Have recorded low sales despite all your marketing efforts? There is definitely a reason for that. Listen to this, If you’re trying to please everyone, you’re pleasing no one. Right? It’s also true for your marketing: If you’re trying to reach everyone, you’re going to reach no one. People might see your ad or take a look at your website. But your ad and your message won’t resonate with anyone if you don’t have a specific audience in mind.

The buying process is in the hands of the customer, and marketers must create targeted, personalized experiences for people if they want to be the ones to grab their attention among a sea of brands and advertisers. When marketers have a comprehensive understanding of their ideal buyer, they can make more informed decisions about media, messaging, and timing.

This article will shed light on who a target audience is and how you can find yours to help you increase in sales.

• What is a Target Audience?
• How Can you Determine Your Target Audience?
• What are 5 Things you Must Consider for Your Target Audience?
• What are the Five Steps to Identify Your Target Audience?
• How do you Reach Your Target Audience?
• How do I Find my Target Audience Online?
• Which are the Tools to Find Target Audience?
• Who is Your Target Audience Example?
• Why is it Important to Know Your Target Audience?
• What are the Types of Target Audience?

What is a Target Audience?

Your target audience refers to the specific group of consumers most likely to want your product or service, and therefore, the group of people who should see your ad campaigns. Target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests or a myriad of other factors.

Read Also: How to Get High Visitor Retention Rate

Depending on what you sell, your target audience might be a niche or broader. For example, if you were a shoe vendor your target audience would be broad since men, women, and children all wear shoes. On the other hand, perhaps you specifically sell high-performance running shoes.

Then, your target audience would be more niche – elite athletes between the ages of 20-40 who have expressed an interest in running or have run a marathon. Either way, it is important to define and segment your target audience in order to determine the creative messaging that will resonate with them, and pinpoint the channels they prefer.

Here is an example, target audiences center around a specific group of people. These can be men, women, teenagers, or children. They generally share an interest such as reading, running, or soccer. Personas can help advertisers investigate relevant magazine titles or industry publications.

How Can you Determine Your Target Audience?

To determine your target audience, you must spend time analyzing the data you receive from consumer engagements, evaluating current buyers and purchase trends and optimizing as new information is revealed.

The following steps should help you realize your target audience:

1. Analyze Your Customer Base and Carry Out Client Interviews

One of the best ways to determine who your target audience is to look at who already buys your product or service. How old are they, where do they live, and what are their interests? A good way to learn this is through engaging on social or distributing customer surveys.

2. Conduct Market Research and Identify Industry Trends

Look at the market research for your industry to determine where there are holes in service that your product can fill. Look at trends for similar products to see where they are focusing efforts, then hone in further on your product’s unique value.

3. Analyze Competitors

Marketers can learn a lot by looking at competitors to see who they are commonly selling to, and how they go about it. Are they using online or offline channels? Are they focusing on the decision maker or the supporter?

4. Create Personas

Creating personas is a great way to drill down into the specific segments that make up your target audience. This is especially helpful if you have a product that appeals to a wide swath of consumers. Personas allow you to determine the general demographics, personalities and needs of your target consumers. The persona of “Fran First-Time Runner” will speak to different needs than “Sam Seasoned Pro.”

Personas are created based on data, surveys, digital engagements and any other information marketers can pull from to give a more complete view of the buyers. This might include favorite hobbies, television shows, publications, etc. It is recommended that marketers develop between three and five personas.

5. Define Who Your Target Audience Isn’t

There will certainly be consumers who are close to your target demographic, but who will not act on messages. Try to be specific in determining who your audience is and who it isn’t. Is your demographic women, or women between the ages of 20 and 40? Knowing this will keep your teams from devoting ad dollars to segments that will not yield returns.

6. Continuously Revise

As you gather more data and interact with customers, you will get an increasingly accurate understanding of your target audiences. Based on this information, you must constantly optimize and hone personas to achieve the best results.

7. Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers extensive data about the users visiting your site. This information can be leveraged to determine key insights such as what channels your target audience is coming from or what type of content they’re engaging and connecting with the most, allowing you to make more data-driven decisions during the media planning process.

