Knowing your target audience is a key step in building a successful brand or business. Your target market or target audience is the group of people who are most likely to want your products or services.
An audience profile or target market profile is a collection of your research into those potential customers, including:
Demographic information
Interests
Buying behavior
Spending power
Barriers to purchase
Pain points and more
Your target market profile will help you define your vision and mission statement, design your brand, and figure out how and when to reach your ideal customer. But locating and building your target audience can take some work. Let’s take a look at some of the tools and techniques you can use to more effectively find your target audience.
Understanding types of audience data
Before you start looking for your target audience, it’s important to define what it is about them you’re hoping to uncover. Here are three of the main types of target audience data to research.
1. Purchase intention
Also known as customer or buyer intent, purchase intention is a measure of a person’s tendency to buy a certain product or service. Are they browsing for information? Are they checking out a few different brands? Have they looked you up specifically to find out more information? Or have they come directly to a specific product page with the intention of buying? Knowing how likely a specific audience is to buy from you will help you craft the right kind of content to encourage their buying behaviors. For example, you could create product comparison videos to target people who are in the process of considering the pros and cons of different brands.
2. Interests
Knowing what kinds of recreational activities interest your audience can help you to target them more effectively. Imagine, for instance, that the people most likely to buy from you read a particular online publication; maybe you could ask to write a guest blog post for that publication. Or you may choose to spend money on advertising in certain locations, like specific websites or social media channels, that reflect your target audience’s interests.
3. Subculture
Members of any target audience tend to fall into certain subcultures. In other words, they conduct their lives as part of distinct, smaller cultural groups that form part of the wider culture. Data regarding subcultures can reveal a huge amount about your target audience because it highlights shared attitudes, behaviors, communication styles, and other identifying traits. All of this can help to shape the way you create and deliver content.
Once you have a clear idea of what kind of information you’re looking to reveal about your target audience, your research about them can become much more focused.
How to find your target market
Your target audience will be defined by a set of common traits, like where they shop, how old they are, where they live, and what social media platforms they like to use. For example, a high-end pottery studio might be targeting homeowners in their 30s and 40s at a higher income level, in any geographic location. There are a few ways to get a better understanding of your target audience.
1. Analyze your existing customer base
If your business is already up and running, the people who have bought from you offer the most reliable evidence as to the characteristics and behaviors of your target audience. As long as those customers have consented to you collecting and using their data in this way, analyzing your existing customers is an important early step in growing your audience.
Among your existing customers, you should be on the lookout for:
Demographic profiles: e.g., the age groups of people buying from you
Geographic profiles: Do you sell more in certain locations than others?
Frequency of visits to your website prior to purchase: Does your audience need a lot of convincing before purchasing, or is your website navigation not effective enough?
The customer journey through your website: Which other pages did they visit before they purchased?
Sales patterns: Are certain groups of people buying certain types of products and services?
Abandoned checkouts: At what point in the journey did the active customer decide to abandon their cart, and what does this say about their experience of your site?
This type of data can be easily collected using website tools like built-in analytics and forms. However, they aren’t the only ways of gathering important information about your existing customers. You can also link to surveys via email campaigns to gather more in-depth qualitative data, and analyze the feedback customers are leaving on your social media accounts. Each of these tactics helps to build a detailed picture of your target audience for future sales and marketing activity.
2. Conduct a market analysis
On top of examining your existing customers, you should also look outwards to the wider market to see how certain audiences interact with brands. Start by analyzing your direct competitors.
Visit their websites and see which seem to be popular vs. underperforming. Crucially, look into what people say about them on social media and review sites. This will enable you to identify their strengths and weaknesses, so you can adopt their successful audience development strategies and avoid repeating their mistakes.
Now go beyond your direct competitors to identify broader market trends. Read recent industry research and trend reports and follow publications and influencers in your industry on social media to get bite-sized summaries of industry trend data. By working out how certain audiences are interacting with brands, you can adapt to the changing behaviors of the market and target your audiences more successfully.
3. Carry out independent research
Another great way to analyze the market is to get people to sign up for free product or service trials on your website in exchange for their feedback. You can do this by adding a promotional pop-up to your website and promoting the trial on your social media accounts. This approach will help you to see which types of people like what you’re doing and which don’t. That information further narrows down your target audience and enables you to focus your product and marketing strategies to meet their wants and needs.
The better your target market research is, the more detailed your customer profile can be. A strong profile will position you to build a brand that connects with your target market.
What goes in a target market profile?
Once you’ve finished your research, your audience profile should help you understand:
What groups of consumers are interested in your product
How to create marketing messages that appeal to your target audience
How to build brand loyalty with your customers
Collect your audience research and create profiles based on these categories.
Demographic data: This is statistical data relating to your audience’s gender, age, location, annual income, language, education level, marital status, and more.
Interests: Knowing which other brands your audience likes tells you a lot about their tastes. This will help you to shape your brand identity, both tonally and visually.
Social media preferences: Knowing where your audience hangs out online means you can show up in the same spaces, posting content there to drive traffic to your website.
Buying habits: Understand whether your target customers are impulse buyers or people who spend lots of time researching brands, for example. Then you can shape your new product launches and marketing efforts to meet their buying style.
Spending power: How much disposable income does your audience have? This will help you decide whether to position your business as a luxury, budget, or everyday brand.
Frustrations: Study your customers’ pain points, especially what’s not working for their current buying habits. Knowing how your brand can solve their problems will help you speak to their specific market and can also help you with product development.
Barriers to purchase: If your audience isn’t buying from you right now, find out why. Understanding this helps you find solutions to help them overcome that barrier.
Preferred types of content: Is your audience most likely to engage with blog articles? Podcasts? Videos? Targeted content is key to converting your website visitors into your best customers.
Tone of voice: Establish a brand voice that reflects how your audience communicates and encourages them to form an emotional connection with your brand. This helps to turn passive audiences into brand loyalists.
See examples of audience and buyer profiles
How to segment your audience
Marketing segmentation is when you create subgroups within your target audience based on shared characteristics, preferences, or behaviors. Segmenting your audience helps you focus your marketing plan or business plan. With segments, it’s easier to address how your products or services appeal to just a few different types of people.
For example, the generational differences between a college student and a retiree might change the way they interact with and experience your brand. While both might be part of your target audience, they might not be interested in your products or services for the same reasons, or be drawn to the same marketing or product messaging. Speaking to the needs of both segments will help you create more effective messaging than if you were trying to speak to a more generic audience profile.
Creating buyer personas
Once you have a clear understanding of what your target audience and segments look like, you may find it helpful to develop buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters based on your audience data. They help you imagine a fully realized person when you share updates, choose brand designs, and think about who your products are for.
It’s all about understanding how a persona comes into contact with your brand, what motivates them to feel something about it, and what will get them to take the next step with you. Give your buyer persona(s) their own nickname or even their own avatar. For example, one buyer persona might be called "Frugal Frank."
Frugal Frank might be a male in their 30s with a steady career and income who likes to do thorough research before spending his hard-earned money. He wants to understand the benefits and form his own opinions before making a choice.
You can then create some marketing campaigns targeted at Frugal Frank that quickly show the many benefits of your product or service. Your tone toward him should be helpful and respectful of his desire to consider all options.
When you have a complete picture of the buyer personas you’re speaking to, you’re in a much stronger position to start developing content that both delights your customers and speaks to their needs. This is the key to becoming one of their trusted brands.
This article was updated on March 18, 2025.