What’s in this article:
- Why and how brands must distinguish between target markets and target audiences.
If you’ve spent any time in marketing, you’ve almost certainly used the words “audiences” and “markets” interchangeably. While these terms certainly overlap, they speak to different elements of relationship marketing strategy. Knowing the differences can help produce more accurate personalized messaging and ultimately reach more customers over the long term.
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What is a target market?
A target market is any group of consumers who typically share some demographic characteristics that brands can target with products and services. Some example markets include:
- Gender
- Age
- Income level
- Education level
- People living in specific regions
- Dietary choices, such as vegetarianism
An entire business often shares the responsibility of defining and reaching out to target markets since it requires coordination between marketers, sales associates, and product designers.
What is a target audience?
A target audience is a narrow segment of a target market that aids marketers in creating ad campaigns. Audiences are far more helpful to marketers designing specialized ad creative and promotions. For example, if your market is women aged 18-55, you can define target audiences by:
- Segmenting further by age, such as women aged 18-29, 30-30, and 40-55
- Distinguishing between students and working professionals
- Creating groups for single and married women
- Dividing the market by income level
As you can see, brands can use the same characteristics to define markets and audiences. The distinction is scale — markets offer a big picture perspective while audiences help you focus on subgroups and other niches.
How can marketers use markets and audiences?
When a market reaches a certain size, it starts becoming impractical to promote your brand to the entire group. Anyone from ages 13 to 70 may have a skin care regimen, but advertising to a 13-year old looks very different from a campaign aimed at 70-year olds. They may require different marketing channels, special promotions, and other factors.
And that’s just looking at age. Factors like education level, career, or even gender may also come into play. A 47-year old doctor looking for new clothes probably won’t be swayed by a back-to-school sale, but a 47-year old teacher might welcome it. One customer might follow a vegetarian diet for ethical reasons, while others want to improve their health. Each group requires a different strategy if you hope to reach an entire market.
Audiences help marketers diversify their perspectives so they can design campaigns that resonate with individuals. Markets let us focus on the big picture and measure the overall appeal of products and services. Over the long run, this enables businesses to guide far more people through the buyer’s journey — something more challenging than catering to a monolithic group.