The target audience is the audience or group to whom the message of any study or campaign will be delivered. In other words, it is the selection of people who will be interested in the product or service. It is usually determined by demographic characteristics, interests, economic groups.

Brands also have a certain target audience. The target audience may expand or contract in the products and services offered by brands. However, when establishing a brand, determining who this brand will appeal to is actually determining the target audience for the brand. The concept of target audience is generally important in areas such as advertising and marketing where a product or service is sold and offered. Determining who is interested in a product or service and who it appeals to directly affects the course of the study.

Identifying the target audience correctly is the first step to success. It is meaningless to reach the desired message to the wrongly determined target audiences, so in fact, we can say that determining the target audience correctly for a brand, product or service is the most important step.

The target audience is not always a group that must be sold to. Indirect work and campaigns can also have target audiences. The concept of target audience can also be used to announce a situation, albeit indirectly for commercial purposes. However, the target audience is basically the people to whom a product or service will be sold.

How to Identify the Target Audience?

The most important point when identifying the target audience is to ask the right questions. There are many different ways to identify a target audience, but the most important thing is to keep narrowing it down and reach the audience that you think is right for your brand, product or service.

When determining the target audience, many different factors can come into play, such as demographic characteristics, interests, economic status, and educational background. The important thing here is to identify the criteria that are important to you and prioritize them.

1- Define Your Target Audience

After using the above-mentioned features to identify your target audience, be sure to identify the ones you think will be useful to you. For example, create target audience headings such as men over 30, men interested in soccer, men interested in sports. If there are brands that you think are close to the price range of your product or service, you may also find it useful to follow them. After evaluating all of these separately, you can combine them when advertising or show different ads to separate groups.

2- Divide Your Audience

Showing different ads to different target audiences or using different channels for certain audiences can be very useful. To do this, first parse and divide your data. Be careful to keep this data organized so that you can match it at any time. For example, when targeting young people under 20, you may have different data for men and women. You can show an ad for both genders on YouTube, change an ad on a makeup forum, or advertise differently on a male-dominated gaming site. This will not only work for digital advertising but also for traditional advertising. If you want to separate an advertisement by gender, even shopping mall restrooms can be an advertising medium for you.

3- Determine Your Strategy

Advertising and marketing activities may not always directly increase sales. You may want to introduce yourself or announce something you are doing. For such a situation, it is very important that you first determine the advertising strategy. You can make changes in channels and audience segments according to your strategy.

4- Know Your Target Audience

After determining the audience you will address, it is very important to know this audience and define it correctly. Don’t just know their interests, try to find out their complaints and expectations. You can organize your own surveys or make use of surveys and statistics. User reviews of products or services of other similar brands will also be useful in this sense. Analyzing and taking these into account can turn into brier data that you can use in your brand’s advertising strategy.

Let’s proceed with an example: Take an expensive women’s clothing brand. When setting a strategy for the brand, let’s be looking to advertise the brand itself rather than promoting a new product. As traditional media, let’s first choose outdoor billboards and billboards in shopping malls. Now as an expensive women’s clothing brand, there will be some neighborhoods that are right for us. First of all, choosing these billboards not in these neighborhoods but in a place where mostly people with low income levels live would be a completely strategic mistake for both the strategic position and sales of the brand.

If we take the digital marketing activities of the same brand, it goes without saying that this brand should target women in all its activities. It also makes sense to target users who are interested in expensive clothes and jewelry. Some of the brands we take as benchmarks can help us with this.

When we choose the medium, the style of the brand will also come into play. Assuming that we are a brand selling sportswear products, it is obvious that it would be right to advertise sports videos on YouTube and sports influencers on Instagram. In this example, everything is interpreted in the simplest form that first comes to mind. We just wanted to talk about the importance of audience identification and how much it affects everything.

Why is it Important to Identify the Target Audience Correctly?

When you fail to narrow the target audience sufficiently, this will mean spending time, budget and effort to advertise and market to more people than you need. To give a simple example through digital marketing; when you keep your target audience wider than it should be, you will actually be advertising for the audience that is not interested in what you produce. This could be the wrong channel or simply an over-selected number of people. However, you could have achieved higher results by advertising in greater numbers or duration to those who are really interested in what you produce…

If we look at it in the opposite way, that is, when you determine your target audience less than its potential, you will use your advertising budget inefficiently by reducing the number of people who may be interested in your product or service. For this reason, it is very important to correctly identify the target audience and prioritize accordingly.

Remember that any product or service you offer should be geared towards meeting the needs of your target audience. A teacher does not want to see a product that a production factory might need. It won’t do him or you any good to see it. Therefore, accurate targeting is very important, especially in our age when marketing channels are so digitalized and there are so many channels.

If any brand wants to be in every medium, it will fail. Anyway, as we mentioned above, it is often not necessary to be on all channels, to be known by everyone. Especially if you are selling a product or service that appeals to fewer people, you should be very careful and dedicated to targeting your audience. If you make a mistake in this step, your marketing activities can be hampered from the start.

Audience analysis is the lifeblood of social media. Digibus In the social media service we offer to our customers, we put brands through the filter of our own methodology and first analyze the target audience. Because we know very well that this is the most important step of good social media management.