Target Audience

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If you run a business, you want to get your brand in front of the right eye – your target audience. Sub-groups of your overall target market, your target audiences share similar characteristics, qualities, preferences, beliefs, and values. You should have a strong grasp of your target audiences for successful branding and visual marketing. 

In this post, I’ll cover all the basic information about target audiences. Continue reading to learn: 

  • What a target audience is 
  • Target audience segmentation 
  • Target audience vs. target market 
  • How to find your target audience
  • Target audience examples 

What Is A Target Audience?

As a business and brand, your target audiences are groups of people that best fit the qualities and characteristics of someone who would purchase your products and/or services. Typically, they are individuals who benefit from using your product, service, or brand. 

Target audiences also refer to the people you feel best relate to your brand, values, and messaging. Yes, it’s likely that someone who relates to your brand will also benefit from your products or services. But that doesn’t mean everyone fits into both categories. 

Brands usually have multiple target audiences based on various characteristics and qualities. To conceptualize each target audience, brands create buyer personas that best exemplify what they look, act, and think like.

Why Is It Important To Know Your Target Audience?

If you know your target audience, you understand their pain points, how to market to them, and ultimately how to form an emotional connection

family on Amtrak train

There are several benefits to knowing and understanding your target audiences. It allows you to strategically build and grow your brand in various ways, including: 

  • Segmentation: By organizing consumers with similar needs and preferences into groups, you can provide a unique and personalized experience to each. 
  • Develop your brand voice and personality: Defining your customer’s preferences and personality types better informs your brand voice and personality to appeal to each target audience. 
  • Create brand loyalty: Understanding the audience you’re communicating with helps provide a more genuine interaction that results in emotional connections and brand loyalty. 
  • Stand out among competitors: Analyzing competitor’s target audiences lets you analyze what’s working in their strategies, what isn’t, gaps they’re missing, and ways to stand out as a unique brand in your market. 
  • Increase your return on investment (ROI): Investing time, money, and resources in identifying the right target audiences enables you to better market your product, services, and/or brand to the right people. That results in less wasted spending on advertising and marketing content.

Target Audience Vs. Target Market

Target audiences are often confused with your target market. It’s understandable – the terms are closely related, but they aren’t interchangeable. 

  • Target market is a broad group of consumers that you elect as “target consumers” for your product, service, or brand. 
  • Target audiences are more specific sub-groups defined through demographics and behavior.

Target Audience Segments

Separating consumers into groups is called segmentation. There are several ways to segment your target audiences. The most common target audience segments are: 

  • Demographics
  • Psychographics
  • Purchase Intent 
  • Lifestyle 
  • Subculture 

I’ll break each segment down in greater detail in the following sections.

flower shop owner interacting with young customer

Demographics

Separating your target audience by demographics involves segmentation based on various identities. 

Typical demographics include: 

  • Age 
  • Location 
  • Income 
  • Marital Status 
  • Gender Identity 

Psychographics

Segmenting your audience by psychographics uses the following characteristics: 

  • Belief systems 
  • Values 
  • Interests 

Psychographic audiences often relate to your brand values or share interests that your brand encompasses. 

Purchase Intent

Target audiences that are segmented by purchase intent are relatively self-explanatory. It’s grouping customers by their position on the timeline of purchasing your product or service. 

Some consumers are discovering your brand while others have your product in their cart and need an extra nudge to complete their purchase. 

Lifestyle

Categorizing consumers by their lifestyle habits is another common strategy for defining your target audiences. 

Lifestyle habits often include: 

  • Income 
  • Spending habits 
  • Travel 
  • Likes 
  • Dislikes

Subculture

An additional, more niche segmentation is based on subcultures. This is grouping consumers who have a common cultural interest. 

Some popular examples would be avid Star Trek fans (Trekkies) or Taylor Swift mega-fans (Swifties).

How To Find Your Target Audience

Now that we’ve covered the theory of what your target audience is and an overview of segmentation, it’s time to dive into practical advice. How do you find your target audience? 

The following steps form a proven template for finding your target audiences:

  • Analyze current existing customers 
  • Conduct a competitor analysis 
  • Gather consumer feedback and research 
  • Participate in social media engagement and social listening 
  • Collect additional market research 
  • Use business intelligence data 
  • Create buyer personas 

Continue reading for more information on how to approach each step of the process.

