How to Identify an Optimal Target Audience

5 min readJul 1, 2021

Okay, your product or even line of products could be amazing; but do you know who to market them to?

Having a target audience can make your business’s marketing so much more effective. If you try to sell to everybody, you’ll sell to nobody. So that’s why you need to direct your efforts to a group of people that are likely to buy your product.

A target with a dart in the middle of it. Target audience research is much like this.

A target audience is the group of people your product is targeted to. People in your target audience could be specified with their age, gender, interests, and more. Having a defined target audience helps your business out a lot. You wouldn’t sell construction tools to accountants, right?

Defining a target audience is extremely important to your business’s growth. But it could also be really difficult. So here are some tips to help you identify an optimal target audience for your business.

Benefits of Having a Target Audience

Having a target audience can help your marketing in many ways. Some of them being:

You can advertise to people who are more likely to buy your product
You won’t be wasting any money or resources on irrelevant prospects
You get to build relationships with customers through a solidified tone and style, unique to your audience
You’re able to get insight into your customers and design future products or ads around them
You get to optimize your ad budget and maximize return on investment (ROI)

And this all means more profit!

The statistics don’t lie, either. 80% of consumers say they’re more likely to do business with a brand that speaks specifically to them.

Specifics of a Target Audience

There are many things you should know about your target audience, some of them being mentioned earlier. It’s important to know things like:

Age. Does your product appeal to millennials, baby boomers, or Gen X’ers? Maybe even two of those groups? Finding the age range of your target audience can give you a lot of insight.
Gender. This one could help you identify a lot of your audience’s pain points. You can then use those to hammer down on the copywriting.
Education. Is your target audience in high school? Did they graduate with a PhD? These two groups of people have very different lives and purchasing patterns.
Purchasing power. Someone selling children’s shoes understands that kids don’t have the kind of money to buy some nice rain boots. So that’s why they would advertise to the kid’s parents! Or they advertise to the child directly and urge them to tell their parents about the product.
Location. Dialect varies extremely from place to place in the United States. Slang can also throw someone off. It’s good to do different ads for different locations.
Consumption habits. What does your target audience do for fun? What do they eat on a night out? Where do they hang out? These questions can help you speak to your audience.
Interests. What’s your audience into? Is your product something they’re interested in or something associated with their interests?

That’s a lot to ask for. But it’s all worth it. Knowing all of these things will help your marketing.

A woman buys something online. Target audience research was done to get her here.

Ways to Find Your Target Audience

Now that you know what a target audience is, what you need to know about them, and why it’s important — we can get down to actually identifying them.

There’s a lot of different ways you can go about this. If you really wanna nail it, consider doing all of the following methods.

1. Conduct Market Research

Look into who’s selling similar products. Who are they advertising to?

Here’s a great way to find out who your competitors are talking to: Clear your browser cookies. Then look up the product you and your competitors are selling. Look up things that are associated with the product. You should get ads targeted to people who are looking for your product. From here you can analyze the ads and learn about your target audience.

Doing target audience research will help businesses identify target audiences

Another way to conduct market research is to check out product reviews. How do they speak? What information can that tell you?

Internet forums are another great way to learn about your target audience. Social media can really give you a nice summary, too.

2. Look at Your Own Business

It’s likely that you already have a lot of insight within’ your business about your target audience. What values does your business have? What does your product do and who would it help?

The features, advantages, disadvantages, and benefits of your product can give you tons of info.

3. Conduct Surveys

Your existing audience can tell you everything you need to know. You can use Google Forms to send out surveys, consider giving people a discount code for taking the time to fill one out.

Ask questions about everything we went over earlier.

If you don’t want to go through the hassle of sending out a survey, you can use Instagram polls. Instagram lets you ask your audience a question that they can then answer with one of two choices. These polls are easy to set up, are easy to analyze, and effective.

The Next Step

Now that you’ve done that, you can optimize your ad spend!

Many advertising platforms allow you to narrow down who you want to advertise to. Make use of this feature and you’ll definitely see an increase in profit.