Glossary keyword - Target Audience

A target audience is a category of people sharing similar characteristics or interests a company focuses on. Those people are the ones who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. Companies usually make use of demographic data to determine their target audience: For example, age, sex, location, marital status, education level, income, and so on. Reaching out to everyone is impossible; therefore, businesses usually narrow their focus and try to target specific leads who have the potential of becoming customers. Focusing on the target audience is also very cost-effective because the businesses will run small campaigns by reaching out to people who are more likely to be in need of their products or services. Targeting the audience will always help you receive a much better return on investment and make your brand known.

The Target Audience

A target audience is vital to a company or a media producer because they need to make sure their products are meeting the audience’s needs. Knowing exactly who their target audience is, enables them to cater and adapt products for a specific group of people by giving them exactly what they need. Therefore, businesses should collect product feedback from their customers and find gaps in the market. 

Evolve and Spot Gaps

The best way to explain this is to give an example. Imagine a business that makes a TV program about different modes of transport. If the company knows their target audience, they will know that the people who watch this program are mainly interested in cars so they can, therefore, give them programs catered to them. The business might make a program about trains when they find out that their target audience is interested in rail transport. If the business finds that a small section of the target audience likes bikes, but no one else is making a program on bikes, the company might spot the gap in the market and make a program about bikes. 

Even though it might be a small audience, the business can still do well from this program because there is no competition. Therefore companies need to understand, categorize, and define their audience. 

Define Target Audience

Firstly there are a couple of terms you might come across, which are a mass audience and a niche audience. This is relatively straightforward as a mass audience is a large audience with a huge variety of people. For example, BBC One has a mass audience. A niche audience, on the other hand, is a specific target audience of the same characteristics or interests.

We can define a target audience by a particular product, for example, the Sun newspaper audience. People that read the Sun newspaper are generally considered to be stereotypical people. Of course, not everyone that reads the Sun is like this, but you can get a rough idea of the audience by looking at the products they consume. Then you can define a target audience by a type of product — for example, documentary films. You might consider people who watch documentaries to be highly intelligent and well educated. Therefore, the kind of product can help us get an idea about the audience to develop an effective marketing strategy for a company.