What are 5 Things you Must Consider for Your Target Audience?

Should you wish to set up an online questionnaire, you have to first understand who your target audience is. These are the kind of people you want to answer the questionnaire.

There are five tips to follow, which will make sure you get the right audience to answer your online questionnaire.

1. Why are you researching

Firstly, you need to understand what you are trying to achieve. Do you want to sell a product, increase awareness or call people to action for instance? Once you know what you want to do, it becomes easier to filter a target audience to more specific results.

2. Use existing market research

Defining an audience for an online questionnaire is not only about demographics. It often isn’t as simple as saying you are only looking for working women in a specific age bracket. What you are looking for is which people are interested in your product or service. For this, you can use existing market research, which will help you to identify the right people.

3. Be selective

What you want to achieve through an online questionnaire is quality rather than quantity. This means that you must make cuts in your audience so you are left only with those who are right for you. At the same time, this means you only have to advertise your questionnaire in a specific place.

4. Have a plan B

You should always have a plan B. If you have done your research and come up with a way of marketing, only to then find you are not receiving the expected number of results, you must deploy plan B and start elsewhere.

5. Measure what you do

An online survey should be seen as a ball or circle. It has neither a beginning nor an end once it starts rolling. Hence, you must communicate with respondents about what has been happening in terms of the results. Show them the actions brought about by them completing the questionnaire.

What are the Five Steps to Identify Your Target Audience?

You can use a number of different methods to identify your target audience. Here is a simple five-step procedure that can help you quickly develop a profile of your ideal buyer:

Following these steps will enable you to sketch a detailed profile of the main segments of your target audience. Here are some tips on how to execute each of these steps successfully.

1. Identify Your Current Marketing Base

An efficient place to begin identifying your target audience is by analyzing who forms your current marketing base. This approach has the advantage of starting with your actual leads and customers, which promotes objectivity and minimizes speculation. This can be more reliable than relying on intuition or guesses to identify your audience.

Your current marketing base consists of several groupings:

• Leads who have followed you on social media, subscribed to your email list or given permission for text messaging
• Leads who have performed some qualifying action, such as visiting a landing page for a specific product
• Current customers
• Inactive customers who have purchased from you in the past

You can analyze members of each of these groupings in terms of criteria such as:

• Demographic qualifications such as age, sex, income level, industry or job description
• Marketing engagement actions representing an interest in your brand, such as following your social media profile, visiting a page on your website or opening an email
• Buying-oriented behaviors such as requesting a quote, using a return on investment calculator, filling out a discovery form or purchasing a product

You can use these types of criteria to create a scoring system for leads and customers. Each criteria met can indicate one or more points on your scoring scale. The higher the score, the better the match with your ideal customer.

Criteria that represent buying-oriented behaviors or actual purchases should be given more weight than other criteria because they represent a higher likelihood of making a purchase or becoming a repeat buyer. For example, someone who has already purchased your app and renewed a subscription once is likely to renew it again if you approach them with a good offer.

After analyzing your current marketing base, you can segment it to develop one or more ideal buyer profiles. You can create segments representing different types of audiences. For instance, you may find that lead from a certain industry have a higher average qualifying score than those from other industries. You may find that customers who have already purchased a specific app are more likely to be in the market for a certain upsell product.

You can also create segments based on whether a lead is near or far from making a purchase. This allows you to segment your marketing for leads and customers at different points in your SaaS sales funnel.

2. Describe Your Market’s Pain Points

Once you’ve identified your current marketing base, you can begin analyzing your market’s pain points. Pain point specifics will vary by market, but in general, pain points fall into a few major categories, including:

• Financial pain (losing money)
• Time management pain (wasting time)
• Labor pain (excessive difficulty)
• Technical pain (steep learning curve)
• User experience pain (poor UX design)

These general categories apply across the board to most industries. Within a particular market niche, you can dive deeper into more specific pain points. For instance, within the general category of poor UX design, your audience may be experiencing difficulty integrating your product with another popular application.

