Target Audience

What Is Target Audience?

Target Audience refers to a group of people having common buying traits selected by a firm as potential customers for the sales and marketing of their products. It allows firms to create specially targeted marketing strategies to build relationships and cater to the demands of a niche customer to sell their products.

It helps firms build buyer personas that help them make correct decisions concerning their market campaigns. It becomes a method to connect to customers' needs and aspirations. For example, a firm will have to speak the language of the targeted audience to create paid campaigns that run on social media. Conducting extensive research enables one to find an intended audience.

• Target audience is the segregation of a large population into smaller groups based on market segmentation to cater to their needs, build loyalty, and increase sales through strategic marketing.
• It aims to increase sales of products to niche customers and build a stable customer base that feels the firm is the best in the industry.
• The target market consists of many smaller target audiences. First, it caters to a general audience, where the target audience caters to the need of a smaller audience in a personalized manner.
• Assess the consumer base, conduct client surveys, identify trends, analyze rivals, create buyer personas, revise constantly, and use tools like Google Analytics.

Target Audience In Marketing Explained

Target audience meaning in marketing could be understood as creating smaller clientele based on market segmentation to design marketing strategies based on their traits and likes. It helps in brand loyalty and encourages customers to buy products without hesitation. In addition, the target audience profile plays an important role in reaching out to clientele of certain niches like weight loss aspiring and special demographics like sports-crazy fans.

It requires a lot of time, research, and analysis to gain insights into the intended audience's real needs. It also means bringing together the similar interest of people together and then filtering out common interests and likes in a product segment. These people share common traits like- age, gender, location, education, or socioeconomic status. So, by carefully identifying one's target audience, one can design strategic marketing methods per the definition of the main customer base. 

Globalization has led to an escalation of costs in reaching everyone using marketing tools for firms and individuals. Therefore, the intended audience provides a way to cut costs by limiting and defining the customer base for marketing products. Moreover, it also helps producers and content creators know customers' likes, dislikes, needs, and tastes. As a result, they can design products and ad campaigns more personalized to cater to customers' special needs and niches. 

Hence, more products could be sold, adding to revenue growth, cost-cutting, customer feedback, and word-of-mouth publicity.

Types

Target audience identification is important in ad campaigns to build a strong customer base and loyalty. Marketers can do it by knowing the likes, dislikes, and needs of the clientele, like working women. But first, one must be aware of the intended audience types before formulating strategies to run an ad campaign.

Some common intended audiences include - preschoolers, teens, mid-teens, adults, middle-aged men and women, and men and women. However, to make this an intended audience, one needs to conduct extensive surveys to become fully familiar with them, like their – habits, likes & dislikes, and behaviors, knowing Facebook target audience.

Segmentation

Let us look at four major types of intended audiences based on market segmentation below:

#1 Geographic

It means the detail of the audience related to their geography. It contains the following details of the intended audience:

• Countries
• Region
• Rural, suburban, and urban areas
• Communities
• Size
• City

#2 Demographics

It means the detail of the audience related to their demography. It contains the following details of the clientele:

• Age 
• Language spoken
• Education
• Gender
• Race 
• Income
• Religion 

#3 Psychographics

It means the detail of the audience related to their psychology. It contains the following details of the clientele:

• Activities
• Pain areas
• Social & cultural values
• Personal beliefs
• Budget
• Attitudes
• Social and cultural tradition
• Roles 

#4 Behavior

It means the detail of the audience related to their behavior. It contains the following details of the intended audience:

• Use of social media
• Buying style
• Habits
• Hobbies,
• Media consumption 
• Usage of mobile phones.

Examples

Let us look at some target-audience examples to understand the topic clearly.

Example # 1

Let us assume one has to work for a famous hotel and luxury chain, HappyHotel Corp., to design their ad campaign. The hospitality sector has been a large sector to target the audience. So, its intended audience would be those who like to get the best price for their hotel bookings. Hence, one should design an ad campaign based on an intended audience.

Keeping these in mind, one would devise a notification-based ad campaign for the audience. Moreover, these notifications-based ads would target the shoppers choosing to buy based on comparing prices, services, facilities, and locations. Thus, as soon as the target clientele receives these notification-based comparative ads, they would start choosing and buying the best-suited hotels for themselves. 

As a result, one can expect around forty percent conversion of the target audience into customers for the hotel. 

Example # 2

Coca-Cola remains the best real-life example of intended audience utilization globally. Every year it sells more than 1.9 million bottles of beverages. It has a brand value of almost $74 billion for its bottles of carbonated and non-carbonated beverages. It has been made possible due to their specialized ad campaigns targeting audiences in the range of 18 to 26 yrs. of age globally. 

These people form a strong base of its target clientele as they:

• Remain active
• Have many friends
• Like fun and going to watch sports 
• Have craziness around the stars
• Throw and enjoy parties
• Have many friends to enjoy getting together with them and their family members. 

Moreover, they build Christmas-related ads once a year to reach the festival-celebrating target audience globally.

Target Audience vs Target Market

Although the target market also forms an essential element of marketing campaigns for target audience analysis. However, there are certain differences, as discussed in the following table:

Target Audience	Target Market
The size of the target audience remains smaller, consisting of only a specific group of people.	The size of the target market consists of smaller target audiences of large size.
Since companies customize their marketing per a niche market by targeting their needs, the likelihood of selling the products remains high.	Since companies generalize their marketing to a large market by targeting their needs, the likelihood of selling the products remains low.
It does not remain limited to selling products but also means that one may use it to denote general consumption, for instance, reading, spending money, and watching films or serials.	The target market tends to be limited to selling one's product to a select market audience with similar demographics.
It forms an important aspect of a variety of advertising strategizing for products.	It forms the foundation of a firm's complete digital strategy related to a product.
Multiple target audiences within a target market for marketing and ad campaigns.	Only one target market for a firm's product is related to ad strategies and marketing campaigns.
Messages sent to the audience tend to be more personalized.	Messages conveyed to the audience tend to be more generalized.
Only specialized niche products like fashion garments get benefits from this audience segmentation.	Generalized products like stationery items get benefit from such segmentation of audience.
A standalone store conducting in-person business, like a hair salon, may use it more often.	However, a shop in a mall may utilize it to attract a mall-visiting target market audience.
Social media marketing by firms generally utilizes it to sell their products.	Social media forms a small part of the large target market audience for product selling strategy.

How To Find Your Target Audience?

Extensive research becomes productive and useful for an entity or individual to find the target clientele. Knowing the buyers' interests, needs, and likes is integral to finding the intended audience. Let us go through the means of finding a target audience to design a marketing strategy as given below:

• Assessment of the consumer base
• Carrying out client surveys
• Conducting comprehensive market research
• Identifying industry trends
• Analysis of rivals
• Creating buyer personas
• Defining the who does not form the target audience 
• Constant revision and value addition to personas
• Using the best tools to analyze the visitors to websites like Google Analytics.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to what is Target Audience. Here, we explain it with types, segmentation, examples, and comparison with the target market. You can learn more about it from the following articles –

• Micromarketing
• Pay Per Click
• Advertising