Target market v Target Audience

Whilst they are closely related, I always found it useful to disconnect target audience from target market. Once you start thinking about target audience more, you will discover that campaigns deliver stronger results.

Key Takeaways

• A target audience is a sub-section of a target market that you want to reach with a particular marketing campaign. 

• Identifying a target audience helps you hone your messaging through the right channels.

• You need to apply segmentation.

• You need to understand their challenges and behaviours and perceptions of your brand. 

• You will need an omnichannel approach and refine your strategy with qualitative data.

Let’s Begin A target market is essentially who you are selling to.

For example, this might be a mortgage broker, or an estate agent, or a FTBs.

A target audience is who you are going to “talk to” in your campaign.

For example, mortgage brokers who are interested in buy to let and have never submitted any business to Lender X. Or estate agents that only operate in NW England with 5 or more branches. Or FTBs who live alone and are classified as professionals. It is more targeted.

What Is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a well-defined and segmented group that you want to target with your campaign. You are targeting this specific audience rather than a broader target market.  

The term target audience should not be confused with personas, which give a representation of a target audience in more detail based on data and research.

Why Target Audiences Matter

Without identifying your target audience, your marketing campaigns become less effective. If you aim for the target market, you are doing a scatter gun approach and will have a lot of waste with your spend. Targeting a specific audience has more precision and helps you craft and deliver more relevant messages and get greater cut through.

What’s The Approach?

Segmentation

• You break you bigger target market into segments to give you a much better understanding of the bigger market which is not homogenous.
  

• As such, it helps you better understand your customer base as a whole. 
  

• There are plenty of ways to segment, but I find doing so based on stage in the funnel the most effective.
  

Feel Their Pain

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• Once you’ve identified the segments that make up your market, it’s time to really dig into the details. 

  
  

• Understand the audience’s behaviours and motivations. But also get to know what challenges they suffer – particularly with using your competitors.

  
  

• Now think about how you can solve these problems.
  

Messaging

• With a defined target audience, you get to create a targeted – and relevant – message for them, rather than a broad message that generate wasted budget spend.
  

• And a message that shows how you solve their problems will work wonders.

Channel reach

• Now you can work out the best way of reaching this target audience.
  

• A general event may not suffice, for example, but you could do your own events just to the audience, or email.

Competition time

• It is worth knowing which, if any, of your competitors are reaching your target audience effectively. What messages are they using? What channels do they use? What tone works?
  

• Now of course you never copy the competition. But it can give you a steer to do things your way, to meet your goals and be better than them.
  

Measure by ROO

• By having a specific targeted campaign, it becomes easier to measure and demonstrate your value.  Measure performance. Refine. Enhance.

Finding your target audience is about answering a two-pronged question about your customers: Who are they, and where are they?

What Else Should You Think About?

Take an omnichannel approach.

You need that one big message for consistency, but tailor it for the channels.

Measure regularly and be agile and adjust. If you wait too long to measure success, new opportunities will be lost.

Use qualitative data: One of the most effective way of gathering insights about your target audience is to talk to them – and listen.

And Finally - Target Audience Research Is a Big Competitive Advantage

Most companies don’t give anywhere near enough attention to target audience research. They adopt a spray ‘n’ pray approach and hope for the best.

If you’re strategic about how you find and reach your target audience, you’ll see more than just a boost to your ad ROI (though you’ll get that, too).