List 12 Types of Target Audience, Useful Strategies for Use

Identifying your target audience is a core aspect of strategic marketing, allowing you to create tailored campaigns and messages. This article from Adsnextgen explores the three main types of target audience segmentation that modern marketers should consider – demographic, geographic, and psychographic.

Whether you’re mapping your entire addressable market or finding your ideal customer avatar, having a firm grasp of these key audience categories will enable more focused marketing. We’ll overview what makes up each major target audience type, when they’re most relevant, and how to best reach each segment. With these fundamentals in place, you can approach targeting with the clarity needed for higher conversion rates.

What is the Target Audience?

What is the definition of a target audience? A target audience is a defined set of people who are most likely to buy from you. Ideally, you should target these folks throughout each marketing effort. They are your ideal prospect or, more simply, your intended audience. (Reference source for the definition of Target audience from wikipedia.org)

These are the folks who are most likely to be interested in your product, service, or business and eventually become clients. In general, there are two sorts of target markets: known audiences and unknown audiences.

Unknown audiences are those who are on the buyer’s journey between awareness and consideration – they may or may not be aware of you. The known audience is the one who is aware of you and may be considering purchasing from you.

The Benefits of Knowing Your Target Audience

Even if it appears that most individuals are your prospects, they are not. The fact is that you will have the most success if you simply sell to a small fraction of web users – your target consumers. Because you have exactly what they need, this small and concentrated group of people will most likely trust you.

As a business owner, defining your target market provides the following benefits when you distinguish between 3 types of target audiences in advertising.

1. Marketing Messages Have Been Improved

The better you understand your prospects, the more effectively you can communicate with them in their language. Your marketing directly addresses their pain areas and problems. This increases relatability and, as a result, client loyalty.

2. Better ROAS as a result of targeted advertising

Targeted advertising is guaranteed to convert better, resulting in higher returns on ad investment for your eCommerce shops.

3. Increased Conversions Compared to Email Marketing

Once you’ve identified your “Customer Avatar” or “Buyer Persona,” your emails will have greater open rates, improved deliverability, and more replies and conversions.

4. Stand Out From the Crowd

Personalization initiatives benefit from audience definition. As 76% of consumers prefer to buy from firms that customize their marketing efforts, this will help you become more relevant and stand out from the competition.

Target audience vs target market

Although the phrases are frequently used interchangeably, a target audience is not the same as a target market. Target Market refers to all potential clients for a brand, product, or service, but a target audience is a more targeted group with whom you’re actively interacting for a specific reason, such as a sales promotion, product launch, or other marketing campaign.

A target audience, in other words, is a subset of a wider target market. As such, it is split along similar lines, taking demographic data such as age, location, income, occupation, and gender identity into consideration. It’s also more concentrated, detailed, and, of course, smaller in size.

Businesses may have many target audiences for various products or services, or even multiple target audiences for the same product. Depending on the unique demands of each campaign and the availability, quality, and quantity of data, a target audience might be broad or limited.

Types of target audience

1. Demography

Demography is one of the most popular and important types of target audience in advertising. The term demography refers to a wide variety of statistics that characterize an individual or group. Age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, and other demographic characteristics are examples.

These criteria may be utilized to separate your target audiences into distinct target groups, which will help you understand who they are and what they want.

Demographic segmentation enables organizations to more effectively target their clients depending on gender, age, economic level, and so on. Here are some examples of demographics:

• Age
• Gender
• Education level
• Income levels
• Marital status

2. Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior refers to the patterns of behavior of those who are most likely to utilize your products and services. Expectant moms, for example, maybe more inclined to purchase a product that helps them avoid sickness and exhaustion.

Consumer behavior mapping is an essential component of every marketing strategy since it determines which consumers require different types of messages and how to deliver them. The following questions can be used to map customer behavior:

• What items is the target market interested in? What items do they require?
• How do they act?
• Why are they purchasing the goods?
• What media platforms do they employ?
• What kind of information do they seek?
• How frequently do they go shopping?
• At what stage are they?
• What are their most likely future steps?
• Who do they communicate with?