You can use a number of different methods to identify which pain points apply to your market:

• Use surveys to ask your customers the biggest business problems they face
• Study market research to find out which pain points are common for customers in your industry
• Monitor social media and review sites to see what audiences in your target market are complaining about
• Study competitors’ marketing and sales material to identify which pain points they address
• Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and imagine what obstacles you would face if you were in their place
• Try out your product or competing products and observe what challenges you experience

After identifying your market’s pain points, you may wish to rank them in terms of which issues are most important to your audience. This can help you determine which angles to emphasize in your marketing and sales material.

You may find that different segments of your market experience different pain points or prioritize the same pain points differently. Take this into account when developing marketing campaigns for different audience segments and when selling to individual customers.

3. Define How Your Audience Benefits from Your Brand

After describing your audience’s pain points, you can define how your brand benefits your audience by addressing those pain points. Like pain points, benefits vary by market segment, but generally fall into a few major categories corresponding to the main categories of pain points:

• Saving money
• Saving time
• Reducing labor
• Making product adoption easier
• Making user experience easier

As with pain points, these general categories can be niched for specific audiences. For instance, a web design product that uses a drag-and-drop interface may appeal to small business users who don’t want to spend time learning to code.

You can research which benefits appeal to your audience using methods similar to those used to research pain points:

• Surveying your customers about which benefits of your product are most useful or important to them
• Studying market research
• Analyzing social media comments and review sites
• Studying competing sales literature
• Putting yourself in your audience’s place
• Testing your product or competing products

Just as pain points can vary by market segment, different segments of your audience may appreciate different benefits or rank the same benefits differently. For best results, segment your audience when presenting benefits in your marketing and sales campaigns and when doing presentations to individual customers. 

Surveying your customers about which benefits of your product are most useful or important to them using a tool like VWO’s on-page surveys can also help you discover useful insights on why visitors behave in a certain way.

4. Determine Where Your Audience Finds You

The next step is to determine where your audience does research to find information about your industry. This will help you determine which promotional channels will serve you best in reaching your audience.

To determine where your audience looks for you, consider questions such as:

• Which sources send the most traffic to your website?
• Which sources send traffic to your competitors’ websites?
• Which devices do your visitors and your competitors’ visitors use?
• Which geographical regions and languages send the most traffic to your site and your competitor’s sites?
• Which keywords do your visitors and your competitors’ visitors search on?
• Which of your social media profiles attract the most followers?
• Which of your competitors’ social media profiles attract the most followers?
• Which popular websites and blogs cover your industry?
• Which video channels do customers in your industry watch?
• Which review sites cover your industry?
• Which trade journals cover your industry?
• Which tradeshows cover your industry?

Web and social analytics tools can help you answer some of these questions. For instance, Google Analytics can tell you much information about traffic arriving at your site.

As the last few items on the list indicate, you don’t necessarily have to limit yourself to digital resources. Consider all resources which your audience might use to find you.

5. Identify Who Your Audience Trusts

Knowing where your market looks for you can help you identify which authorities your audience trusts. This can be useful for helping you tap into the credibility of recognized thought leaders and lending their authority to your own brand. For example, if you know your audience follows a certain software review site, you might consider offering that reviewer complimentary use of your app for review purposes. Similarly, citing a thought leader in your field can lend credibility to your blog and social media posts.

To identify who your audience trusts, consider questions such as:

• Which thought leaders are recognized in my industry?
• Which sites receive the most traffic in my industry?
• Which social media profiles attract the most followers and engagement in my industry?
• Which authorities are featured as speakers or panel participants at seminars, webinars and trade shows in my industry?
• Which review sites does my market rely on for information?

You can use specialized social media analytics tools such as Klout to help you identify influencers in your market niche.

How do you Reach Your Target Audience?

If you market your product to the wrong set of people, you’ll end up wasting your time and money. You need to figure out a way to reach your target audience to market your products. Here are the steps you need to take to reach your target audience more effectively.

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

To reach your target audience, you must first define your target audience. And, for this, you need to understand your customers. You can do this by building a consumer persona. A customer or buyer persona is a generalized representation of how your ideal buyers would be like.

You list their demographic and psychographic attributes and preferences to gain a better understanding of your target audience.

