Differentiating Your Target Audience and Target Market and How to Reach Them Effectively
Every business has a target audience and a target market filled with different people. Target audiences and markets are shaped with the product or service and knowing the difference between them is a key part of ensuring that your ad campaigns and marketing strategies are successful. But, differentiating between them can be difficult as there is a ton of overlap.
Basically, a target markets is the group of people that your business or brand is looking to market too. A target audience is the group of people that your business or brand expects to purchase the product or utilize the service. Think of target markets as broad and target audiences as small.
However, just knowing the definitions doesn’t mean you know your target audience and market. Defining your target market and audience can make or break your business. Differentiating the two will allow your ad campaigns and other marketing strategies come to life as you will know exactly who to target them to.
Determining Your Target Market and Target Audience
The process of determining your target market and audience is extremely important, and also extremely similar. Start by looking at demographics and how they may relate to your business or brand. There are so many different demographics to choose from and knowing as many as possible may be the key for your business or brand. Gender, age, location, marital status, race, education level, income status, etc. are the basics, but the vital part is looking even deeper.
Go deeper by looking at religious and political affiliations, languages spoken, place of birth, etc. as these also say a lot about a person and what they will be looking for. Demographics like religious or political affiliations influence a person’s morals and values a lot, and thus can help determine your target market and target audience.
For example, the target market for a bookstore specializing in Christian books would not include atheists. However, they would be marketing toward Christians or those interested in Christianity.
Knowing and understanding who your target market isn’t is almost as important as knowing who your target market is. This way, you know exactly who to market and advertise to without wasting any resources on people who probably wouldn’t be interested in your product, no matter how you market.
Similarly, their target audience would be a smaller subset of their target market. If the bookstore is located in an upper middle-class suburb and specialized in Christian novels with liberal perspectives, the target audience would include Christian people with a higher income status and a liberal political affiliation. Knowing the demographics of your target audience help you to understand exactly who to market to and how to market to them.
Other than demographics, businesses and brands should also look at consumer behaviors to determine their target market and audience. Although demographics give a basic look into who consumers are, behaviors allow you to get to know what the consumer does.
Basic demographic information is a great start, but people are more than just their gender, age, or education level. Even within those, not all women think the same, not all young adults think the same, and not all college-educated people think the same. Understanding not only the basic demographics, but the behaviors of the target audience and market, are key.
For example, if a business is selling fitness watches, their target market will be young adults. This is extremely broad as that is who the company is aiming to market towards. However, the target audience would be much smaller and would rely on behaviors of the target audience.
In this instance, the target audience would include active young adults passionately interested in fitness and exercise. Because the target audience is who the company expects to buy the product, focusing on the behavior of the target market will help your company determine and differentiate the target market from the target audience.
Reach Your Target Market and Target Audience Productively
Now that you know how to reach your target market and audience, how do you reach them in an efficient and effective manner? Think about your target market, how would you reach a broad amount of people? Think about your target audience, how would you reach a small amount of people?
The most effective ways to reach your target market are advertising and marketing in a multiplicity of ways.
- Utilize programs like Google Ads, which use demographics you’ve selected to advertise to people who fit those demographics. This way, your company knows that the people who are seeing your ads are the consumers who are most likely to engage with your company.
- Social media is one of the most important modern tools you can use to reach your target market. Creating consistent, unique and quality content is essential. But social media isn’t just limited to Instagram posts or tweets. Utilize aspects like video marketing or blog articles to reach your target market in a way that is more in depth.
- The video market is booming with social media sites like YouTube and TikTok. By giving your brand a face through video marketing, people will relate more to your content in a way that is more personable. The more personable and authentic your brand is, the more people will want to come back to your content.
The most important way to make sure that your target market and audience keep returning and consuming your content is by making sure that it is quality content. Just posting to post is not going to keep people interested. Instead, make sure there is a reason behind every post that is authentic to your brand.
Differentiating between your target market and target audience is the key to making sure that any marketing projects or ad campaigns reach the correct people. After differentiating between them, ensure that you are reaching them as effectively as possible. Utilize social media and ad campaigns in a way that relates to them and will keep them coming back for more.