You may also segment your audience depending on their online behavior by tracking their activity.

Metrics based on consumer behavior, such as the ones listed below, can assist you in locating your target audience: Purchase purpose; living habits; engagements; interactions, and so forth.

3. Interests

One of the three commonly used target audience types for social media is interests. Once you identify customer preferences related to the products/services you sell, reaching these customers is only a matter of time. Interests enable marketers to divide their target audience into groups with comparable interests. Target audiences can be segmented into groups based on their interests and utilized to share tailored offers, personalized information, or marketing communications. Here are a few instances of various interests:

• Fitness;
• Technology;
• Entertainment;
• Travel;
• Financial security;
• Education, etc.

4. Divide target audiences according to “buyer portraits”

Most businesses will most certainly deal with various “types” of ideal prospects, such as when your product solves an issue that both working women and college students have.

When this happens, we divide our target audience into distinct “Customer Avatars” or “Buyer Personas.” This segmentation can occur due to a variety of factors. Some of the most important are as follows:

• Audience Demographics: include age, gender, education level, income level, married status, parental status, racial or religious subcultures, and so forth.
• Psychographics: include core values, personal views, hobbies and pastimes, professional interests, personality types, lifestyle choices, and so on.
• Habits & Behaviors: Purchase intent, living routines, engagements, interactions, and so on are all examples of habits and behaviors.
• Geographics: Local companies, the same city or state, a certain country or worldwide targeting, and so on.
• Existing Customer: A group of people who are already clients of a company or organization and can be targeted with loyalty or upselling efforts.
• Prospective Customer: A group of people who have not yet purchased from a company or organization but may do so in the future.
• A niche audience is a small, highly specialized group of people who have distinct requirements or interests.
• A mass market is a big, diversified collection of people with a wide range of interests or requirements.

Examples of types of target audience in advertising classification:

• Age range: 25-40 years old
• Gender: solely a female audience for a beauty make-up product.
• Residence location: solely residing in and near New York City
• Education Level: only graduates
• Socioeconomic status: only iPhone or Mac users
• Income Levels: earning at least $100,000 every year

Characteristics of a target audience

In the above section, you learned about 3 types of target audiences. Categorization will help you create successful campaigns and maximize your revenue source. The next step is to understand the characteristics of your target audience so you can easily build your customer portrait.

1. Diversity

Always make certain that the sample is varied. In other circumstances, ensuring the diversity of a sample might be problematic since it is difficult to contact your target audience or certain segments of the population or persuade them to participate in the survey. A varied sample is required for a sample to genuinely represent the population.

2. Transparency

The population structure and size are determined by a variety of variables. To ensure transparency regarding sample selection techniques, researchers must explain these limits. Researchers must be open and honest so that survey results may be interpreted correctly.

3. Consistency

Before beginning the survey, researchers must carefully study the population and assess the sample’s consistency.

This is critical for research projects that track changes over time and geography, especially when we need to know that any difference in our study data represents the same trend across comparable and consistent samples.

5 examples of target audiences

Have understood the definition of target audience, the 3 types of target audience in advertising that need attention, and their characteristics. So you have basically built a complete customer portrait. Next, we will reveal 6 typical examples of target audiences.

1. Aiming for a Particular Audience

The definition of intended audience is simpler than you would think: it is the group of people for whom your services and goods are designed.

This is also a rather “primitive” audience, defined by only two demographic characteristics: age and gender. Examine the target audience study below.

The following is a basic audience segmentation:

• Gender: Male
• Age group: 20 to 25 years old

From here, you can begin to narrow down your core target group; consider what additional qualities 20 to 25-year-old guys may have. For example, because it is a younger audience, we expect them to be interested in music bands, pop culture, and Japanese animation.

2. The Primary Audience

You may further divide your core types of target audience into two groups by looking at probable qualities that your targeted audience shares. Following the target audience analysis example from above, your Meta-ad audience would look like this:

Audience Set 1

Gender: Male

Age group: 20 – 25 yrs

Interests: playing games, watching TV

You may also play around with target market analysis and audience interests.

