What Is a Target Audience, and How Do You Define One?

A target audience is the group to whom a project or campaign wants to deliver its message. In other words, it’s the selection of people who will be interested in a product or service. It is usually defined by demographics, interests and economic groups.

Brands have target audiences too. Depending on a brand’s products and services, its audience can widen or narrow. When building a brand, deciding whom it will speak to is, in fact, defining its target audience. The concept matters most in areas where a product or service is sold and offered, such as advertising and marketing. Defining whom a product or service concerns and whom it speaks to directly shapes how the work goes.

Defining the target audience correctly is the first step to success. Delivering a message to the wrong audience is pointless, so we can say that defining the target audience correctly is the most important step for a brand, product or service.

A target audience isn’t always a group that must be sold to. Indirect projects and campaigns can have target audiences too, and the concept can be used to announce something, even if the purpose is indirectly commercial. But at its core, defining a target audience means identifying the people a product or service will be sold to.

How Do You Define a Target Audience?

The most important thing when defining a target audience is asking the right questions. There are many ways to do it, but the key is to keep narrowing the audience until you reach the one you believe is right for your brand, product or service.

Many different factors can come into play, such as demographics, interests, income and education. What matters is identifying the criteria that matter to you and prioritizing them.

1. Describe Your Target Audience

After using the characteristics above to define your audience, be sure to describe the ones you think will be useful. For example, create audience headings such as men over 30, men interested in football or men interested in sports. If there are brands you think are close to your product or service’s price range, following them can also help. After evaluating all these separately, you can combine them when advertising or show different ads to separate groups.

2. Segment Your Target Audience

Showing different ads to different audiences, or using different channels for certain audiences, will be very useful. To do this, first sort and segment the data you have. Be careful to organize it so you can match the data whenever you need to. For example, when targeting people under 20, you may have different data for women and men. You might show a YouTube ad to both genders, change the ad you show on makeup forums, or run a different ad on a site for games played mostly by men. This works not only in digital advertising but also in traditional advertising. If you want to target an ad by gender, even mall restrooms can become an ad channel.

3. Define Your Strategy

Advertising and marketing aren’t always about increasing sales directly. You may want to introduce yourself or announce something you’ve done. In that case, it’s very important to define your ad strategy first. Depending on your strategy, you can adjust your channels and audience segments.

4. Get to Know Your Target Audience

Once you’ve defined the audience you’ll speak to, it’s very important to get to know it and describe it accurately. Don’t just learn its interests; try to learn its complaints and expectations too. You can run your own surveys or draw on existing surveys and statistics. User reviews of similar brands’ products or services will also help. Analyzing and considering these can turn into valuable data for your brand’s ad strategy.

Let’s take an example: a high-end women’s clothing brand. Say that, in setting the strategy, we want to promote the brand itself rather than a new product, and that we choose outdoor billboards and in-mall displays as traditional channels. As a high-end women’s clothing brand, certain neighborhoods will be right for us. Placing these displays in an area where mostly lower-income people live, rather than in those neighborhoods, would be a complete strategic mistake for both the brand’s positioning and its sales.

Looking at the same brand’s digital marketing, it goes without saying that all its activities should target women. Beyond that, targeting users interested in expensive clothing and jewelry makes a lot of sense. Some brands we use as benchmarks can help us here.

When choosing channels, the brand’s style also comes into play. If we were a sportswear brand, it would be obvious to advertise on sports videos on YouTube and with athlete influencers on Instagram. In this example, everything is interpreted in its simplest, most obvious form. We just wanted to show how important defining the target audience is and how much it affects everything.

Why Is Defining the Right Target Audience Important?

If you don’t narrow your audience enough, you’ll spend time, budget and effort advertising and marketing to more people than you need. To give a simple digital marketing example: if your audience is wider than it should be, you’ll also be paying to advertise to people who aren’t interested in what you make. That could be the wrong channel or simply too many people. Instead, you could have gotten better results by advertising more, or for longer, to the people who are truly interested in what you make...

On the flip side, if you define your audience narrower than its potential, you reduce the number of people who might be interested in your product or service and use your ad budget inefficiently. That’s why defining your target audience correctly and prioritizing accordingly is so important.

Remember that all your products and services should meet your audience’s needs. A teacher doesn’t want to see a product a manufacturing plant might need, and seeing it does neither of you any good. So defining the right audience is very important, especially today, when marketing channels are so digital and there are so many of them.

A brand that tries to be on every channel will sink. As we mentioned above, being on every channel and known by everyone usually isn’t necessary anyway. Especially if you sell a product or service that appeals to fewer people, you need to be very careful and diligent in defining your audience. A mistake at this step can derail your marketing from the start.

Target audience analysis is the lifeblood of social media. At Digibus , in the social media service we offer our clients, we run brands through our own methodology and analyze the target audience first, because we know very well that this is the most important step of good social media management.

To learn more about social media management, you can contact us.