Who is the target audience? The target audience is a group of consumers with a specific demographic, psychological and behavioral composition who are likely to be interested in the products or services provided by the company. This group represents a pillar in the decision-making process when developing marketing plans, and often directs marketers to where to spend money. Money in advertising, how to attract customers and develop the characteristics of the product itself.

Target audiences share a set of characteristics, such as age, gender, income, interests, challenges, and goals. For example, the target audience for a brand that sells electronic products may be young men and men between the ages of 15 and 45 who are interested in new technologies, the majority of whom are middle- and high-income and want to own the latest digital devices.

What is the difference between target audience, target market and customer persona?

If you have come across these three terms before, you may feel that they are very similar and difficult to distinguish between them. There is a close relationship between the three that can be explained simply as follows: target market is the broader term, and the target audience represents a part of it. On the other hand, the customer persona represents a more specific and detailed individual model of the target audience.

Here is an example to illustrate: In our previous example of an electronics store, we referred to the target audience, and the target market will be “consumers in Riyadh,” while the customer persona is as follows:

“Ali, a 22-year-old university student, lives in Riyadh. He always follows the latest trends in mobile phones, gaming devices, and digital watches. He spends some of his free time watching YouTubers who specialize in technology and games. He likes to play sports.

Why is it important to define the target audience?

Whoever thinks that all people will buy his products is mistaken, as he needs to think again about the specific group that is ready to buy. For example, only those over the age of 18 will buy scooters when they are able to issue a driver’s licence. Even if younger teenagers show interest in scooters, they are still outside the target audience, as they will not help achieve actual sales.

Companies also compete on the Internet to attract the attention of the public, and are keen to be at the top of search results, and for their products and services to be convincing and appropriate for buyers. That’s why everyone is keen to define the target audience well enough, to understand their needs and study what they want and how they like to be communicated with.

Identifying and understanding the target audience is the first step in any marketing campaign, and it is also useful in the following marketing areas:

Copywriting:

How should you describe products and offers to persuade your target audience?

Content Marketing:

What articles, images, and reels should you create to attract your target audience?

Email Marketing:

What specific messages would make your target audience curious to read your email campaign messages?

Social media marketing:

Which platforms do your target audience visit most frequently throughout their day?

Sponsored ads:

Where should your ad appear, and what are your specific ad targeting options?

Search engine optimization:

What are the keywords that the target audience uses in the Google search engine to solve their problems and search for the product, and whose interests reflect the characteristics of the target audience?

The characteristics of the target audience are the classifications that are used to accurately define the audience. The most important of these characteristics are:

demographics:

This classification is based on users’ socioeconomic information, such as age, income, occupation, and geographic location.

Interests and lifestyle:

This classification concerns everything that people are interested in, such as hobbies and inclinations, and things that they are passionate about searching for, such as books and travel. The opinions and issues that they are aligned with also fall within this classification.

Knowing this data helps in communicating with the audience in a better way. For example, we assume that the audience is passionate about keeping up with new technologies, and this can be used to formulate the advertising message for a smart watch that was just released.

Purchasing intent:

This segmentation segments the general audience according to their most recent searches for a product, which often indicates their desire to purchase after conducting a search. For example, the audience is divided into groups such as users interested in mobile devices.