How To Reach Your Target Audience With 6 Strategies

A target audience is a group of people a business wants to reach. Your audience anchors every marketing effort your business makes. When you know who they are, you can tailor your marketing, messaging, and channels to reach them more effectively.

“My advice is always to stand for something for someone, because it’s a process,” says Babba Rivera, founder of hair care brand Ceremonia, on Shopify Masters. “Otherwise you end up being nothing for no one. And that’s just the reality, especially in an early-stage company; you don’t have the marketing dollars to go after every single human on the planet earth.”

In this article, you’ll learn how to define and reach your target audience, with expert insights from successful business owners like Babba about how to build a marketing strategy around your audience.

What is a target audience?

A target audience is a group of consumers that a business intends to reach with a marketing effort. Digital marketers define target audiences by demographic data like age, gender, location, income, and interests. They may focus on one primary target audience and segment that audience into smaller groups, or they may target separate audiences with different business offerings. 

For example, the dinnerware brand Jono Pandolfi targets individual consumers and restaurants with their direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecommerce website and business-to-business (B2B) wholesale offering, respectively. Jono Pandolfi defines their consumer target audience as people who want to serve restaurant-quality food at home. When they look to target restaurants, they focus on small, influential businesses.

Target audience vs. target market 

Target audience and target market are distinct concepts. A target audience is any group that a business attempts to reach, and a target market is the group a business considers most likely to purchase its products or services.

The two terms are also closely related, and they may refer to the same group of customers. Here’s an example: A business determines that women aged 20 to 45 who live on the West Coast and compete in canine agility are more likely to purchase its products than any other consumer group. This is the business’s target market. 

If the business decides to promote itself to this group, the group becomes its target audience. If it decides to promote itself only to group members who compete in multiple events each year, its target audience is this smaller subset of the larger group. 

How to define your target audience

How you’ll reach your target audience depends on who those consumers are. Defining your target audience involves two core steps:

Research your target market 

To find the target market for your business you can study your existing customers and analyze competitor audiences. Or you can conduct secondary market research to identify the characteristics of consumers likely to purchase your products or services.

Connecting with customers in person can also help. For Jono Pandolfi, conversations with customers at their annual pop-up shops were particularly valuable. 

“Talking to customers face-to-face at those pop-up shops has really kind of helped inform who our customers are,” says chief operating and chief financial officer Nick Pandolfi. 

Outline the key characteristics of this market and ask:

• What age group and life stage are they in?
• Where are they located?
• What are they genuinely interested in?
• What’s their income level and/or what are their spending habits? 
• What are their biggest pain points?

Identify durable segments 

Once you’ve identified the characteristics of consumers in your target market, decide which of those consumers you’ll target with marketing materials. Target audience segmentation is the process of dividing your audience into smaller subgroups. It’s an ongoing process; you can experiment with different groupings and use automated segmentation tools to create unique audience groups for even a single outreach.

Some segments, however, require tailored outreach in perpetuity. Language-based groups are one example. If 20% of your target audience speaks exclusively Spanish, your business will consistently need to create marketing materials in Spanish.

To identify durable segmentation factors in your target audience, imagine a campaign designed to appeal to your entire audience, and ask yourself who that campaign excludes (if anyone). If you serve both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) customers, for example, you’d find you can’t effectively target both groups at once. You’d create two distinct audience segments—B2B and B2C consumers—and plan to target them separately.

How to reach your target audience

• Target niche audience groups
• Create short-term segments for specific campaigns
• Learn what channels your customers use
• Consider brand partnerships
• Open a two-way line of communication
• Target lookalike audiences

Once you know who you’re targeting, you’re ready to plan your marketing outreach. Here are six targeting strategies that can help you reach your target audience:

Target niche audience groups

Energy drink company Guru Energy uses audience segmentation to create niche audience groups and targets them with hyper-specific campaigns. On an episode of Shopify Masters, Vice President of Marketing Shingly Lee says that the brand uses psychographic segmentation to target customers based on lifestyles, motivations, and barriers. The company also maps out the customer journey and tailors content to meet customer needs at each stage.

