A target audience is a group of consumers within a predefined target market that has been identified as the best recipients for a particular marketing message. For example, the target market for an online bookkeeping tool might include businesses with over $500K in annual revenue.
One of the single most important factors to consider for any form of successful communication is a clear understanding of your audience. Pick any topic. Imagine how you would discuss this topic with a group of kindergartners, your best friends, a group of strangers, your parents, or your significant other. Obviously, your approach would vary depending on the group even though the topic remains the same.
Defining a specific target audience characteristics will help you make your design message more effective. Without them, your message may make perfect sense to you but not necessarily be effective in communicating the importance of your message to someone who needs educating. A campaign is a form of focusing a design message. No effective campaign is directed towards “everyone” even though everyone might benefit from knowing the information. When that is the case, multiple campaigns are necessary, and essentially the same information is “customized” or delivered in different ways to different target audiences.
Part of why your communication approach should differ is because you know, or can reasonably assume, some general facts about your audience group. The best situation is that you have data which supports preferences and past consumer habits of your group. You use that data information to get to know your intended audience so that it will lead you to talk in a way that is tailored or customized to that group. This is very similar to what designers do when creating an effective form of visual communication. If you weren’t able to talk directly to these groups, but instead wanted to communicate a message to them visually you would need to change the media, the style, or the look (the FORM) to get the best “fit”. The difficulty arrises in that the audience groups that a designer is trying to reach are typically quite large and also that the designer is rarely a member of that group herself.
So, to solve this difficulty, the designer (or a marketing firm) must do some research or demographic study to find out information that characterizes the intended or target audience. The trick is to find information that will help the designer make some design decisions that will likely be appealing to that specific audience. Some examples of these design decisions that can be highly influenced by the particular audience that is being targeted include;
- color and typeface choices
- slogan or tagline wording/grammar
- level of abstraction/realism
- choice of media and choice of deliverables
- choices of location/placement—end use context
- use of symbols/metaphor,
- visual references to people, places, or things,
- overall visual style (retro, contemporary, colorful, fast-paced, etc.)
- the “voice” (serious, formal, funny/humorous, quirky, irreverent, use of slang, etc.)
To get to the point of creating meaningful design that communicates successfully to an audience, the designer needs to know WHO are the people that your client is trying to attract—the target demographic. So, in order to make intelligent and effective design decisions—such as those listed above—The designer should carefully consider WHICH characteristics of the target demographic will be the most helpful. (All information or characteristics of an audience are not necessarily helpful to making design decisions.) Below are some characteristics or types of information that would be good to know about a target audience and therefore quite helpful in customizing a design message or project. Some examples of these include;
- Lifestyle Choices (leisure, tech, sporting/athletic, family, vacation location, purchasing, etc.)
- Urban/Rural (Metropolitan, Medium-sized City, Small Town, Suburban, Country)
- Education Level (High school grad, Undergraduate Degree, Graduate Degree, Doctorate, etc.)
- Income Range (minimum wage, 50K–80K, 150K–300K, etc.)
- Occupation (unemployed, part-time, multiple jobs, blue-collar, white-collar, business, entertainment, tourist, etc.)
- Specific Geographic Location (City, Neighborhood, State, Country, etc.)
- Age Range (Teen, College Age, Baby Boomer, Gen-X, Millinial, 30-50, Retiree, etc.)
It is important to understand that one of the areas that is most commonly misinterpreted is age range. This is because we all tend to accept or presume generalizations about age and apply those generalizations across a wide range of product usage. Do not depend on generalized assumptions about age to be very helpful. Look deeper.
Ask yourself these questions as you work to define your target audience:
- What problems does your product or service solve?
- Which demographic characteristics influence the decision-making process?
- Which psychographic traits impact content consumption?
- How does your audience prefer to engage with brands similar to yours?
- Is your audience segment large enough?
It is equally important to realize that people of all ages, income and educational levels, regardless of occupation or where they live make the majority of their decisions based on their personal lifestyle choices. This fact is vital in discovering what visual approach will be most effective in reaching any audience. So, research questions that tell you what kind of things your audience buys, what kind of car, how they dress, where they might vacation, if they have a family, etc. will help you to understand the type of lifestyle they are choosing. It is to your advantage to tailor your design message with this lifestyle in mind.
Ultimately, your client, with your help, is targeting an audience because they want to increase their business by attracting a group that they are currently not attracting. You are there to help in this by creating a visual message that has been customized to appeal specifically to that group of people—the target audience.
An Example: Business Travel Company
- Key demographics
- Age range: 30-55.
- Gender: 70% female, 30% male.
- Common job titles: Procurement Officer, Travel Buyer, Supplier Relations Expert.
- Key psychographics
- Values relationships when working with suppliers.
- Dislikes working on repetitive, mundane tasks.
- Is wary of handing off responsibilities to a third party.
- Challenges
- Suppliers fail to deliver on promised rates.
- Doesn’t have enough data to make informed decisions.
- Not familiar with ground-level travel concerns.
- Preferred channels
- Looks for answers via organic search.
- Communicates with other procurement professionals on social media platforms.
- Preferred content types
- Easily digestible blog posts.
- Case studies.