Then you can market your brand and products only to those who are most likely to be genuinely interested in them. This means that there will be higher chance of getting leads and conversions. This will help you increase revenue by investing less.

Step 2: Create Useful and Relevant Content

The best way to reach your target audience is by providing them with useful and relevant content. Writing about topics that are of interest to your intended audience is a sure-shot way of grabbing their attention.

The more targeted and relevant your content marketing is, the easier it will be for you to reach your target audience and engage them.

Content marketing plays a major role in helping you generate leads and conversions. It can be implemented in various ways to get your desired results.

Here are some of the most common methods:

• Video marketing – Videos are highly engaging and interactive in nature. A good quality video can catch the attention of the viewer easily.
• Blog posts and articles – Written content may not work as well as videos and images, but it still helps you get the attention of your audience. Just make sure that you write about topics that are of interest to your target audience and are useful to them.
• Social media content – You can connect with your target audience through social media platforms as well. Through a combination of images, videos, and text, you can engage and reach them more efficiently.

Step 3: Leverage Influencers

Influencer marketing has quickly become the go-to marketing style for digital marketers. You can utilize the power of social media influencers to reach your target audience more effectively. In this form of marketing, you partner with influencers to market your brand to their audiences.

Influencer marketing is a very effective marketing technique that can help you attain numerous marketing goals.

If you partner with relevant influencers from your niche, you can reach potential customers who might be interested in your brand or niche. This allows for qualified lead generation and helps you reach your target audience.

However, determining the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign can be a difficult task.

Software like GRIN can make influencer marketing easy for you. You can search for influencers and can even contact them and send them sample products with GRIN. And you can manage your campaign and determine your ROI right from the platform.

GRIN makes influencer marketing easy for you by providing statistics and tracking all from one portal.

A well-managed and executed influencer marketing campaign can help your brand reach out to more people. You can extend your reach, generate leads, and drive sales without breaking the bank.

Step 4: Use Targeted Advertising

You can reach your target audience more effectively by using targeted advertising. Whether it is Google ads or social media ads, they all provide advanced targeting options to help you reach your target audience. You can target the ads based on demographics, location, and interests of your audience.

This will make sure that your ads are only displayed to those who are likely to show interest in your brand. This means you don’t need to spend a fortune on ads to reach your target audience who are more likely to convert than anyone else.

Facebook, for instance, gives you access to multiple targeting tools that will help you create and run ads. They even offer analytics so that you can further optimize your advertising campaigns. Other social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter also have their own advertising tools.

You can also create ads through Google Ads and showcase them to your target audience across the internet. Or you can remarket your products and services to people who have shown interest in them previously. This too can be achieved through targeted advertising.

Step 5: Referral Marketing

Many businesses use a referral system to expand their reach and generate leads. A referral system can help you harness the power of your own customer base to expand your reach. You can give a referral code to your customers and incentivize them to share it with others. This way, you can reach your target audience quickly and with lower investment.

You can, of course, play around with your incentives. You could offer a discount to your new user and the referrer or could even give them a special offer. This not only incentivizes the new customer but also the referrer to make a purchase from you again.

The people who join through such a system may genuinely be interested in your brand and products. This method has helped businesses to grow and establish their network on a larger scale.

Step 6: Reach Your Target Audience on Social Media via Hashtags

With people spending more time on social media platforms, you can’t ignore the importance of them to reach your target audience. However, to target people who might be interested in your brand, you need to use hashtags.

Relevant, industry-specific hashtags can help you broaden the reach of your social media content. And, it will help make sure it’s displayed to people who might actually be interested in it.

For example, if you have a luxury hotel brand, you could use hashtags like #luxurytraveler or #luxurytravel. This will help you reach people who might actually be interested in booking your services.

Also, remember to use more specific hashtags than generic ones. In the above example, using generic hashtags like #travelblogger or #traveler might not be much effective. That’s because these people might be interested in travel, but most of them might not be interested in luxury travel.

How do I Find my Target Audience Online?

1. Use Google Analytics to learn more about your customers.

Google Analytics is such an expansive tool and is great for obtaining demographic details about your audience, as well as their interests. Recall from above that this is critical information that helps locate a target audience.

