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?
In essence, the definition of a target audience is the specific group of consumers most likely to be interested in your product or service. These are the individuals who are most likely to engage with your marketing campaigns and ultimately become your customers.
Defining your target audience involves understanding their demographics such as age, gender, location and income, as well as their psychographics, including their interests, values and behaviours.
Understanding the importance of identifying your target audience
Identifying your target audience should be an integral part of your marketing strategy, as it will ensure your messaging reaches the most receptive group of people.
A study by Sender revealed that 75% of consumers say personalised communications are key when choosing a brand and making purchases1. This means that knowing your target audience in detail is essential. It allows you to 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 particularly important.
Target audience vs target market: What’s the difference?
While these two terms might seem interchangeable, they actually have distinct meanings in the marketing world. Understanding the differences between a target audience vs a target market can help you fine-tune your marketing strategies and reach the right people with the right message.
● Target Market: This is usually the broader group of people who are most likely to be interested in what you offer. This group is usually defined by shared characteristics like their age, location, income and lifestyle. For example, a target market could be "eco-conscious millennials who live in urban areas and enjoy outdoor activities."
● Target Audience: Your target audience is a more specific group within your target market. It's the segment you want to connect with through a particular marketing campaign or message, and is defined by more specific traits like their interests, behaviours and needs. For example, a target audience within that broader market could be "eco-conscious millennials in London who frequently purchase sustainable products online, and follow environmental activists on social media.”
Types of target audiences and examples of each
Demographic
A demographic target audience is segmented based on shared characteristics like:
● Age: Retirement communities can effectively target their marketing efforts towards individuals nearing retirement age.
● Location: Promoting a local event? Focus your advertising on residents of the specific city or region where it will be held.
● Gender: Clothing lines designed for a specific gender can tailor their marketing campaigns accordingly, reaching women or men exclusively.
● Income: Luxury brands often target high-income earners with advertisements for their exclusive products and services.
● Education: Educational institutions can promote their programmes and courses to prospective students based on their current education level.
● Occupation: Specialised tools and services designed for specific professions can be marketed directly to those working in those fields.
Psychographic
A psychographic target audience is grouped based on shared psychological traits such as:
● Values: Companies can market eco-friendly products specifically to consumers who prioritise environmental sustainability.
● Lifestyle: Travel agencies can tailor their promotions to different lifestyles, offering adventure packages to thrill-seekers and luxury travel experiences to those seeking comfort and exclusivity.
● Interests: Gaming consoles are often marketed to video game enthusiasts through targeted advertising campaigns.
● Attitudes: Political campaigns can use targeted messaging to reach voters with specific political viewpoints.
● Personality: Brands with unique personalities can use marketing to connect with consumers who appreciate those traits, such as those who enjoy humor or unconventionality.
Purchase intentions
This type of target audience is segmented based on their readiness to buy:
● Awareness: When potential customers are unaware of a product or service, marketing efforts should highlight the problem it solves and raise awareness of its existence.
● Consideration: For those actively researching and comparing options, targeted marketing can provide the detailed information and comparisons they need to make an informed decision.
● Decision: A gentle nudge, such as a special offer or a reminder of the product's unique benefits, can be effective in encouraging those ready to make a purchase.
● Loyalty: Building strong relationships with existing customers, through engagement and incentives, can foster loyalty and encourage repeat purchases and brand advocacy.
Subcultures
A subculture target audience shares a common interest or identity:
● Fans of a specific music genre: Concert promoters can effectively target metalheads or pop music fans when marketing tickets or band merchandise.
● Members of an online community: Social media platforms and online forums can cultivate a dedicated user base by promoting their services to specific communities, such as gamers or book lovers.
● Followers of a particular lifestyle: Targeted advertising can reach those committed to specific lifestyles, such as promoting vegan products to vegans or sustainable living resources to eco-conscious consumers.
● Enthusiasts of a hobby or activity: Companies can effectively market sports equipment or travel packages to those who actively participate in those hobbies or activities, such as cyclists or hikers.
