A target audience includes the people who most likely want your product or service. It’s a subset of your target market, which includes anyone who could potentially use what you offer.
Advertising to your target audience is lucrative — advertising to the entire target market will incinerate your budget.
The better you can narrow your focus on a target audience, the more profitable your campaigns will be. Here’s some good news:
- You know a lot about your target audience already, even if you have never formally spelled it out.
- It’s not hard to get more data on your target audience and fill in any gaps.
- Placing ads in front of your target audience is incredibly easy.
This last point surprises people, but it’s 100% true.
If you want to advertise to director-level women in cybersecurity who are interested in finance, for example, LinkedIn gives you just the tools you need.
If you want to get in front of people who are searching the internet for “best ramen Chicago”, that’s only going to take a few clicks on Google Ads.
To avoid burning money on millions of impressions that don’t lead to sales or new customers, I’m going to walk you through the steps I use to create a target audience profile. This is a simple, practical, document that helps ensure you are trying to reach the right people, at the right time, on the right channel, with a message that resonates.
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience
Here is a simple list of the concrete information you should find out about your target audience:
- Demographics: Data about objective traits, such as age, gender, location, occupation, role, or income.
- Psychographics: Insights into subjective traits, such as what people value, how they see themselves, what motivates them, and where they get their news.
- Preferred platforms: Where your audience spends their time online or offline, including platforms like social media, email, search engines, or cable TV.
- Purchase behaviors: Insights into how, when, and why people make purchases, including frequency, preferred price points, and purchasing channels.
- State of awareness: Where your audience stands in their knowledge of your product or solution — ranging from unaware of the problem to ready to buy.
- Seasonality: Recognizable patterns in audience behavior, such as lull during the holidays or a spike in activity before the end of each quarter.
From these factors, you will be able to generate a useful profile of your target audience.
Is it a perfect and pretty profile? No.
Is it useful? Absolutely. You will have the demographic and psychographic data you need to target your advertising, along with audience insights that will help you strategically craft the tone of your messaging.
If you want some more background on any of these terms, check out this post on customer journey mapping, which can be helpful for thinking through purchase behaviors and the audience state of awareness. Also, this post on psychographics examples can help you select the most important factors for your target audience.
Two Target Audience Examples
I think it will be helpful to step out of the abstract for a second and look at two examples of target audiences in completely different verticals. These are made-up, but I tried to stay true to the real-life audiences.
In each case, you will see a sharply drawn target audience emerge in about 150 words.
Example 1: Fitness Equipment Company (B2C)
- Demographics: Adults aged 25–45, evenly split between genders, located in urban and suburban areas. Occupation ranges from office workers to fitness instructors, with a household income of $50,000–$100,000.
- Psychographics: Health-conscious individuals who value convenience, self-improvement, and work-life balance. Motivated by the desire to stay fit without spending hours at the gym. Follow fitness influencers and healthy living blogs.
- Preferred Platforms: Instagram, YouTube, and fitness apps. They also engage with email newsletters about fitness tips and promotions.
- Purchase Behaviors: Tend to buy during New Year’s resolutions and pre-summer months. Price-sensitive but willing to invest in durable, high-quality equipment. Prefer online purchases for convenience.
- State of Awareness: Solution-aware; they understand their fitness goals and are looking for equipment that aligns with their needs and space.
- Seasonality: High interest in January (New Year) and April–June (summer prep). Lower activity during fall and holiday months unless incentivized by promotions.
Example 2: SaaS Project Management Tool (B2B)
- Demographics: Small to mid-sized business managers aged 30–50, predominantly male, located in North America and Europe. Roles include project managers, team leaders, and startup founders with annual team budgets of $100,000+.
- Psychographics: Driven by efficiency, team productivity, and cost-effectiveness. Value tools that save time and reduce friction in workflow. They identify as problem-solvers and look to business podcasts, LinkedIn, and industry reports for insights.
- Preferred Platforms: LinkedIn, 𝕏, and email newsletters. Also active on search engines for comparison tools and case studies.
- Purchase Behaviors: Seek free trials or freemium versions before committing. Decision-making often includes consulting reviews and team input. Prefer subscription models with tiered pricing.
- State of Awareness: Solution-aware but comparing options. Some are product-aware and need convincing of added value or cost-benefit over competitors.
- Seasonality: Increased purchasing interest at the start of fiscal years (January, April, or October, depending on region). Slower adoption during holiday or end-of-year budget freezes.
Of course there is more data that you can (and probably will) add into your target audience profile. Any local business is going to have to get much more targeted with ZIP codes, for example. Some marketers might include target audience components that explicitly state pain points or important subcultures.
But less is more — especially when you are trying to get the approval of stakeholders that don’t want to read miles of marketing data.
