget. For instance, people frequently share magazines with their friends and relatives. While the lengthy shelf life is helpful for marketers, it shouldn’t be taken into account when choosing where to buy since it’s only an estimate. When deciding or haggling over price, consider the paying subscribers.

Nielsen ratings

Nielsen can estimate the number of homes that watch a certain show using statistical samplings. Even while it would seem like a good idea to air shows during prime time to appeal to a large audience, you might find that more specialized programming on the early or late fringe can reach your target group for far less money. This is especially true now that television is so fragmented due to the addition of additional channels and programs.

Social

You may use social media to target advertising based on a range of demographics and interests. Various populations consume media in different ways, although the audience may be extremely precisely targeted. On Instagram, some individuals might not be responsive to adverts for businesses, while they could be more receptive to Facebook. It’s crucial to assess the effectiveness of various ad formats on these platforms, such as display vs native. Try out different platforms to discover what produces the best results.

Information from a third party

You may determine the websites and television programs your target consumers visit or watch by using marketing analytics solutions like the Marketing Measurement and Attribution Platform. When choosing a partner, look at how these businesses choose how to reach the target markets. They either have media connections or they’re utilizing old data.

How to Connect with Your Audience at the Appropriate Moment
It’s important to understand not just where to find today’s empowered consumers, but also when to do so. Marketing at the proper time will be profitable as consumers get more skilled at blocking out messages.

To achieve right-time marketing across several platforms, take a few important factors into account:

Television

Commercial breaks are no longer necessary for viewers thanks to the development of DVR. This implies that you can’t guarantee views for advertisements that are shown during a commercial break for any show, even if you have the correct target demographic. When negotiating television spots, concentrate on either being the first ad before a break or the final one after a break. Live television is much better. Since they are living, certainly, more viewers are currently tuning in rather than using the fast-forward option.

Radio

Make careful to schedule advertising at the beginning or conclusion of the break if at all feasible because listeners frequently switch radio stations during commercial breaks. DMAs should also be taken into consideration (Designated Market Areas). Signal strength is the basis for the DMAs that Nielsen offers.

Email

Think about the time before ordering an e-blast from a source. Sending an email on a different day may enhance your open rates as Fridays are often a day when individuals take time off.

Conclusion
Although it’s essential, having a thorough understanding of your target audience is not the last step. You must make sure that everyone on your team is aware of these profiles to increase the effectiveness of your marketing. Share this definition widely once you have it to ensure that the people who matter most to your company may be served by whatever you put out there.

Get more customers, increase your sales, and attract clients who pay premium price.