Have you ever encountered an ad and wondered, “Why am I seeing this?” That’s because many marketing campaigns fail to reach and resonate with their target market effectively. As a result, the customer experience suffers.
According to a Zendesk report, 68 percent of consumers expect all experiences to be personalized. But how can you achieve that if you don’t know who you’re catering to?
If you struggle to connect with consumers, here’s a breakdown of how to build your target audience and enhance your digital marketing plan.
What Is a Target Audience?
According to the online course Digital Marketing Strategy, target audience refers to the group of consumers most likely interested in your products or services, who should be the focus of your marketing campaign.
While you can identify your target audience in several ways, doing so without customer data can be extremely difficult. According to a HubSpot survey, 82 percent of marketers say high-quality customer data is important to succeed in their roles.
Digital Marketing Strategy offers three categories of customer data you should consider collecting: demographic, customer behavior, and consumer motivations.
Demographic Data
This first set of data focuses on your typical customer’s demographic information, which can include:
- Age
- Gender
- Occupation
- Lifestyle and interests
This data can be especially useful when making implicit assumptions about your customers. For example, if your business primarily targets millennial women, preferences such as business sustainability typically align with that demographic.
Your customers’ personal details can provide valuable insights when building and executing your marketing plan. Yet, many marketers struggle to collect it. According to HubSpot, only 42 percent of marketers know their audience’s demographic information, and less than half know their interests and hobbies.
Customer Behavior
Analyzing customer behavior is another method for determining your target audience. Unlike preferences and lifestyle information, this category focuses on behavior related to your products or services.
Examples of customer behavior include:
- Purchase history and frequency
- Email marketing open rates
- Website interaction habits
By examining these behaviors, you can gain invaluable insights into your target audience and learn how to best engage them through email marketing, online ads, and blog content.
When patterns emerge, like frequent visits without purchases, it could indicate a mismatch between the message and your target market. Behavior data can help you close that gap.
Consumer Motivations
The final approach to identifying your target audience is focusing on consumers’ primary motivations, which often requires asking, “What are they searching for?”
When it comes to products, consumers often seek:
One of the best ways to determine your customers’ motivations is by conducting market research using surveys and focus groups. The information you gather can help you group your consumers and understand their purchasing motives.
This also applies to a personal brand. In the online course Personal Branding, Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery offers another practical approach applicable to all brand types: Consider who you want to influence, what they need, and how you can create value and make a difference in their lives. This mindset shift from pure promotion to building resonance can make your message more meaningful to your target market.
Top Benefits of Identifying Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is essential to successful digital marketing. Here are the top benefits of identifying your customers and their needs.
Target Market Segmentation
Segmentation is vital to your digital marketing plan. It entails organizing consumers with similar needs and preferences into groups called “segments,” enabling you to provide them with personalized experiences.
This approach closely mirrors the framework taught in Personal Branding, which asks you to reflect on who you want to engage and why:
- Who’s important to you as you pursue your goals?
- What do they need from you?
- What pain points are they experiencing that you can relieve?
- What desires do they exude that you can fulfill?
- How do you hope to make a difference in their lives?
These questions encourage you to think beyond demographics to identify emotional and motivational factors that define a target market.
Consider Nike’s segmentation of its audience, 40 percent of which is female. To cater to that group, Nike incorporates messaging about female athlete endorsements, inclusive models, and holistic health in its ads. At the same time, the company successfully connects with its other target audiences—male fitness enthusiasts and youth athletes.
In addition to ensuring customer personalization, segmentation offers financial benefits and can increase revenue by up to 760 percent.
Adaptability
Identifying your target audience not only informs current marketing initiatives but helps you adapt to changes your customers may experience.
For example, if most of your consumers aren’t price sensitive, your communications don’t have to focus on value.
Consider fast-food chain McDonald’s adaptability in the face of increased price sensitivity during the 2008 financial crisis. While many businesses struggled as consumers tightened their belts, McDonald’s modified its marketing strategy to highlight its offerings’ value and affordability. It ramped up Dollar Menu ads and introduced value meals and promotional deals through online platforms commonly used by its target audience.
McDonald’s also exemplifies how brands can balance mass appeal with a targeted marketing focus.
“McDonald’s is unique because we truly are for everyone,” says Amy Murray, a global marketing executive and McDonald’s former vice president of global marketing enablement and family, in the online course Creating Brand Value. “We like to say that we’re a democratic brand. Everyone is welcome. But when we do our marketing, we’re focusing on Gen Z. And we tend to focus on the younger consumer because we find that young kids aspire to be older. And then when you’re older, you aspire to be younger.”
By focusing on that “sweet spot,” McDonald’s successfully resonates with a primary target market while still welcoming a broad customer base.
By understanding your target audience, you can modify your marketing strategy to meet customers’ evolving needs.
Return on Investment
You must spend money efficiently to ensure your marketing plan stays on budget and generates a return on investment. That means your marketing efforts need to be focused and relevant.
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Consider HelloFresh’s marketing communications. While some food companies pride themselves on quality ingredients, HelloFresh customers primarily want the convenience of a healthy, prepackaged delivery service.
As a result, the company has invested in advertisements for young consumers seeking cost-effective food options, including streaming ads to reach the gaming community and YouTube videos to appeal to young home chefs.
HelloFresh highlights why you should leverage your target audience’s preferred publications and platforms: to ensure the money you spend on advertising reaches the right people.
Budweiser offers a different but equally important lesson in ROI: the value of perception.
“Even if the brand absolutely outperforms everybody else in a blind taste test today, perception can become more important than reality,” says Brian Perkins, Budweiser’s vice president of global marketing, in Creating Brand Value. “Because if people believe the brand is too available and too affordable, it can lead them to think that it might not be the best beer on the market.
Perkins’s insight underscores a key point: Even when your product delivers, your brand’s perceived value among your target market can determine your marketing investment’s effectiveness and return.
Consumer Relationships
Consumer relationships are crucial to your company’s success. According to a McKinsey report, word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.
Fitness apparel company GymShark is one example of how strong relationships with your target audience can lead to long-term success. Despite fierce competition in the athletic market, GymShark has achieved record-breaking sales.
Its secret? Strong relationships with athletic influencers who promote, wear, and even design clothing lines with the brand. Through its partnerships, GymShark gets cost-effective advertising from those its target audience trusts.
“In general, influencers have a significant following on social media and have the power to influence purchase decisions of their followers,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “Some research studies show that 82 percent of people are highly likely to act upon the recommendation of an influencer, and 92 percent of consumers trust the recommendations of people they follow on social media more than they trust commercial messages from companies.”
While working with influencers may not be the right choice for your business, GymShark exemplifies how engaging with your target audience can benefit your marketing strategy.
Find Your Target Audience
Choosing the right target audience can pay dividends for your digital marketing strategy. Whether you’re creating a marketing plan for your existing organization, a new startup, or your personal brand, conducting research to identify the right target market and then tailoring your message and nurturing those relationships is crucial for promoting your brand.
One of the most effective ways to do so is by enrolling in an online marketing course. Through real-world case studies, you can learn how to leverage your target audience in your marketing plan.
Do you need help identifying your target audience? Explore our marketing courses, Digital Marketing Strategy, Creating Brand Value, and Personal Branding, to discover how. Not sure which course is the right fit for you? Download our free flowchart to find out.
This post was updated on October 17, 2025. It was originally published on January 23, 2024.