Audience Set 2

Gender: Male

Age group: 20 – 25 yrs

Interests: Pop culture, Japanese anime

Multiple target audience groups may be examined to see who is most likely to purchase your goods. This is a typical case of venturing into new territory – you make an assumption about your audience and utilize real users to support your assumptions. You may optimize your product, positioning, and marketing plan based on information. You may even identify various target audiences for your future ads this way.

For example, the product design might have numerous color and text versions based on age and gender – stylish and funky messages for the younger and more trendy audience, and basic creative ones with polite wording (if any) for the elderly generation.

3. Cold Audiences

After you’ve completed your audience study and identified various subsets of your core target group, analyze their relationship to your brand, goods, and services. Are the folks in the audience familiar with you? If so, have they already purchased from you?

An individual who has never heard of your brand before is part of a cold audience – type of target audience. These folks are typically the most difficult and expensive to turn into consumers. There are two reasons for this:

• Before making a purchase, a consumer must identify the brand on some level; reaching these individuals necessitates paid marketing initiatives, such as running Facebook advertisements.
• Nonetheless, firms must acknowledge cold audiences since getting new clients is critical for long-term success.

So, how do you include cold audience targeting in your marketing strategy? Since you’re unlikely to have contact information, it’ll be difficult from the start. Having stated that you have two major options:

1. Investing in conventional marketing mediums such as radio, print, and television may be costly and time-consuming.
2. Concentrate your marketing efforts on Google Ads and Facebook Ads, which are thought to be the strongest performers in terms of new customer acquisition.

Other marketing activities, such as organic Facebook posting and email campaigns, may have previously been a part of your effective marketing plan. Unfortunately, without a significant incentive for current customers to share with non-customers, they have little to no influence on cold audiences.

4. Warm Audiences

A warm audience is made up of people who have already interacted with your business, such as through social media or purchasing from your website. This demographic is considerably easier to promote to than a cold audience since they are already familiar with your brand.

Smaller firms, in particular, prefer to target warm audiences rather than cold ones since they believe it is more successful owing to a better work-to-return ratio. However, focusing just on warmer audiences is unwise because the Customer Lifetime Value of targeting cooler consumers has a significantly greater influence on future revenues.

In other words, targeting prospects that have a strong interest in the brand’s items would likely result in greater income but shorter-term advantages than cold audiences.

5. Customers

Understanding the types of target audiences helps you easily reach your customers who have already purchased from you may be found farther down the marketing funnel.

They’ve most certainly become your clients as a result of previous focused marketing efforts, thus the technique geared at capturing the attention of your present customer base is known as remarketing or retargeting. Remarketing efforts re-engage customers based on previous activity, such as purchasing a certain product, visiting a specific page on your website, or showing interest in a product category via an online form.

If your consumers need a push to buy from you again but don’t follow you on social media or open your emails, remarketing can help in a variety of ways. Banner advertising is a well-known strategy in which website banners accompany tagged clients to places they often visit, such as local media sites, YouTube, forums, and others.

It should be remembered that remarketing is still an additional investment in your business plan, even if it is far less expensive than other methods of advertising.

7 Ways to Determine Your Target Audience

1. Analyze Your Customer Demographics and Collect Feedback

The best way to identify your target audience is to research your target audience and analyze their demographics. You can keep track of how many people open each message, how long they remain on your website, which goods they look at, and so on. Use this data to gain a general notion of who your ideal consumer is. You may also examine data from your CRM, sales data, analytics, and other marketing tools. After you’ve researched and found a user group, you may contact them directly to learn what they want.

Conduct a quick survey to learn about their pain spots and whether you can alleviate them. Request feedback from your current audience on your product or service. Some questions to consider:

• What do you want to gain from our product?
• What do you like best about it?
• What do you find objectionable about it?
• How did you come across us?
• Does it help you with any of your regular problems?
• Is there anything else you’d want to tell us?

