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What Is a Target Audience?

The biggest mistake businesses can make is to sell its products or services to everyone. It is crucial to prepare the marketing preposition for the customers who look for it. Here, a target audience description comes in place.

The target audience means people with certain characteristics (sex, age, education, income, etc.) who potentially would like to purchase your goods. Such people have some common features including their demographics and/or interests and are looking for similar products across the web. The target audience can be rather broad or narrow depending on the type of product you promote. In most cases, businesses look for small segments of target customers presenting them with a unique value proposition.

Why a Target Audience Matters for Your Business?

When you aim to sell your product or service you can’t concentrate your marketing efforts on everyone. The more effective approach is to define a small segment of the audience who are mostly interested in your product. You can also choose several segments and prepare different marketing campaigns targeting each segment.

For example, you can sell luxury and budget cars at the same time. Then, you will require different marketing messages for these audiences – one for high-income people and the other for the middle class. You can also verify that one part of your customers love visual messages and the other requires expert reviews. Then, for one group you prepare an Instagram campaign and for the other, you prepare the expert research on the topic. It should be the most cost-effective marketing approach as you will approach each customer group with the individual preposition meeting their needs.

Types of Target Audience

Various characteristics can help to define your target audience. All these characteristics can fall within three main groups:

  1. Demographics – age, sex, education, marital status, location of living, etc.
  2. Interests – the information about their hobbies, places they visit, things they are interested in. These characteristics may include travel habits, book people prefer to read, podcasts they listen to, speaking clubs they are involved in. Investigation of this type of target audience is very important for marketers because they can find the key to individual engagement in their goods.
  3. Purchase intentions – potential customers are divided according to their search for specific products. The companies can target them with remarketing offering more information about the products they previously searched for.

Remember to investigate your audiences in detail. Follow our comprehensive guide on 10 ways to find your target customers. The most important thing is to listen to your audiences and verify their needs, creating engaging content in social media to attract their attention.

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