What Is Target Audience?

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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.

Key Takeaways

  • 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:

  • CountriesRegionRural, suburban, and urban areasCommunitiesSizeCity

#2 Demographics

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

  • Age Language spokenEducationGenderRace IncomeReligion

#3 Psychographics

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

  • ActivitiesPain areasSocial & cultural valuesPersonal beliefsBudgetAttitudesSocial and cultural traditionRoles

#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 mediaBuying styleHabitsHobbies,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 activeHave many friendsLike fun and going to watch sports Have craziness around the starsThrow and enjoy partiesHave 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:

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 baseCarrying out client surveysConducting comprehensive market researchIdentifying industry trendsAnalysis of rivalsCreating buyer personasDefining the who does not form the target audience Constant revision and value addition to personasUsing the best tools to analyze the visitors to websites like Google Analytics.

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 –

The best way to target the audience on Facebook has been through the business manager section of Facebook. The business manager contains an Ads manager that helps one to create the target audiences in its audiences section.

Those group of people that get designated to get influenced using marketing strategies for selling one’s products has been the target audience of a message.

One can easily target an audience on Instagram by using the audience’s interest related to one’s niche product.

For a blog, the target audience could be the niche of people or the product for which one has selected to write. It entirely depends on the interest of the people for whom one writes their blog content, be it fashion, medicine, or sport.

  • MicromarketingPay Per ClickAdvertising