There is a ton of useful information packed into these lean target audience profiles. It’s more than enough for either company to start running ad campaigns on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google Ads. They know where their target audience is, what they care about, and how they buy.
How To Get Data on Your Target Audience
There are a handful of strategies you can use to get this information. Some are fairly quick and provide basic data that is good enough for the early days. The strategies towards the bottom of this list are more time and resource-intensive, but will give you a more detailed picture of your target audience:
- Analyze competitors and their messaging: There are productive questions you can ask to start getting at your competitor’s strategy and what you should be doing to differentiate your brand productively. Who are they targeting? How do they approach customers? What keywords are they targeting? Where is their traffic coming from? What do they think is most important to tell potential customers? What do they get the most engagement on social media?
- Analyze existing customer data: Use analytics tools to see how customers interact with your brand on digital channels. You can get lots of demographic data and dig into what content people engage with (or not). Social listening tools and online reviews can also provide valuable qualitative data about how customers perceive your brand.
- Survey or interview current customers: this will give you some basic data about the people who are already bought into your service. Surveys yield quick information on current customer demographics. Interviews will give you deeper insights into motivations, interests, and other psychographics.
- Conduct or purchase market research: You can research the market yourself using tried and true methods. This creates valuable in-house expertise about your target market and audience. Alternatively, you can hire out a consultant or purchase market research from a reputable firm.
There are many more ways to come at this task, but rather than try to perfect the target audience profile pre-launch, let’s power ahead.
After all, the best possible data you can get on your messaging is seeing whether it works or not in the open market.
Step 2. Commit to Measurable Goals
With a clear understanding of your target audience and how they interact with your brand, you can set goals that align with their expectations and your business objectives.
For example, if your audience is primarily cost-conscious, goals might focus on driving traffic to promotions or increasing sales of discounted products.
Or, say your audience values thought leadership, you might prioritize engagement metrics like webinar attendance or content downloads.
It’s absolutely crucial to articulate these goals and how you are going to measure success. As soon as you start spending money on advertising, you are going to get plenty of clicks, views, engagement — you need these goals as a reference point to ensure that you are getting a real return on investment.
Goals should include concrete outcomes like:
- New customer acquisitions
- Increased conversions
- Increased revenue
- Decreased customer acquisition costs
Driving these metrics will tell you that your target audience strategy is on point. You are connecting with more people who really need what you are selling.
For raising brand awareness and growing audiences at earlier stages of the buyer journey, softer goals can be valuable, such as:
- New social media followers
- Increased impressions and reach
- More content downloads
- More likes, reactions, and social shares
- Increased email click-through rates
Just be wary of these softer targets and vanity metrics, like impressions and social shares. While they signal that you are raising brand awareness, they don’t make for viable long-term goals because they don’t explicitly tie out to concrete business gains.
In other words, you could drive your follower count or total content downloads through the roof without adding a single new customer.
Step 3. Create Channel-Specific Messaging
With a good idea of who your target audience is, what they care about, and where they are, start building out effective messaging.
Based on what you learned defining your target audience, select the channel that you think gives your message the best chance of finding meaningful traction. This could be email, direct mail, LinkedIn, Reddit, 𝕏, GitHub, Google search results, specific Facebook Groups, or even followers of particular accounts on Instagram.
Begin creating appropriate ad content for the best channel and use your target audience profile to make creative decisions. Any text and images you select for advertisements should speak to the demographics, psychographics, state of awareness, and other factors that define your target audience.
Here’s some examples of the type of channel-specific messaging that could be used by an organic skincare brand:
- Instagram Reel: A short video featuring a morning skincare routine with the tagline, “Glow Naturally — Because You Deserve It.”
- Google Search Ad: A text ad with the headline, “Gentle, Organic Skincare You Can Trust,” a short description that reads, “Nourish your skin with pure, eco-friendly products made from natural ingredients. Shop now for glowing, healthy skin,” and a call-to-action urges, “Discover Your Glow Today!”
- Pinterest Ad: A pin showcasing a visual guide to “5 Ingredients to Avoid in Skincare Products,” with their brand highlighted.
With your target audience narrowly defined, you can pick the right channel and messaging format to reach them. Text ads are simple and effective. Video and visual ads are a little more work, but can really drive engagement and shares on social media.
Because this post is about getting in front of your target audience tonight, I’m focusing on advertising rather than on creating content. This post goes in-depth about how to build a content marketing strategy, which is super valuable — but it takes a few months to start generating high-intent leads.
With ads, you can start to generate high-intent leads within a few hours. Let’s get to it.
Step 4: Launch Your Campaign
You know who you are targeting, you have your ad content ready to rock — it’s time to place these ads directly in front of your target audience.