For example, if you own a fashion and beauty blog and eComm store, you may have a mix of regular visitors who come to read content and customers who want to buy from you. Inquire with your present visitors about what they want to see on your blog, and be sure to give those updates. Also, consider how you may enhance your plan. Your current audience may have already indicated areas for improvement. Use this data to further segment your audience and target comparable user groups.

2. Examine Market and Industry Trends

Market research is critical to your success as a business owner or entrepreneur. This data helps you understand what your consumers want, who they are, how you can solve their issues, and if they are willing to pay for it.

One of the most effective strategies to contact your target market is to use research tools and analyze industry trends.

To understand more about your consumers and industry, utilize tools like Google Trends,  Ahrefs Market Explorer, GapScout, and others. These tools will assist you in doing market research, understanding growth trends, and uncovering patterns that will get you closer to your target audience.

3. Assess Your Competition

Identifying 3 types of target audiences helps you easily evaluate your competition with competitors in the industry.

Spying on your competition is one of the most effective techniques to get closer to your target market. Examine what your rivals are doing and whether or not it is working for them. Analyze their marketing methods and approaches, then be inspired to develop your own that will assist you in reaching your target market.

What are they doing to entice their audiences, you could ask?

For example, if your rivals run sponsored ad campaigns to increase sales income, you may try paid advertisements to locate your target demographic.

The most essential thing here is to identify your competitor’s main expertise and then figure out how to differentiate yourself from them.

You can make educated selections about how to compete against your competition once you’ve established their primary expertise. Remember that being distinctive in your marketing plan is only possible if you are aware of what others are doing.

Here are some methods for learning what your rivals are up to:

• Google has the terms you intend to concentrate on. This will show you all of your rivals’ indexed pages, how much traffic they receive, and any mentions on social media networks.
• Examine your rivals’ ‘top results’ on the SERP. Keep track of where they rank, what they rank for, and the kind of links they have.
• Use SEO tools to determine which links your rivals are ranking for.
• Determine whether they are utilizing Facebook, Twitter, or other social media ad campaigns; determine the social channels they are using.
• This might reveal the audiences they’re aiming for and which platforms they’re most active on.

All of this will demonstrate the level of work required to pull your audience closer to you. In other words, the information you have obtained thus far will assist you in developing a character portrait of your audience.

4. Identify customer profiles

As I mentioned above, knowing the 3 main target audience types will help you identify customer profiles such as location, age, preferences, interests,…

A buyer’s persona is a fictionalized portrayal of your ideal customer. Consider it a CV for your ideal customer but with a focus on what you want to know about them.

Consider how useful this knowledge might be for your marketing approach. Now, start profiling the ideal customer using the information you acquired in the preceding phases. You may find and document your target audiences using web technologies.

As seen in the example above, the idea is to create customer personas that span all areas of the buyer journey, such as demographics, interests, personality traits, and motivations.

An ideal buyer persona is made up of three parts:

• Information about demographics (such as age, gender, economic level, and occupation)
• Personality characteristics and values are examples of psychographic information.
• Behavioral data (for example, favorite online and offline media)

Here’s how to establish buyer personas for your company:

• Describe your ideal consumer; get opinions from persons who are similar to your ideal customer;
• Gather information on their interests, habits, and motives.
• Use the data to write down your assumptions about how the client would feel and respond in various scenarios (psychographics).
• Use the data to create a character that represents your audience’s behavior, motives, and emotions in each circumstance.
• Based on the customer profile, make product, price, marketing, and content strategy decisions.

Creating realistic buyer personas or profiles may assist you in determining the sort of content to create and the marketing channels to use.

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5. Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a popular tool for collecting and analyzing web visitor data. It will help you learn about your target audiences and identify the trends on your website.

Use it to gain insights into their visitors, track their activity, and enhance your target group’s marketing approaches. Google Analytics reports may give you the following market information:

• Your target audience’s demographics
• Where they’re coming from
• How they found your site
• Which pages do they frequent the most?
• How many visits came to your website last month vs the previous year, and much more?

Google Analytics gives a fantastic starting point for analyzing the data generated on your website. This data may be used to determine if visitors are turning into purchasers, which types of visitors are most likely to purchase from you, which platforms perform best for your business, and more.