You can use tools like Shopify Segmentation to explore niche audience segments. The platform allows store owners to sort customers based on purchase history, engagement data, and geographic location. You can also create and filter by custom attributes, and existing segments will automatically update as customer information changes. 

Create short-term segments for specific campaigns

Use audience segmentation to isolate the best audience for a particular marketing objective. Jono Pandolfi uses this strategy to promote their pop-up shops. 

“We’ll often do a mailer before a shop to a geo-targeted audience,” says Nick. 

The brand uses geographic location and past purchase history to identify customers likely to attend the event and purchase products. This strategy allows the company to focus its resources and be strategic with more expensive tactics like direct mail campaigns.

Learn what channels your customers use

Market research doesn’t stop once you’ve defined your target audience. From there, you’ll want to find where they spend time online.

“One of the best things you can do is to identify who you’re trying to sell to and then identify where they congregate,” entrepreneur and content creator Lyn Allure says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “Are they primarily on TikTok, because maybe they’re a younger crowd? Are they a little bit more mature in their career goals? Are they on LinkedIn?” 

Lynn recommends creating customer personas and using them to identify the channels and messages that will resonate with your audience. 

“Really understand your avatar and get really, really specific—so specific that you’re almost best friends with this person,” she says. “Understanding them to their core helps you to know where they’re congregating and how to speak to them in their language.”

Use analytics tools like Shopify Analytics and Google Analytics to view the channels that drive traffic to your store and understand how visitors from different sources interact with your site. Once you’ve determined where your audiences are, you can focus your marketing efforts on those channels and know whether your audience is more likely to respond to useful and relevant content, social media ads, referral marketing, or influencer marketing,

Consider brand partnerships

If there’s a new audience you want to target, consider a partnership with another brand or influencer that already has that group’s attention.

When Guru Energy’s study of existing customers revealed their popularity with runners, the company partnered with one of the largest running clubs in Quebec. The move effectively promoted the brand to an audience of recreational runners, and allowed Guru Energy to gather valuable brand and product feedback from that customer base.

Open a two-way line of communication

Your target audience can provide valuable feedback. By opening a two-way line of communication, you can pinpoint their needs more precisely and shape your products and branding based on that information.

For example, Babba involved her community in brand and product development for Ceremonia.

“We went straight to our community and involved real customers in the product development process,” says Babba, who held a series of round-table lunch conversations about Latin identity and beauty culture during the company’s launch phase. 

Her goal was to understand why the beauty industry considers brands from countries like France more prestigious than those from Latin countries. 

“I realized that it was all stemming from a lack of representation. We just never saw our culture in an aspirational context,” she says. “We just don’t have a single aspirational global beauty brand that has its roots in Latin culture.” 

Babba used these conversations to develop a brand that resonates with her intended audience. 

“Having those discussions with customers is so important,” she says. “They informed a lot of brand decisions for me in the early days.” 

Babba surveyed her community about brand identity elements like colors and logos and continued roundtable discussions, bringing audiences along in the brand development process. 

“I had this hypothesis, but if I were to have just built this brand by myself, it wouldn’t necessarily be relevant to anyone else,” she says. “By inviting the community, I was able to really shape the brand together with them.”

You can also use social listening tools to see what customers are saying about your brand on social media platforms. Alternatively, Shopify Messaging allows you to send SMS campaigns and text with customers directly. 

Target lookalike audiences 

Another way to reach members of your target audience is to create and target a lookalike audience, which is a list of potential customers whoshare characteristics with your existing customer base. 

Jono Pandolfi uses Shopify Audiences to identify audiences similar to its current customer base and target them with paid ads. 

“Shopify Audiences has a tool that we can use to target customers who have a similar profile to our existing customers,” says Nick. “Digital marketing tools have gotten just so good at finding new customers who are similar to your current customers, and they can do that without all these subjective signals that you used to have to put into these platforms.”

You can also use social media analytics tools, search engine optimization (SEO) competitor tools, Google Analytics, and owned customer data to identify a lookalike target audience effectively.