How to choose your target audience?

Your target audience is the group of people most likely to buy what you sell, described precisely enough that you can write an ad to them. You find it with market research, a look at the customers you already have, and a persona built from both, then you test it and narrow it.

Start with market research

Gather information about the people you think you are selling to before you spend anything on reaching them. Surveys, focus groups, customer interviews and straightforward online research all count. What you are looking for falls into three groups.

• Demographics: age, gender, income, education level and location.
• Psychographics: values, attitudes, beliefs, interests and lifestyle.
• Behaviours: how people use your product or service, how they buy, and how often they buy again.

Look at the customers you already have

Your existing customers are the cheapest research you will ever do. Go through them and find what they have in common, in demographics, interests, behaviours and attitudes. That overlap is your starting point, and it is evidence rather than opinion.

Write one customer persona

Take the research and the patterns from your current customers and turn them into a single detailed profile of your ideal customer: who they are, what they care about, and how they behave. A persona is useful because it forces a decision. It is much easier to write an ad to one person you can picture than to a segment on a spreadsheet.

Name the problem you actually solve

Every product or service solves a problem or meets a need. Write down the specific problem yours solves, then ask who is most likely to have it. That question alone will remove a large part of the market from consideration, which is the point.

Know your unique selling proposition

Your unique selling proposition is what sets you apart from competitors. Once you know it, ask which audience is most likely to care about it. Plenty of people have the problem you solve. Fewer will value the particular way you solve it, and those are the ones worth paying to reach.

Check the market is big enough

Measure the size of the market you are aiming at and how fast it is growing. A tightly defined audience is efficient, but it still has to be large enough to sustain the business. This is the sanity check that keeps precision from turning into a dead end.

Test, then refine

Once you have identified your audience, put your messages and tactics in front of them and watch what happens. Which creative earns attention, which offer converts, which segment costs least to reach. Use that feedback to sharpen both the targeting and the message.

The balance to aim for

Your target audience should be specific enough that you can write tailored messages to it, and broad enough that the market can sustain your business. Most campaigns that underperform have got one of those two wrong, usually the first.

Questions I get asked about this

What is a target audience?

A target audience is the specific group of people most likely to buy your product or service, defined by demographics such as age and location, psychographics such as values and interests, and behaviours such as how and how often they buy.

How do I find my target audience with no customers yet?

Start with market research and competitor analysis. Interview people who have the problem you solve, look at who your competitors are visibly selling to, and build a first persona from that. Treat it as a hypothesis and let the first campaigns correct it.

How narrow should a target audience be?

Narrow enough that you can write a message aimed at one recognisable person, and wide enough that the market can support your revenue goal. If you cannot picture the person, it is too broad. If the market is too small to hit your targets, it is too narrow.