FAQ: What Does “Target Audience” Mean In Digital Marketing?

In marketing, there are a ton of different terms thrown around pretty much constantly. Some of them are relatively obvious, mundane, or self-explanatory. Others are common beginner knowledge, which never ends up defined because everyone assumes everyone else already knows them. Still, others are niche, esoteric knowledge.

Today’s topic is about the middle ground, an essential term we all use all the time but which you might need help understanding, especially if you’re a newcomer to digital marketing.

It’s the Target Audience. Read on to have all of your questions about target audiences answered.

What Is a Target Audience?

The simplest possible definition of a target audience is “a group of people you want to reach with your marketing.”

There are other definitions as well, of course. You want to reach these people, but why? Well, because they’re the people most likely to buy your product.

“See How My Team at White Peak Can Drive Tons of Traffic to Your Site”

~ Tim Woda – White Peak, CEO

Knowing who your visitors are and what they need will help you create content that resonates with them.

Example #1

Consider: you operate a business selling cars. Do you go down the street waving a sign saying you’re selling cars to attract the attention of anyone passing by? You could, sure. Some people who pass by might even want to take you up on that and buy a car. Some may be walking, need a car, and have money for a car. Others are currently driving, but their car is dying, and they need to buy a new one.

The trouble is that most people who see your sign aren’t interested in buying a car any time soon. They aren’t part of your target audience. They weren’t looking for a car, and most of them already have one, so it’s a much harder sell and will require more eyeballs to result in a conversion.

Example #2

A store that sells shoes could reasonably expect that 99% of the people on the planet are its target audience.

After all, who doesn’t want to wear shoes? Some people refuse shoes for their personal beliefs, and there are certainly plenty of people who already have shoes, but most of those people are perfectly willing to buy more shoes sooner or later when their current shoes wear out.

But, what kind of shoes does this company sell? If you sell athletic shoes, try to market them to someone with a chronic illness preventing them from jogging, marketing to people over 90 with limited mobility, or marketing to people with no interest in athletics, these are all bound to fail. Those people may want to buy shoes, but not athletic shoes.

Similarly, you have a much more limited potential audience if you sell high heels. For example, the vast majority of men have no interest in high heels. Marketing your high heels to men is unlikely to be successful without a very interesting marketing campaign.

Example #3

Another example relevant to many businesses is geographic relevance.

Suppose you’re a local business offering retail items for sale in a physical location. In that case, you can market to people who live in your area – neighborhood, city, county, maybe state if you’re big enough – but a local business in Ohio isn’t going to benefit much from advertising to potential customers in Nevada.

Note that the exception to this is, of course, the internet. You aren’t nearly as restricted by geographic boundaries if you can ship products and sell them via a website. You may still be limited to certain countries (international shipping is a pain), but your potential target audience gets much more extensive.

Why Is Your Target Audience Important?

As you can intuit from the above, your target audience is essential because it focuses your marketing.

For example:

If you want to sell food, you don’t just go into a crowd and start shouting that you’re selling food; you look for hungry people to sell food to.

Do You Only Have One Target Audience?

Nope! “Target audience” is shorthand for a complex system of interconnected audiences.

Take the shoe store example above. Your “target audience” is everyone who would buy shoes, sure. If you sell athletic shoes, your target audience is everyone interested in purchasing athletic shoes.

But you can further narrow that down. Athletic shoes come in many different forms. Some are better for running, some are better for sports, some are better for wet conditions, and some are better for indoor athletics. You may sell all or just some of them. You can refine your audience to each group looking for specific athletic shoes – the runners, the pickleball players, and the cyclists.

You can have as many different target audiences as you have products. Moreover, if your products have many possible uses, you can have more audiences. They will generally be relatively narrow, and that’s a good thing. The narrower an audience is, the more accurately you can target them, and the cheaper it will be to market to them and convince them to buy your products.

What Defines a Target Audience?

A target audience starts off as “the group of people most likely to be interested in buying your product.” From there, you have to define that group of people.

This group largely comes down to demographic and interest characteristics. Here are some of the common factors you can consider:

Some of these will have more impact than others, which also depends on your product.

In general, you can break down target audience characteristics into specific groups. Demographics include things like age, ethnicity, and location. Interests include things like hobbies, preferences, and media consumption habits.

Behavioral factors include product usage, preferred social networks, and marketing channel. There are also some product-specific categories relevant to your brand.

For example, most of the above categories don’t matter if you want to sell a bagel.

Some, like cultural and ethnic backgrounds, may; certain cultures put more cachet on bagels as a traditional food than others. Income level doesn’t, nor does education level nor the device used to access your site. Dog owners and Cat owners likely enjoy bagels in equal measure.

On the other hand, if you sell a mid-class B2B accounting platform, more of these are going to matter.

Work position is essential, budget and income levels can be significant, and so on. You’re primarily targeting the decision-makers in other businesses, after all.

Note: always sanity-check your target audience. If you sell motorcycles, you’ll have a ton of interest from males aged 12-18.

After all, what young male doesn’t love a fast, cool motorbike? But none of them can buy your products because it’s not legal for them to drive a motorcycle at that age. Marketing to them won’t get you a return on your investment, so you should exclude that age range to save marketing dollars.

A crucial part of target audiences is developing buyer personas to represent your target audiences. These personas act as genericized stand-ins for people who are likely to be interested in your product. They have different general interests, different demographic qualities, and different levels of response to other messaging.

How Can You Identify Your Target Audiences?

If you want to identify your target audiences, there’s good news: there are many different ways to do it.

For example:

Whenever you’re analyzing your target audiences, you want to ask yourself: is this audience as narrow as it can be, or could it be divided into valuable sub-groups? Remember, in most cases, the more limited your target audience is, the more effectively you can target those people.

How Should You Use Target Audiences?

Target audiences come into play in two primary ways.

What is that, then?

Well, we’re a digital marketing agency with a whole host of related services, from web design and advertising to branding and content marketing. We do everything related to digital marketing, whether helping you build out a new business idea from scratch or kicking your existing business into high gear.

If our expertise throughout this post has impressed you, why not check our service pagess? Or, if you’re not quite ready to pull the trigger yet, feel free to browse the rest of our blog. If you have a question we have yet to answer, we’ll be more than happy to answer it in the comments or even write a whole new post about it, should it warrant it. All you have to do is ask! There’s something for everyone, and we’re constantly publishing more content.

Tim Woda is the CEO and founder of White Peak Marketing. He has been on the founding team of five successful start-ups and his digital marketing campaigns have acquired more than 800 million customers for his start-ups and White Peak’s client companies. Tim has been featured by The New York Times, Fox News, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and more. Under Tim’s direction, White Peak was selected as one of America’s Top Digital Marketing Agencies for 2021 by MarTech Outlook magazine.

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