7 steps to finding your target audience
Identifying your target audience is essential for effective marketing, but where do you begin? This section outlines seven key steps to help you pinpoint and understand your ideal customers, enabling you to tailor your marketing efforts for maximum impact.
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 prioritise to reach them? The answers lie in market research.
There are several types of market research you can utilise to help you build a valuable profile of your target audience:
● Interview 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.
● 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 — transactions, feedback, reviews and testimonials — to help it understand which audience may be interested in its new offering.
● Competitor analysis: This helps you 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 to them 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 target audience 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 do wonders in helping you choose the best routes to reach the audience, and to tailor your marketing campaigns to increase purchase intention. Wondering how you can research the demographics for your potential customers? Point 5 has the answer.
3. Analysing psychographics: Understanding your audience’s interests and behaviours
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. Thus, it’s also important to consider a target 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 thus looking for an electric vehicle? Psychographics will help a business understand its target audience in greater detail.
4. Creating buyer personas: Building detailed profiles of your ideal customers
Now it’s time to begin building buyer personas. These are fictional “characters” that represent your target audience. Based on your market research and demographic and 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?
These insights will help you truly personalise 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 personalised experience increases sales2, so creating accurate buyer personas is important.
5. Utilising 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, 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 understanding of who your target audience is and what motivates them to interact with your brand — insights you can leverage to enhance your offering.
Beyond Google Analytics, other tools within the Google Suite can also provide valuable audience insights. Google Search Console, for instance, offers data on how your website appears in search results, including the search terms people use to find you. This can help you understand what your audience is looking for and how they are discovering your content. Google Trends, on the other hand, reveals the popularity of specific search terms over time and across different regions, providing insights into audience interests and preferences.
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. Plus, you can also engage in competitor comparison by seeing what your competitors’ social pages are up to.
Social media analytics will give you further insights into your target audience’s behaviours. Engagement rates (likes, comments and shares) will show you what content best connects with them, whilst peak activity data is important in telling 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 behaviour, preferences and sentiments, allowing you to fine-tune your social media strategy and maximise 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 at engaging the audience. You can also use analytics tools to track and measure the performance of your digital marketing campaigns and 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 keep it top of mind when the time is right. It's designed to teach prospects about your products and services and build trust in your brand. This approach improves your sales strategy by engaging all potential customers, not just those ready to buy immediately.
And it can really pay off! Research from Marketing Sherpa4 found nurtured leads make purchases that are 47% bigger than non-nurtured leads. There are several Lead Nurturing Strategies to consider:
Email marketing
According to Business News Daily, 55% of marketers believe that email marketing drives the highest return on investment out of all digital marketing strategies5. With segmentation, you can divide email subscribers into groups based on different parameters — such as 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 select the channels most likely to engage your targets.
Align sales, marketing and customer support teams
Your leads’ journey through the sales funnel involves multiple touchpoints with your business, so it’s important all your teams are aware of their responsibilities and are aligned in the messaging they’ll deliver to the prospect.
Personalise your engagement
Before approaching a lead, it’s important to do your research on their business and their industry. When speaking to them, it shouldn’t be a sales pitch; 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 prioritise where you spend your time and focus by ranking leads based on their chances of converting. You can use metrics like engagement to determine how ready they are to make a purchase.
Post-purchase nurturing
Lead nurturing shouldn’t end after the sale. After all, you want customers to 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: Continuously understand and adapt to your audience’s needs
Tools such as Google Analytics will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You can segment the 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.
However, the most important route to understanding your target audience is speaking to them directly; asking questions and inviting feedback. By truly knowing your customers — their pain points, needs and challenges — you can communicate in a way that inspires action. And when it comes to meeting those needs, remember that today's customers value a personalised experience, which includes fast and flexible shipping. DHL Express offers a range of reliable shipping solutions and export services — as well as logistics insights — to help you exceed those expectations and build loyalty.
