Whether you’re starting a new business or expanding an existing offering, knowing your target audience is a crucial step for success. Read on as we break down the best practices for identifying a target audience, including the importance of demographics, psychographics, and buyer personas, and how a Lead Nurturing Strategy will turn these insights into sales.
What is a target audience?
The definition of a target audience is the specific group of consumers most likely to want your business’ product or service, and therefore, the group of people who should see your ad campaigns. In other words, these people are your future customers and are defined by various factors, including age, gender, income, location, interests, and purchasing behaviors.
Understanding the importance of defining your target audience
Identifying your target audience should be an integral part of your marketing strategy, because it will ensure your messaging reaches the most receptive groups of people. According to Business Dasher, 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a company that offers a personalized experience1!
Knowing your targetaudience in detail will also help you create tailored marketing campaigns that generate high-quality leads — and a greater return on investment (ROI). For SMEs with a limited marketing budget, this is especially important for ensuring effective marketing efforts with limited funds.
Target audience vs target market: What’s the difference?
A target market is the broader group of people who you think will be interested in your brand. It's a general categorization based on demographics like age, gender, income, and lifestyle. For example, a target market could be "women aged 25-40 who live in urban areas and enjoy fitness activities."
A target audience, on the other hand, is a specific segment within your target market that you want to reach with particular marketing messages and advertisements. It's defined by more specific characteristics, such as interests, behaviors, and needs. For example, a target audience could be "women aged 25-40 who live in London, frequently purchase athletic wear online, and follow fitness influencers on social media."
In a nutshell, your target market is the larger pool of potential customers, while your target audience is the specific group you're trying to engage at a given time. Defining both accurately is crucial for maximizing your marketing ROI.
Types of target audiences and examples of each
Demographic
Demographic target audiences are grouped based on shared characteristics like age, gender, location, income, education level, and occupation. For example, a fitness app might target young adults aged 18-30 who are interested in health and wellness, while a luxury car brand might focus on high-income earners above the age of 40. Understanding the demographics of your target audience helps tailor marketing messages and select appropriate channels to reach them effectively.
Psychographic
Psychographic targetaudiences are segmented based on shared psychological traits, such as values, lifestyles, interests, attitudes, and personality. For instance, a sustainable clothing brand might target environmentally conscious consumers, while a travel company might focus on adventure seekers or luxury travelers. Understanding the psychographics of your targetaudience allows you to anticipate consumer trends, and create marketing campaigns that resonate with their values, aspirations, and motivations.
Purchase Intentions
This segmentation approach categorizes audiences based on their readiness to buy. It includes those who are unaware of their need for a product or service, those actively researching and comparing options, and those ready to make a purchase. For example, a new software product might target businesses that are not yet aware of the solution it offers, while a promotional campaign might focus on customers who have previously shown interest in similar products.
Subcultures
Subcultures are groups of people who share a common interest or identity, such as fans of a specific music genre, members of an online community, or followers of a particular lifestyle. For instance, a music festival might target fans of electronic dance music, while a vegan food brand might focus on those who follow a vegan lifestyle. Understanding the specific interests and values of subcultures allows for tailored marketing messages that resonate with their unique identities.
7 steps to finding your target audience
Want to define your targetaudience and create effective marketing campaigns? This section provides seven actionable steps to help you identify and analyze your ideal customers:
1. Conducting market research to identify your target audience
So, who are your target audience? Where do they spend their time? What are their needs and wants? Which marketing avenues should you prioritize to reach them? The answers lie in market research.
There are several types of market research you can utilize to help you build a valuable profile of your target audience, including:
- Interviewing potential customers: Ask open-ended, in-depth questions about their pain points and challenges, how they want to be communicated to, and what influences them to buy.
- Utilising existing customer data: Identifying a target audience is not just a strategy for new businesses. An established business wishing to expand its product range, for example, should look at past customer data — including transactions, feedback and reviews — to help it understand which audiences may be interested in its new offering.
- Competitor analysis: To understand what the competition in your industry is currently offering, look closely at how they communicate with customers, which channels they market and sell on, and where customers needs aren’t being met — you can pivot your business to fill these gaps!
2. Defining demographics: Key factors to consider
A big part of defining your targetaudience is segmenting it by demographics — i.e. the main characteristics of the customer base that your business wants to engage through its marketing.
The most common ones are age, gender, income, occupation, education and race. Knowing these attributes will help you choose the best routes to reach youraudience and tailor your marketing campaigns to increase purchase intention.
3. Analyzing psychographics: Understanding your audience's interests and behaviors
There are some limitations to demographic segmentation. For example, assuming every group aged 30-40 wants the same things when buying a car is too broad an assumption. In this case, it’s also important to consider your targeted audience’s psychographics — their lifestyle, attitudes, interests and values.
How often do they plan to use the car? Do they have a big family to transport? Are they sustainably minded and looking for an electric vehicle? Understanding these psychographics also allows businesses to employ marketing strategies like nudge marketing, subtly encouraging desired behaviors, such as opting for eco-friendly delivery options or signing up for a newsletter.
4. Creating buyer personas: Building detailed profiles of your ideal customers
Now it’s time to begin building your buyer personas — the fictional “characters” that represent your target audience. Based on your market research, and demographic or psychographic analysis, you can create a profile of your ideal customer that encapsulates their needs, values and pain points.
The more detailed your buyer persona, the better. What motivates them to buy? Are they price conscious? Which aspect of your product/service will most appeal to them? What problems are they trying to solve? For example, Nike's buyer persona might be a young, athletic individual who values performance and style, while a luxury skincare brands’ one might be an older, affluent customer who prioritizes quality and results.
