What is a target audience?

A target audience is a group of market participants who respond to marketing activities. They are a smaller part of all market participants, they share similar characteristics and interests, and they therefore respond more homogeneously to outside influences.

How is a target audience defined?

To keep marketing activities efficient and to avoid wasted coverage, you need to know what your desired customers respond to best. A target audience is therefore defined on the basis of market segmentation, using the characteristics that are relevant. There are different types of target audience, depending on which characteristics you take into account.

1. Sociodemographic target audience: characteristics are, for example, age, income or gender.
2. Behavior-based target audience: characteristics are, for example, buying behavior (impulsive or considered, first purchase or repeat purchase, and so on).

Many further groupings are conceivable. Media usage is one example, meaning how potential customers can best be reached. Building a target audience around psychological factors is possible as well: are the market participants more security minded, or more willing to try something new?

Why is target audience analysis important?

Every company should carry out a target audience analysis early in its history and align all of its marketing activities with that ideal customer. In the long run this keeps wasted coverage in advertising small, which in turn saves money. Social media channels are well suited to targeted advertising, because a target audience can be defined there. Users who match the desired characteristics are then shown custom ads.

Terms that connect to this one are collected in the SEO glossary.