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What is a Target Audience?

There are 4.66 billion internet users in the world as of today. As a business owner, you must know that you can not assume each of these people can be your customer. You must have a target audience.

target audience graphic design

The target audience is the group of people that may want to purchase your product or service. They have common characteristics and demographic traits such as age, gender, education, location, marital status, etc.

The target audience of your business has a high chance of being your customers. Therefore, identifying your target audience is highly recommended while creating marketing campaigns and/or making business strategies for your products/services.

Benefits of Knowing Your Target Audience

As mentioned priorly in this article, there are many advantages you have if you know who your target audience is. We will go over a couple of them:

As a business owner, your time and money are VERY important. You don’t want to waste your time by focusing on the wrong customer base which makes your marketing efforts waste. Right?

You may create the perfect campaign for your service yet if you market it to the wrong customer group, you may fail.

Let’s say you are a medical materials supplier. You created a new ad which promotes your new product for the elderly. If you target the 18-45-year-olds for your ad, you will most likely waste your time and money even if you created the most perfect ad.

The aim is the show that ad not to all people, but the right people.

If you can identify your target customer correctly, it will lead you to choose the proper channel for your marketing campaigns. It will directly affect the marketing costs and you can manage your marketing budget accordingly.

Selecting the proper media is highly important in terms of your marketing ROI. With the same example, you may not want to show your ad on Instagram since only 2.3% of Instagram users are 65+ years old.

How do Target Audiences work?

Target audiences matter. Period. But how do they work? First of all, you may want to think about what needs that your service/product fulfills. What is the pain point? Who has these pain points in common?

Let’s say you have a candle business. Your products are hand-made soy wax candles and eco-friendly. You want to sell those candles and of course, make a profit. Your target audience may be women who are aged between 20-45. (Mostly women are into home decoration) and/or vegan people since you sell soy-wax candles.

In that case, your target audience may be more specific than general. You should do more specific research for your target audience to narrow it down.

What are The Types of Target Audiences?

You can categorize target audiences according to:

  • Demographics
  • Interest
  • Purchase Intention

Also, it is very important to know which stage of the buyer journey (also called a marketing funnel) to target. We want to aim at the correct funnel stage for your target audience.

Demographics: The most common demographic factors are:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Education level
  • Location
  • Income

Interest:You can target them based on their interests, such as their hobbies, likes, entertainment preferences. If you can successfully analyze their interests, you will make personalized ads and campaigns for your potential buyers and that will help you with your marketing goals.

Marketers using personalized marketing in the United States range from 78 to 96%. It is enough to understand that personalization is highly important for the customers.

Purchase Intention:You can define potential customers who are looking for a specific product or service. They may want to purchase a laptop or a motorcycle. This way, you can locate what are the pain points for this audience and what can you do to get their attention.

Target audiences are very important yet you should also be careful not to have too narrowed down target audiences since it may exclude potential buyers. You may want to recalculate your target audience and update it when needed - in case that your business expands and/or you launch another product that serves different needs.

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