Understanding your target audience may help you run more effective advertisements since customers will feel more connected to your brand. Whether you’re just starting out or expanding your company, you must understand who your consumers are and how to attract them. Your company will not be able to survive if it does not have clients. Where will you locate customers? A target market is something you should be aware of. Let’s talk about target audiences and how to find yours.

A target audience is a group of people who are distinguished by their activity and demographics, such as female extreme athletes between the ages of 18 and 25. Target audiences are used by most businesses to influence marketing strategy decisions such as where to spend money on advertisements, how to appeal to customers, and even what product to produce next.

Target audiences are also used to define a company’s buyer persona. Buyer personas are a representative summary of a company’s ideal consumer based on data from a target population; however, we will discuss this in another post. Here are some examples of demographics and behavioural traits:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Education background
• Purchasing power
• Social class
• Location
• Consumption habits

This information is helpful in understanding the customer and how they make purchasing decisions. Targeting a certain audience can also assist your campaigns to reach the people who will best relate to your company’s messages and offerings. 

Differences between Target Audience and Target Market

When discussing a target audience, it is important not to mistake the phrase with a target market. While they are similar, the distinction is key for marketers. Though both target audience and target markets are concerned with segmenting customers into groups in order to make educated business decisions, a target market is a specific set of consumers to whom a company’s products are marketed.

A target audience is a group based on demographics, interests, and purchasing history. Simply said, you may explain your target market by identifying your target audience. If the target market was “marketers aged 25-35,” the target audience would be “marketers aged 25-35 residing in Boston, Massachusetts.”

Types of Target Audience

We’ve gone through the characteristics that make up a demographic. There are several in the marketing field, all of which are useful in identifying the right audience. When we talk about target audience types, we’re talking about more ways to describe whom you’re planning a campaign for. You may classify your audience into groups or further define them using categories such as:

1. Purchase Intention: A group of people who are seeking a certain product and wish to gather additional information before making a purchase decision. Consumers purchasing a new laptop, vehicle, clothing, or television are a few instances. This information is required to determine how to properly target your content to your target audience.
2. Interests: This is information on what individuals are interested in, such as hobbies. Knowing this information allows you to engage with your audience more significantly and uncover customer motivations and habits. People who prefer road riding as a pastime, for example, are likely to be most interested in new road bikes in the spring when the weather warms up and the road racing season begins. For example, if you discover that a high number of potential consumers are interested in travelling, you might incorporate that message into your marketing campaign to attract additional buyers.
3. Subculture: These are groups of individuals who share the same experience. A distinct music scene or entertainment genre is one example of this. Subcultures define people, and corporations may utilize those subcultures to understand whom they’re reaching out to. Consider how they connect to your business, especially if you have a huge prospective audience. Netflix, for example, appeals to subcultures of individuals who watch certain sorts of material through social media accounts dedicated to such subcultures.

How to find your Target Audience

As you might expect, developing a target audience requires some study into whom you want to reach and how you can get there in a way that differentiates you from competitors.

If you’re ready to discover yours, these are the steps you should follow:

1.  Use Google Analytics to learn more about your customers.
2.  Create a reader persona to target blog content.
3.  Look at social media analytics.
4. Use Facebook Insights.
5. Check on website performance.
6. Engage with social media audiences.

Knowing your target audience is a great idea as it helps you focus on people who are most likely to convert. Also, prioritizing the target audience helps you define the type of person that your marketing campaign can be directed at.