Here are three channels you can start using tonight.
- Paid search works best when you want to drive quick traffic, capture leads, or boost sales from users with immediate needs.
- Paid social is especially effective for building awareness, drumming up engagement, and promoting visually driven products and services.
- Cold outreach is ideal for B2B sales and niche markets with clear customer pain points and high-value offers.
There are more options to connect with your target audience, but if you are trying to connect as soon as possible, these are your three fastest options.
Let’s go a little more in depth on each.
Engaging Your Target Audience with Paid Search
Paid search targets users actively looking for solutions by showing ads based on their search queries. For example, a residential propane company would show ads to people who searched for “propane near me” or “heating oil vs propane costs” in a specific geographic location. Users searching those high buying-intent keywords would then see the propane company’s advertisement in search results.
Tools like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising help you manage campaigns, track performance, and give you additional control over audience targeting.
Here are a few strategies to use to get started:
- Identify high-value keywords relevant to your audience’s searches.
- Create targeted ad groups with specific, compelling copy tailored to user intent.
- Optimize landing pages to align with ad messaging and encourage conversions.
These methods outline the fastest way to start seeing results on this channel, which is ideal for businesses with clear offerings that match high-intent keywords. Learn how to do keyword research to find high-value search terms, and how to optimize a landing page to maximize conversions.
Engaging Your Target Audience With Paid Social
Social media advertising reaches users through the platforms they frequent, using demographic and interest-based targeting.
Channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok offer campaign management tools to build ads and reach particular audiences. Social media management tools aggregate data from across channels to give a more complete view of how your brand is performing and compare different channel performance.
Some strategies for reaching users on social media:
- Use platform-specific audience targeting to tailor ads to user preferences.
- Design eye-catching creatives with concise messaging and clear calls to action.
- Test multiple ad formats, such as carousel ads or short videos, to see what drives meaningful engagement.
A word of warning here. It’s insanely easy to drive impressions, shares, and other surface-level forms of engagement on social media without getting meaningful traction. Social media platforms are designed to maximize the time people spend on them — not how much they buy — be sure that you are getting real customers and adding real value with this channel, not just juicing impression metrics.
Engaging Your Target Audience With Cold Outreach
Cold outreach campaigns are direct messages to targeted recipients with the goal of building relationships and generating warm leads. Email is the classic cold outreach channel, but companies are increasingly turning to direct messages (DMs) on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
Email marketing services are essential for managing contacts, campaigns, and sending emails at scale (without getting flagged as spam). Social media management tools may be useful cold outreach on those platforms, but the built-in campaign management tools are probably sufficient if you are just starting out.
Here are some fairly well-established tactics for using cold outreach:
- Take time to build quality contact lists and keep them up-to-date.
- Personalize messages by referencing something specific about the recipient, like their work, interests, or company goals.
- Always offer value by sharing a tips, solutions, or resources tailored to their needs.
- Write casually but professionally, ending with clear next steps like scheduling a call.
Standing up a full email marketing campaign is a lot of time and effort. I included it on this list of “fast” ways to reach your target audience because it’s possible to get started right away. If you have a niche product or service, cold outreach is one of the best ways to start putting yourself in front of the relatively small pool of people who care.
Tracking Progress with your Target Audience
Because you set clear and measurable goals that align with your target audience and business objectives, you will have a clear benchmark to determine the success of your campaigns.
Use tools like Google Analytics, CRM software, social media management platforms to monitor the metrics you care about. These tools provide data to evaluate how well your efforts resonate with your audience and compare performance across different channels.
Regularly review your progress to confirm that your campaigns stay relevant and effective. Here are a few tips to keep your messaging fresh and on-target:
- Establish a consistent reporting cadence, whether weekly or monthly, to assess performance against benchmarks.
- Keep a close eye on competitors to see how they are evolving their messaging.
- Pay close attention to qualitative feedback, such as comments or replies from your audience, as they can reveal insights that metrics alone may miss.
- Combine data analysis with audience feedback to incorporate a healthy mix of qualitative and quantitative insights.
Refining Your Target Audience Over Time
I want to close the post with this idea: Your target audience is not static.
Neither are your competitors or what they offer.
It follows that you need to review and revise your target audience periodically to make sure you are defining it properly and selecting the best possible messaging strategy. This is critical for maintaining relevance with your core audience and uncovering new opportunities for growth.
You don’t want to spread your marketing efforts too thin by casting too wide of a net, but you also don’t want to leave revenue on the table because you are over-focused on messaging to your core audience.
It’s a balance you will have to strike.
By refining your target audience based on new learnings, you will be able to adapt to customer preferences as they evolve, and continually drive meaningful connections with the people most likely to value your offerings.
