Most businesses tend to put less focus on targeting the right audience for your product or business. Their contents and ideas are really great, but unfortunately they do not bother with the needs and wants in the market.
Before we jump any further into the importance of target audience, let us clarify and open-up your mind on the differences of target audience and target market. Have it in your mind that these two types of audience are different. Watch the video below for more clarity on target audience:
From the video above, we can see that the sales representative is selling the books to the children aged 4-10 years old. That would define his target market. Meanwhile, the target audience are the people who are relatable from the target market. In this situation, his target audience would be the parents, grandparents, schools, NGO, and etc.
What is Target Audience?
There are two main types of target audiences; primary and secondary audiences.
The primary target audience is the group of customers that a business thinks it has the greatest possibility to convert. In other words, this primary target audience will get the most attention from your business as you expect them to become the most effective and valuable customers. In addition, the primary target audience is considered to be a smaller group of people, and they probably not even be visible to your business.
Your business should select an audience that the company had identified through a process of discussion and analysis. They’re a group that meets all the criteria and data sets as being most likely to buy into that product or service. Marketing should be designed in a way that will ring bells with that group.
The secondary target market is simply the second most important consumer segment that you'd like to target. It's not your primary customer base and may spend less or have fewer demand on your product. It is also the next market that most appeals to the company for its potential and promises.
Take a look at this situation: One of the electronic and gadget shops in Mid Valley mall sells low budget laptops specialized for students and teenagers who couldn’t afford to buy the high-end and brand new laptops. Those students and teenagers may be the expected end user, but the primary audience is actually the parents who will be deciding which laptop will suit the needs for their kids. As we can see, this does not only focus on one type of person but actually involves various kinds of people who may become the buyer of the laptop.
How to Classify Your Audience?
Instead of you trying the whole market by targeting everyone on Facebook or other channels, you might want to classify your audiences based on their preferences such as their demographics, interests and behaviours.
The demographics could be grouped by their general information such as age, gender, educational level, religion and etc. For example, you can group people of certain age group such as 35 - 55 years old when targeting for any car brands. This is because younger age groups are unlikely to purchase for vehicles as they could not afford since they have slightly lesser income. Since the older generation are not familiar with using social media, we would also not recommend to target them as well.
For interest, we classify the market based on the similar beliefs, personality or lifestyle, and etc. We can also classify the audience based on their behaviour such as their purchasing habits, interactions with a particular brands and the list goes on.
The above categories are some of the example types to classify your audiences. You can create multiple targeting for your campaign to test out which audiences work best for you. Basically, everyone could be your potential customers as long as you target them and send them an accurate message of what they are looking for.