What to Consider When Defining Your Target Audience in Marketing

Marketing has two core elements: the product and the customer. The effort to bring these two together is what we call marketing.
One of the fundamental components of marketing is the target audience. Campaigns launched without a properly defined target audience, thrown together quickly in the hope of fast results, end up either inefficient or in outright failure.

In digital marketing, unlike out-of-home advertising, you can run highly specific targeting and equally specific analysis.
By using this depth, you can define your target audience with precision and lay the foundations of a successful marketing strategy through both SEO and SEM.

Know yourself and your product

Knowing yourself (that is, your brand) and your product is far more important than defining a target audience, and it comes first. If you do not know your own brand and product, and you lack solid answers about where and how it is used, then any audience definition you attempt will run on guesswork alone. That inevitably produces inefficient strategies.

Do not oversimplify this. Even for the most basic product, think through every stage of its entire life cycle from the product's own point of view: what it goes through and what it experiences. Yes, it is hard to think this way about inanimate objects, but imagine it anyway.
Do not treat this as a throwaway exercise. Find a quiet place, focus, and spend at least a few hours on it. Ask your team members to do the same, then gather afterwards to compare notes and evaluate how your product's entire life plays out. There is a very good chance you will encounter surprising insights.

This exercise also builds a shared understanding of the product across your whole team, which translates into alignment when the marketing work begins.

Identify your general target audience

Once you truly know your product, it is time to determine who uses it. The first pass stays broad: simple metrics such as gender, age, and education level. This general audience represents the people who will buy roughly 90 percent of your products, though the figure can vary by industry.
This audience forms our outer circle. Whatever campaign we run, whatever strategy we follow, it will always draw from within this general target audience. Any campaign aimed outside this circle can safely be considered inefficient.

Analyze your target audience

Now that we have a target audience, it is time to think about their ordinary daily life. Just as you evaluated your product, visualize the daily routine of a person who fits your audience profile. Consider every step they take: what happens as they go about their day, or as they work in the industry your product serves. In other words, walk through their entire day.

Doing this with your team and evaluating the results together afterwards will again prove very useful.

As you run this exercise, imagine two versions: one where your product exists in their life and one where it does not. Ask questions such as: "What gap does your product fill in daily life?"
"Whose lives contain more of that gap?"
"Does the same gap-filling apply to my competitors? What sets me apart?"
Ask these and similar questions and collect the answers. One question will naturally lead to the next.

After working through these questions and answers, alongside the fundamentals of "what kind of product is this?" and "what kind of people are my customers?", the answer to "who needs my product most, and who is most likely to buy it?" should have settled clearly in your mind. That answer is the core segment at the heart of the general target audience we defined earlier.

Build a marketing strategy that fits your target audience

Alongside your general audience, you now also have a core audience. Depending on your planning and your budget, you can start marketing to the core segment alone, or extend beyond it as well.

This marketing activity is not, of course, simply a matter of adding your defined audience to a campaign's targeting settings and moving on.

You also need to work out where your target audience spends their time during the day, what they research, and what occupies their attention. Based on those calculations, you can decide which channels deserve the larger share of your budget.

The same understanding makes it much easier to shape the content of your ads around your target audience.

Naturally, this work could also be done through thorough market research, surveys, and market testing, which would yield more precise data. Companies with the resources to do that already do. For everyone else, this alternative approach can make the job considerably easier.