With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see website insights, and it’s broken into different sections, like age, gender and location. These sections are labeled clearly on the dashboard and provide colorful graphs for you to interpret.

Above is an example of the age overview in the Audiences portion of Google Analytics. Notice the breakdown of the numbers and how the graphs give you an excellent visual. This tool can be a great asset into getting a really great insight into who’s visiting your website and how your content fits into their lives.

2. Create a reader persona to target blog content.

With reader personas, you’ll never forget who you’re writing for. The good thing about reader personas is that you should closely align them to your buyer persona; they should be nearly identical.

This is because your blog should contain content that’ll be useful for your readers. Marketers probably want to read blogs about digital media, for example. It builds the reputation of your company to consumers.

The difference between a reader persona and a buyer persona is that a reader persona generally focuses on the challenges your persona might face. How can you write content that solves those challenges with blog posts?

For example, if one of the challenges you’ve identified in your buyer persona is “Marketing Mario wants to find a solution to low ROI on ad spending,” you can use a reader persona to think of content that surrounds helping that challenge.

3. Look at social media analytics.

When are your followers most engaged with your social media channels?

Is it when you post a funny meme on Instagram or create a poll on Twitter? By taking a look at these questions, you can get a couple of clues into what content your audience is interested in, thus, filling in one of the parts needed to find a target audience.

Every social channel is different and has a different audience, so looking at your analytics across all platforms are important. For example, Twitter tends to have a younger audience, while Facebook tends to have an older one. On the same note, Twitter is based on short-form content, while on Facebook, you can post long-form content and videos.

Instagram is a visually-based social media platform, so content that’s graphically stunning would thrive on the channel. Knowing these things, you can begin to plan your strategy accordingly.

Analytics can tell you who is looking at your profile. What’s more, they can tell you what’s working and what’s not working, content-wise.

By posting content your audience is more interested in, you can gain followers that are in your target market.

4. Use Facebook Insights.

If you have a Facebook page, this tool is golden for you. Facebook gives every Page a huge set of insights, for free. These insights work similarly to Google Analytics — you’ll receive critical information needed to create a target audience.

By accessing the People tab on your Insights dashboard, you can see who and from where your visitors are. Below is an example of how Facebook shows location demographics. It seems that a primary location is the east coast, so it’s safe to say that part of the target audience for this page is located in east coast cities.

Other areas Facebook focuses on include interests and integrations with other social media platforms, like Twitter. The insights report tells you the lifestyle of your audience, such as if they purchase items online.

Insights like these can help you far into your campaign planning, past finding a target audience, so it’s a worthwhile tool to check on every now and then.

5. Check up on website performance.

Monitor your best- and worst-performing content areas on your website. Your website can be the introduction to your company for a lot of your target audience, so sprucing up what interests them is a great way to attract more audience members.

By looking at what blog posts or landing pages are captivating your audience, you can repurpose content that isn’t and promote the content that is. For instance, if your blog post about email marketing was a hit with audiences, share it on your socials to expand your reach.

6. Engage with social media audiences.

Interacting with social media followers is so important because they’re your audience. When you create your buyer persona, they’re the users you should look to. If you don’t have social media accounts yet, remember to keep this step in mind.

Ask your followers what they want to see, and use tools like Instagram Stories and replies to get their response for how/what you’re doing. Whatever engagement you get, positive or negative, can influence how you attract more audience members.

For example, try tweeting out something that invites a CTA, like “Send us a picture of your favorite outfit to wear with our new hats!” This evokes a response, responses you can analyze the language of and imitate to grow your audience.

Which are the Tools to Find Target Audience?

To get a solid knowledge of your target audience, one of the best ways is to find the proper tool that can help you get started with your customer research journey and give you valuable insights into their choices and feedback. 

Below are some of the best tools to consider using for your brand or product to get an idea of your potential target audience: 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that helps you to find out the interests of your audience. You can extract data relating to your audience demographics that include age, location, gender, behavior, device used, interests, language and much more.

With the details extracted by Google Analytics, it is easy to find the context thereby helping to find exactly the audience who is interested in your products and services.  This is a list of people who have a higher likelihood to become your customers.