These insights will help you in truly personalizing your marketing approach — from the language you use to speak to the audience, to the channels you choose to reach them on. In fact, 94% of marketers say offering a personalized experience increases sales2, so creating accurate buyer personas is important.
5. Utilizing data and analytics to identify your target audience
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that will help you understand your target audience. The platform’s Audience Report shares insights into your e-commerce website visitors, including demographics like age, gender and location, and where they’ve come from. The Behavior Flow report tells you how visitors navigate through your website — including what content they engage with the most — whilst the Site Search report shows what they’re searching for.
With these insights, you can identify patterns and trends that will give you a deeper meaning and understanding of who your target audience is and what motivates them to interact with your brand — insights you can leverage on to enhance your offering. Beyond these, consider exploring other tools under the Google Suite such as Google Search Console and Google Trends to gain further audience insights. For more advanced analytics capabilities, DHL's advanced analytics platform also offers a range of solutions to help you analyze and optimize your business operations.
6. Leveraging social media for audience insights
Social media platforms are a fantastic way to gain insights into your target audience. Their interactive nature means you can engage with people directly and invite feedback about your brand. You can closely monitor your followers’ comments to discover what’s trending, and what challenges and pain points they’re facing — this applies to competitors’ social pages, too.
Social media analytics will give you further insights into your target audience’s behaviors; engagement rates (likes, comments and shares) will show you what content best connects with them, whilst peak activity data will tell you the optimal time to post to reach them. You can integrate these learnings into your content strategy to ensure your messaging reaches the right audience in the most effective way.
Beyond the native analytics provided by each platform, consider using dedicated social media analytics tools to gain deeper insights. Tools like Sprout Social, Brandwatch, and Hootsuite offer comprehensive analytics dashboards, social listening capabilities, and competitor benchmarking features. These tools can provide a more holistic view of your audience’s behavior, preferences, and sentiment, allowing you to fine-tune your social media strategy and maximize your reach and engagement.
7. Refining your target audience: Testing and iterating for optimal results
Defining your target audience is not “black and white” — after all, people do not always fit into neat little audience segments, and their needs will be constantly evolving. Thus, refining your target audience should be an ongoing process based on feedback and data analysis.
A/B testing is a useful strategy to consider. This involves separating your target audience into two random groups and then serving each a variation of an advert. The responses will help you understand what type of content is most impactful in engaging the audience. You can also use analytics tools to track and measure the performance of your digital marketing campaigns to see what content does and doesn’t work well.
Applying a lead nurturing strategy
Once you have identified your target audience, you can begin focusing on nurturing them into paying customers. According to Forrester Research, businesses that are successful at nurturing leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost3, but it takes time and resources. Like any relationship, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out.
Whilst potential customers finding your business might not be ready to purchase right away, a dedicated Lead Nurturing Strategy will ensure your brand remains front and center when the time is right. It’s designed to teach prospective customers about your products and services, build trust in your brand, and improve your sales strategy by ensuring every potential customer is engaged with — not just those ready to buy right away. And it can really pay off! Research from Marketing Sherpa found nurtured leads make purchases that are 47% bigger than non-nurtured leads4.
Here are several Lead Nurturing Strategies to consider:
Email marketing
Did you know that 55% of marketers say email marketing drives the highest return on investment of all digital marketing strategies5? With segmentation, you can divide email subscribers into groups based on different parameters — including where they are in the sales funnel — to ensure each recipient receives communications tailored to their needs.
Content marketing
You can build brand awareness and demonstrate your business’s authority on a subject (and thus create trust) through blogs, newsletters, podcasts, how-to articles, and social media posts. Using your audience insights research, you can also narrow down the channels most likely to engage your targets.
Personalize your engagement
Before approaching a new business lead, it’s important to do your research into their business and their industry. When speaking to them, it shouldn’t be a sales pitch; but rather a conversation to understand their challenges and needs. By knowing how your product or service can best serve them, you’ll be more likely to close the deal.
Lead scoring
This will help you prioritize where you spend your time and improve business efficiency, by ranking leads based on their chances of converting. You can use metrics like how often they interact with your emails or website to determine how ready they are to make a purchase.
Post-purchase nurturing
Lead nurturing shouldn’t end after the sale. The goal is to ensure your customers return to your business again and again. Post-sale nurture could include stages like sending a thank-you email, inviting feedback, placing a follow-up call to check the customer is satisfied with their purchase, and monitoring their future interactions with your business.
Staying Ahead: How to adapt to your audience's needs
To stay ahead of the curve and ensure your targeting efforts remain effective, it's crucial to continuously analyze and adapt to your audience's evolving needs and preferences. Tools such as Google Analytics help measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns — your business can segment its audience by measurable outcomes such as conversions, sign-ups, downloads, or sales. You can also use Google Forms and SurveyMonkey to create surveys and polls about your product or service and send them to prospects via email.
Perhaps the most effective way to understand your target audience is to speak to them directly by asking questions and inviting feedback. By truly knowing your customers, your business can communicate in a way that inspires action. As your buyers’ needs evolve, ongoing audience profiling will be crucial to continue delivering the personalization they desire and maintaining high-quality customer experiences.
And when it comes to meeting those needs, today's customers also value fast and flexible shipping. DHL Express offers a range of reliable and efficient shipping solutions to help your business exceed expectations and build loyalty. Sign up for a DHL Express business account today to experience the difference that seamless shipping can make for your business and customers!