All of this information may help you improve your buyer personas and target audience approach.

6. Maintain and Improve Your Target Audience Personas

Your target audience is always shifting. It is critical to analyze and refine your target audience on a frequent basis in order to maintain your marketing efforts relevant to your audience.

Use statistics to have a better knowledge of your target audience. Keep an eye on new industry trends and conduct regular polls.

You may improve your audience personas in a variety of ways, including:

• Analyzing their behavior on your website;
• Enhancing their demographic profile, and
• Using social listening technologies to learn about their issues and ideas.

7. Use Similarweb To Get More Information

Similarweb is a competitive research tool that may provide you with information about your rivals’ visits and audiences. SimilarWeb offers traffic statistics for millions of websites, which may help you determine your target demographic. SimilarWeb can help you find:

• A competitor’s website’s traffic volume
• Average visit time
• Top referring domains
• The number of distinct pages viewed

SimilarWeb may help you discover your target audience’s hobbies and passions. People who return to the same website are most likely interested in their services.

All of this information may be used to improve product and service offerings and become more relevant. Similarweb, for example, may provide similar statistics on Amazon and its competitors if you want to know how much money or time users spend on Amazon.

The options are limitless. You must concentrate on gathering as much information as possible.

4 Simple Methods for Reaching Your Target Audience

1. Blog Content

Blogs are essential for attracting new clients. While it’s nice to see your website’s traffic increase, to create trust and authority among your prospects, you must “text target” them with content they can connect to.

2. Social Media

Social networking is an easy method to get the word out about your company. Social networking networks have grown to be the internet’s greatest search engine, with enormous potential to attract consumers to your website. Furthermore, you may quickly establish a devoted following that you can use to test your ideas, learn more about your audience, and drive sales.

3. Video Marketing

Video marketing is still an efficient and popular way to reach your target audience. To generate relevant videos that reach potential buyers and target your audience, all you need is a decent storytelling account on a video platform, a brilliant concept for daily content, and some video editing tools.

4. Email

Emails are a simple method to remain in touch with your consumers. Furthermore, email might be the most efficient approach to contact your intended audience. According to recent research, two out of every three marketers utilize email to spread information.

You should also utilize emails to communicate with your audience regularly. You may use email to design a newsletter, distribute offers, and nurture prospects to become customers.

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Choosing a sample size from your intended audience

It is impossible to poll your target audience in research. It is also not a good idea to target everyone to locate your target audience. To make conclusions about the entire population, you must derive a sample from this objective. Here are some pointers to consider when determining your sample size from your target audience:

1. Determine your research goal

Set your research objectives first. Determine exactly what you want your study to accomplish. Will the study be utilized to create generalizations about the whole population in your target area? Have a firm grasp of these issues.

2. Set the amount of precision

Set a goal for the amount of precision you wish to reach with your study. Your sample size can be adjusted depending on the size of your population.

3. Choose a degree of assurance

The amount of confidence is proportionate to the level of danger. If you want to keep your risk to a minimum, you must have a high level of confidence, and vice versa. Choose your level of certainty about the importance of the research.

4. Calculate the response rate

Determine the response rate you’re likely to get. Increase your sample size if your population is large and you foresee a low response rate. A small sample, especially in a varied population, will not provide the desired precision.

5. Calculate the margin of error

Determine an acceptable margin of error for your investigation. The margin of error specifies the highest amount of variability or imprecision that you are willing to accept in your sample estimations.

6. Determine the sample size

Statistical formulae or online sample size calculators tailored to your study design, statistical test, confidence level, margin of error, and population size (if finite) should be employed. These calculators assist in estimating the sample size required to meet your research objectives.

The above article is a detailed guide to help you understand your target audience, the 3 main types of target audiences, and typical examples in practice. Segmented targeting through the lens of demographics, geography, and psychographics allows brands to fine-tune messaging to be most relevant.

While a brand can market to many target groups, identifying your key ideal persona is important. Continuous refinement through data collection provides a clearer view of customer needs and behavior.

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