The data provided by Google Analytics will offer you the opportunity to connect well by planning the perfect campaigns that are most suitable for your audience. You can share the right type of content that will be useful and informative with help of this audience data.

Cloohawk

Cloohawk is an intelligent social media assistant that will assist you to grow the right audience for your products and services. The tool has the ability to dig up and generate a list of people who are most aligned to your interests. These are your potential followers.

Cloohawk can locate your target audience. It looks for people who are active and who relate to your niche. The list of people is derived from Twitter based on their profile, their areas of interests and their recent activities. You can generate a list of potential audiences who are taking about your interest.

Furthermore, Cloohawk offers automation features that allow you to automatically follow people based on their interests and behavior. Knowing your target audience’s interest is the key to your products and services, as well as to design your marketing efforts to meet their needs.

Audiense

Audiense is yet another social media management tool that is designed to identify the right audience that is most relevant to your business.  This tool is capable of finding a large audience that is perfectly matched to your brand.  

Audiense will assist you to not just identify the audience, but also to personalize the messages and deliver it effectively to your audience.

With the help of the social data available, the tool will analyze the interests and behavior to understand and shortlist the audience most suitable for your brand.

The filter options in the tools will allow you to create a report that is most relevant and thereby enable you to focus on the most important audience segments.  The tools will analyze all connections between people with the help of machine learning and will instantly give your target audience.

AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a social media management tool that enables you to understand your audience.  From a single platform, AgoraPulse enables you to engage with your audience and followers.  

This tool gives you the capability to segment your audience based on age, gender, interest, location, industry , spend or whatever matters the most for your business.

AgoraPulse allows you to consolidate information regarding your audience who is viewing and engaging with your business. This information can be used to reach out and serve your target audience better.

The tool helps you to customize messages and texts based on earlier conversations so that you can reach out to potential customers with useful information based on their past conversations.

QuickSprout

A successful social media marketer knows how to clearly identify the target audience.

QuickSprout is a social media management tool to help marketers to identify the target audience. This tool can be used to conduct research on various factors thereby coming up with a customer persona.  

Unique and individual profiles of your customers based on their likes and behavior is called as a customer persona. QuickSprout can help you to build personas that will represent the ideal audience that any marketer would wish to have. The tool will prepare the personas based on demographics such as interest, language, age, location, gender, education, spending habits, etc.

With the help of the unique personas of your audience, you can design and optimize the content that has to be shared with your audience. You can also build audience-specific marketing campaigns based on the personas.

Who is Your Target Audience Example?

There are many target audience examples, including cold audiences, warm audiences, and customers. Before you research and build your target audience, you need to understand what your focus is and which target audience category you should focus on. This will help you understand the best way to reach and connect with your target customer.

Let’s take a look at a few target audience examples to help you understand the different categories and how your marketing efforts should be structured.

Warm Audiences 

Warm audiences are people who are already familiar with your brand. They have either previously visited your website, interact with your social media profiles, posted a comment about your brand, subscribed to your newsletter, or downloaded your app. However, they have not yet made a purchase from you or shown a clear interest in buying your products or services.

The aim of warm audiences is to convert them from potential target audiences into paying customers. The best way to do this is by segmenting them into sub-categories, such as leads and visitors, before targeting them with specific conversion campaigns.

Cold Audiences

Cold audiences are people who have never heard of your brand, products, or services. Their goals and pain points match those of your target audience, but they have yet to discover who you are and what benefits you can offer them.

The best way to approach this type of target audience is by reaching out to them and introducing them to your Unique Selling Proposition. This will help you build long-lasting relationships that can lead to conversions at a later date. 

The aim here is to build brand awareness, nurture potential leads, and learn more about the wants and needs of your target audience. Social media can be a great platform for this, as can targeted ads. 

Customers

The third target audience example you can use for your business is your customers. Existing customers are much easier to target, as they already know who you are and what you have to offer. They have already made a purchase from you, so there is usually an established level of brand awareness, trust, and loyalty. 

The aim of targeting converted leads of this type is to upsell similar products or services and improve your customer lifetime value. You want to build on the customer relationship and encourage brand loyalty and repeat purchases.