Analyze Current Existing Customers

The first step in identifying target audiences is to analyze your current customer base. This gives you insight into the qualities and characteristics of consumers that convert into customers. It also provides information about their purchase process. 

husband and wife laughing and looking at server at restaurant table

Some purchase data you can look at includes: 

  • Time of year and dates of purchases 
  • Typical shopping lifecycles 
  • Data on repeat customers 

Additionally, look through any existing surveys or interview data to get a base level of knowledge of your customers.

Competitive Analysis 

With a baseline understanding of your existing customers, you can look at competitors to assess their strategy. Conduct a competitive analysis to find out how competitors are segmenting their audiences.

A competitive analysis helps identify areas where: 

  • Both you and your competitors are targeting 
  • Competitors are targeting that you aren’t 
  • You are targeting where competitors aren’t 
  • Untapped opportunities

How do you approach a competitive analysis? While you can browse any component of competitor businesses, some tactics include: 

  • Visiting their websites 
  • Analyzing their social media profiles 
  • Searching for print and online ads 
  • Looking for additional content targeting their audiences

As you analyze each medium or piece of content, consider who they’re targeting, the method they’re trying to send, and their strategy in doing so. 

Consumer Feedback And Research

Internal research can only get you so far. To get inside the minds of consumers, you need to talk to them! Gain new insights from consumers through feedback, research, and interaction. 

Some of the best ways to gain knowledge from the consumers’ perspective include: 

  • Adding a contact form to your website for feedback 
  • Creating an email marketing campaign that specifically asks for feedback 
  • Conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups.

nurse interacting with senior living facility resident

Social Media Engagement And Social Listening 

Social media is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with consumers and serves as another avenue into their thoughts or preferences. 

Engaging on social media and analyzing that engagement helps you gain a better understanding of your brand’s perception by consumers. Social listening also involves gauging the general public’s sentiment about your brand, but without directly interacting with them.

A few ways that social media can help inform your strategy include: 

  • Listening to what people are saying about you on social media
  • Joining groups on Facebook or other platforms
  • Tracking mentions
  • Monitoring other engagement metrics. 

Additional Market Research

Outside of the methods already mentioned, you can scour other avenues to conduct additional market research. 

Monitor industry websites, blogs, forums, or other sources to identify target audience segments for your brand. 

Use Business Intelligence Data

Business analytics are there to be used. You can use your business analytics to track consumer behavior. Various sales and marketing tools provide insights and data to help inform your target audience strategy.

Create Buyer Personas

After completing the steps above – and any additional tactics that I haven’t covered – you can create buyer personas to exemplify the ideal customer within each target audience segment.

Target Audience Examples

If you’ve made it this far you should have a better understanding of what a target audience is and how to determine yours. While all of the theory and information is essential, it helps to see a few examples of target audiences to put the information into practice.

Automotive Manufacturers

Automotive manufacturers have numerous target audiences depending on the company. Sometimes consumers are just window shopping while others know what they want. Certain segments will be focused more on finding a car on a budget versus others looking for luxury and status.

red tesla car driving through mountainous terrain

Here are two different examples of target audiences for automotive manufacturers: 

  1. Customers actively looking to purchase a car by visiting car buying sites, viewing reviews and price comparisons, visiting dealerships, and more. 
  2. Tesla’s ideal target audience is an environmentally friendly consumer who wants a luxury car. The brand targets multiple audiences because they’re environmentally friendly but they’re also higher-end luxury vehicles.

Senior Living Facilities

When people think of senior living facilities, they tend to focus on residents – the senior citizens who can’t live alone anymore. While they are the ones who live at the facility, there are often two distinct audiences that senior living communities need to target. 

  • The first target audience is senior citizens who are aware that they can’t keep up with their homes. They are searching for an independent living facility where they can continue to thrive and live a happy life without the responsibilities of owning a home. 
  • The second target audience is the children or caregivers of senior citizens who are looking to place their loved ones in a home. 

Those two audiences are distinct and unique. They each require a specifically targeted marketing message.

senior living resident daughter and granddaughter blowing out candles of chocolate cake

Create Visual Content For Your Target Audience With Casey Templeton 

That’s a lot of information to digest, but you’re better off as a business owner and brand manager for taking it in. Now you should have a stronger understanding of what a target audience is, how segmentation works, and how to create your target audience. 

With your audiences defined, you need to create visual content tailored to each audience. High-quality professional photography can be used to create branded imagery for marketing and advertising to each audience. 

Casey Templeton Photography offers professional corporate and commercial photography for businesses and brands in Nashville, TN, and beyond. Casey is technically skilled behind the lens and has extensive business branding experience. To learn more about tailoring content to your target audience, or to get the ball rolling on a project, fill out our contact form!

 

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