Defining your target audience

target audience  Victorian males aged 25 to 50.

Regional business decision makers.

Affluent, fashion conscious, inner-city females aged 18+.

The starting point for any successful advertising campaign is a concise definition of target audience. No matter your advertising budget, your ability to identify the primary customer groups that you want to reach is critical.
Few businesses are truly mass market in which everyone is a potential customer. So knowing who you want to target is important from the media planning stage – the start of the advertising process. It helps inform your media selection ensuring you choose the right mediums and media brands for your advertising campaigns.

Consider the target audience of mountain climbers. Just knowing this group’s common interest immediately guides your thinking towards specialist publications, websites or other targeted media rather than mass market media brands with broad focuses. This is ‘target audience’ at work. Understanding your target audience helps guide your thinking and prevents “wastage” – i.e. when a large proportion of your advertising audience has no interest in the product or service being sold.

With this in mind, can you describe your business’ target audience? If your answer is simply “my customers” then you are probably not ready to start buying advertising.

Identifying exactly who your target audience is may take some research. You may even find that you have several. The point is to speak to your customers, run client surveys, examine your website’s usage and other techniques to gain an insight into your customer base. Once you have this information, look for common, unifying characteristics and attributes.

Know Your Target Audience

Of course researching target audiences can be like the proverbial ‘piece of string’. Trying to gain detailed demographic and psychographic breakdowns of your customers can be an involved, time consuming and expensive activity. However, the fundamentals of establishing your target audiences are not difficult to obtain and can be broken down into four simple questions, namely:

  1. Where is your target audience located? Are your customers from the local area? Are orders being received predominantly from interstate or overseas?
  2. Is your target audience primarily male or female? Knowing the gender of your target audience can greatly influence the medium and media brands you choose to advertising in. For instance, fashion conscious females are unlikely to be reading 4WD titles in great numbers, whilst teenagers are more likely to listen to music than talk-back radio.
  3. How old is your target audience? Age is another key determinant in advertising. Simply compare the audience make-up of youth oriented television programs to over 50’s programs to see its impact.
  4. What is your target audience’s area of interest? Knowing your product or service is only part of the answer. You might have to think laterally. For example, a retailer of energy efficient household products might advertise in household design magazines, but may also advertise in green / environmentally conscious magazines, websites, or television programs.

Once you have answered these four questions, you can then enhance your target audience research by examining more detailed areas. For example:

  • What is the income range of your target audience?
  • Is your target audience single or in a relationship?
  • What kind of lifestyle do they lead?
  • What are the core attitudes and beliefs of your target audience?
  • What are the main professions of your target audience?
  • What qualifications do they have?

Conclusion

A clear understanding of your target audience should always be the foundation of any advertising campaign. It will enable you to better select and compare advertising vehicles, and ultimately, give you greater confidence that your advertising dollars are being used to target those people that matter most – your customers.