How to Identify Your Target Audience

Following a buyer’s journey is key to effective marketing. Adapting your approach to each stage can help you differentiate yourself in a crowded market. By understanding your audience's needs, behavior, and preferences, you can create more impactful messaging and increase your chances of success.

“Only when you know your customer’s journey can you adapt and nestle around them. In the long run, this brings higher customer loyalty and higher customer satisfaction. Just make sure you’re consistent in every stage of the journey. “ - Andrews Wharton

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is the specific group of consumers that have the highest likelihood to want your product or service that you seek to cater your advertising to. This involves understanding the ins and outs of your audience including who your ideal customers are, what they care about, and what motivates them to hit “buy now”.

What is the Benefit of Knowing My Target Audience?

The first step to every marketing campaign is knowing your audience. As a marketer, this information will enable you to define your strategy and tailor your messaging to speak directly to your audiences’ needs and preferences.

“There are many ways to activate target audiences in ad campaigns. These include the use of first-party data, as well as third-party data from digital ad tech tools, media platforms, compiled files and media panel sources.” - Gartner

By understanding the entire scope of your audience, your marketing can become hyper personalized and therefore increase engagement, brand loyalty, and ultimately sales.

What are the Types of Target Audiences?

There are many attributes that can be considered when finding the right audience. These attributes can be associated with different types of target audiences such as Demographic, Psychographic, and Behavioral.

Demographic

The demographic of your target audience is the most straightforward to identify. Demographic data includes age, gender, income, education level, and geographic location. Segmenting based on demographics can better tailor your marketing messaging to appeal to the right audience.

This socio-economic data can be appended to your file to better target your campaign. For example, segmenting your audience by age and gender will allow you to send targeted campaigns to specific generations and geo-locations. A male Boomer in Florida will relate to a product different than a female Gen-Xer in New Jersey.

“Every generation creates an identity independent from those that came before them.” - Sprout Social

Psychographic

The psychographic target audience involves understanding the lifestyle, attitudes, values, interests, and personality of your audience. This segment is more focused on the psychological and emotional drivers of consumer behavior.

This data can be found by engaging with your audience with a survey or social media engagement to gauge what your audience is truly passionate about.

Behavioral

The behavior of your target audience includes things like past purchase history, online activity, and brand interactions. By understanding these behaviors, you can better predict what your audience will do in the future and tailor your messaging accordingly.

For example, a fitness company might target people who have recently started a new workout routine or recently searched for new fitness equipment. To identify this audience, the company could leverage AWI’s Web Intent Data to find specific consumers in the market for new fitness equipment or other fitness related search terms.

Target Audience vs Target Market

A target market is the entire set of consumers to market to. This refers to a specific group of people you want to target with your products and services.

For example, a major shoe brand might target both men and women across the entire age range within the United States.

On the other hand, a target audience is a group within the target market. For example, the major shoe brand has just announced a new running shoe for women. The target market for this product would be athletic women who have a special interest in running.

How Do I Determine My Target Audience?

Figuring out your target audience relies on research and investigation all with the help of data.

Some starting points include:

1. Analyze your current customers
   Discovering the right audience for you lies in who currently is buying from you now. Understanding your current audience’s motivations will identify future customers.

2. Conduct market research and review industry trends
   Staying in the know of what the marketplace in general is saying will aid in sending timely messaging.

3. Define who your target audience is not
   Narrowing down your audience includes excluding specific audiences as well. By knowing what your audience is not, it will not only be easier to identify your target audience, but exclude specific information from your messaging and branding.

4. Turn your data into customer personas
   Marketing to a general audience versus specific people can help when tailoring your messaging to your target audience. For example, knowing your audience is primarily female is one thing, but another is taking all of your customer data to create specific personas of commonality.

AWI is here as your consultative partner

The AWI team is committed to helping our clients achieve marketing success. Andrews Wharton is the proven direct-response solutions provider with a long-standing reputation for solving the toughest marketing challenges. 

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