What is ‘Target Market’ & ‘Target Audience’ in Marketing?

How to Reach Your Target Audience Online?

Every business is established with a purpose and is made for a selected group of people.  If a company is targeting all the people, it could be in deep trouble towards loss. Every business needs to target a specific audience and create a niche that suffices those needs. Many people confuse the target audience and target market and use them interchangeably. In this article, you will learn about the meaning of the target market and target audience in marketing plus how to identify the target audience.  

What is Target Market?

Target Market Definition - A target market is a group of people or individuals that a company wishes to serve with the products and services. It is an essential step in the development of products and marketing. It revolves around the needs of those specific individuals. Marketing plays an important role. It aims at understanding the needs of customers and developing or altering the product with their requirements.

The target market can be streamlined into categories like geographic, sociographic, psychographic, demographic, and behavioral. It helps companies to focus on specific people and create products that fit them.

Target Market Example – We all know that McDonald's is famous for its burgers, fries, and other fast foods. It is one of the largest fast-food markets in the world. McDonald's is a perfect example of demographic target marketing. It targets young children and creates marketing ideas that children love, like play areas, happy meals with toys, and Disney characters. It focuses on marketing the brand, and McDonald's has multiple campaigns targeting each brand they sell.

But sales seemed to slow down around 2016 when people started eating healthier foods. There has been a decline in the number of people eating junk food. To survive this, McDonald's changed the menu options, created fresh and healthy food to serve the customers, and upscaled the coffee products. It helped the company to stay in business and still be the largest fast-food market.

What is Target Audience?

Target Audience Definition - Target Audience is a narrow concept as compared to the target market. It refers to the specific people targeted by marketing campaigns. According to specialist Tom Duncan, 'A target audience is a group that has significant potential to respond positively to a brand message. The target audience does not have to be the end-users.

They help you to direct your market. Your customers must be educated about the advantages of the products, how to use them effectively and how your products can change their lives.  Customers usually buy products that help them with their reasons and needs. So, target audience advertising is essential.

Target Audience Example – Let us wrap up the last example. McDonald's targets young children, but they don't have purchasing power or money to buy the products. So, McDonald's creates advertisements promoting the Happy Meals as they serve a purpose for the family. Hence, targeting the parents.

The company has created so many family-friendly advertisements to serve children and target audiences in marketing. So, we can say that the children might be the target market for McDonald's, but they are not the target audience.

How to Identify Target Audience?

By now, you might have a good understanding of the target audience and target market. So, here are some of the tactics to help you identify the target audience for your business:

1. Start with your current audience

Before you identify the target audience, you need to understand your current audience and customers. You can only make decisions if you know what your customers want and what they liked in the past. It can also help you determine their choices and where they are spending the majority of their time. Your research and marketing teams can help you identify the needs. With the help of RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary), you can pinpoint the future target audience.

2. Collect demographic data on your target audience

It is essential to know the demographic data of your customers to understand them better. You can keep a list of the old customers that turned to acquaintances. You can add them to your social network and write messages or set up target advertising on them. It will help you lead to other customers. Expanding your web insight will help you understand the behavioral patterns of customers and market accordingly.

3. Customer surveys

Customer surveys are another way to help you identify the right target audience. An average blog post can help you collect more than 300-400 answers within a couple of days.

You can start by segmenting the answers and understand the likes and dislikes of people. Talking and engaging with your customers can help you to better your product and with marketing. You can look for trends in online customer feedback and find a pattern that attracts customers. You can also check popular online forums like Quora and Reddit to pinpoint the frequently asked questions by consumers.

4. Go Niche

If you know your niche and the target market, spend the majority of your time perfecting it. Having a specific plan of action for your target audience is essential to make growth. Make a plan and stick to it. It can help you understand a particular group of people and their responses to your products and services.

5. Research your competitors

The best tip is always to do thorough research about your competition. Many companies sell similar products, and one outweighs all of them because it focuses on the right people and does the right marketing. You can check social media platforms for your competitors and eventually make your products better than others.

6. Don’t overcomplicate it

It is easy to overthink your decisions and make bad choices even after targeting the right audience. Call to action plays an essential part in the business. Thinking about one person about the call to action can be extremely helpful sometimes. You can identify the type of audience that one person belongs.

Research is important, but no matter how much research you do, some parts are left uncovered. You will only identify the extremes when you see the type of audience visiting your website.

Thus, to conclude, we can say that identifying a target audience is not an easy job. It requires time, patience, marketing, and research. The hard work will lead you to identify the target audience for your products and services. It will help you with brand messaging and marketing strategies. It determines the right marketing message that will help you communicate and connect with the customers on a deeper level.

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FAQs

Q. What are the different types of the target audience?

Ans. A target audience can be grouped under various sectors like communications, media, advertising, information, and marketing. Some of the different types of a target audience include demographics, locations, subculture, super culture, needs, attitudes and opinions, personality, fans, customers, etc. It is essential to identify the audience your business should target.

Q. What audience values should a business consider?

Ans. Audience analysis is important, and it can help you with the growth of your business. A true businessman will put forth the needs of the customer over anything else. A business should consider not offending the customers, being accurate with the facts and figures, being sensitive and polite, and avoiding hateful and negative words. Ethical speaking and sincerity in the tone of voice play a significant role in connecting with people.

Q. What to do when speaking with a hostile audience?

Ans. When speaking with a hostile audience, you should talk to positive people in the room, confront the negative ideas, and spread optimism. It helps to maintain a good connection with the audience. You should also disarm the hostility with humor, align yourself physically with the dissenters, and open your conversation for suggestions and feedback while wrapping up the conversation. It gives you an edge and understanding of the customers.