Target demographics

The final target audience example we will look at today is demographics. Demographic segmentation is the process of categorizing your customers and target audience by a number of characteristics. This usually includes age, gender, income level, location, marital status, nationality, occupation, and education level. 

You can then work on targeted marketing campaigns that address the specific needs of each demographic. This helps you ensure the right messages reach the right ears, saving you money and increasing your ROI in the long term. 

Why is it Important to Know Your Target Audience?

Identifying a target audience of consumers is among the most crucial elements for a new business operator to consider. Without knowing your target market, or whether an audience even exists, you can’t realistically expect your business venture to survive.

Business owners who learn how to identify target audiences of consumers stand a better chance of convincing lenders to support them. Understanding the importance of targeting customers will help you to distinguish between different audiences and make it easier to determine what segments of consumers support your business and whether they are going to become more than a one-purchase customer.

Improves Marketing Ability

Adopting a general approach – assuming your customers will come essentially equally from all segments or demographics – is no longer enough to support a new business, because the marketplace has become too differentiated. In courting potential customers, owners must consider age, gender, lifestyle and technological sophistication, according to Entrepreneur magazine’s Small Business Encyclopedia.

Attempting to serve every possible niche is a route to failure. Identifying a target audience provides a clear focus of whom your business will serve and why those consumers need your goods or services. Determining this information also keeps a target audience at a manageable level.

Helps Prioritize Resources

Target marketing helps businesses evaluate which segments of their audiences are most likely to buy their products, and prioritize resources accordingly. With consumers’ help, however, companies can determine which foreign audiences are worth targeting.

For example, Google’s volunteer network has helped the company become the world’s most translated for-profit website, with 148 languages and counting. This relationship, in turn, enables Google to learn what aspects of their products or services matter most to customers.

Increases Planning Precision

Once you determine your business’s target audience, there is no end to how precisely you can further pinpoint your audience’s needs and wants. One method is generational marketing, which defines consumers by age, demographic and economic, social, and psychological factors, according to Entrepreneur.

Read Also: Fostering Increased Business Visitors

This technique has been used since the 1980s to gain a clearer picture of consumer behavior. Another option is studying people who share common characteristics or experiences. This method is known as cohort marketing. Companies using this approach hope to learn why people behave differently even when they are similar in age.

Provides More Information to Lenders

Target audience data is important to a business plan, which is the key document that lenders use to determine which ventures they want to support, the U.S. Small Business Administration notes in an overview on its website.

Business plans include key details such as a business loan applicant’s anticipated business target market, its projected total annual sales and its growth potential. Target audience data shows the applicant’s knowledge of his industry and whether his projections for success are supported by meaningful and measurable data.

What are the Types of Target Audience?

A target audience is a group identified as the focus of communications, media, entertainment, information or advertising. A well defined target audience can be used to tailor messages to your audience and to find avenues where they can be reached. 

Below are common types of target audience.

Everyone

Communications, media and entertainment with a large budget may target as broad an audience as possible. For example, a beverage company with a high market share may create ads that simply convey a positive feeling that is likely to have broad appeal.

Demographics

Demographics such as a film intended to appeal to a particular age group.

Locations

Locations such as information about a festival aimed at residents of a neighborhood in Tokyo.

Subculture

Subcultures are spontaneously formed groups that identify with a shared experience such as a music scene. In many cases, media and entertainment is targeted to a subculture.

Super Cultures

Super cultures are large groups that share elements of culture that span multiple nations such as classical music fans or sailing enthusiasts.

Needs

Information that targets a set of needs such as a video channel that helps people with common do-it-yourself home improvement projects.

Attitudes & Opinion

Target audiences based on how people feel about a particular topic. For example, a charity may seek communication channels that reach people who are concerned about an environmental problem.

Personality

Personality traits such as a movie for people with a certain sense of humor.

Lifestyle

A lifestyle is how people spend their time. For example, an audiobook collection that targets people who have a long commute and would like to use the time to improve knowledge and skills.

Fans

Communications aimed at fans of a media or entertainment series.

Customers

Messages targeting existing customers of a firm. For example, ads for upgrading to a premium version of a service.