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Key takeaways
- Your target audience is the specific group of people most likely to buy from you, defined by shared traits such as demographics, location, interests, behavior, and intent.
- A target audience is narrower than a target market. The market is everyone who could buy; the audience is who you build campaigns for.
- B2C audiences are defined mostly by personal attributes. B2B audiences add company attributes such as size, industry, and job title.
- Most businesses have one primary audience and one or two secondary audiences.
- The answer to “who is my target audience?” usually starts in your existing customer data.
Intro: Your target audience is the specific group of people most likely to buy your product. To answer “who is my target audience?”, look at who already buys from you, what they have in common, and which traits separate your best customers from everyone else.
This post covers what a target audience is, how it differs from a target market, the main types of audiences, and examples for B2C and B2B businesses. For the research process itself, see our guide on how to find your target audience.
What is a target audience?
A target audience is a defined group of people your marketing is built to reach. Members share traits that make them more likely than the general population to need your product, such as age, income, location, interests, buying behavior, or the topics they research online.
Knowing your target audience affects three decisions:
- Budget: you spend on people likely to convert instead of everyone a channel can reach.
- Message: you write copy around the problems and language of a specific group.
- Channel: you choose platforms based on where that group spends time.
Without a defined audience, each of those decisions defaults to a guess.
Target audience vs. target market
A target market is everyone who could plausibly buy your product. A target audience is the narrower group within that market that you actively build campaigns for. One target market usually contains several target audiences.
| Target market | Target audience | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Everyone who could buy | The people you choose to reach first |
| Used for | Business strategy, product planning, market sizing | Campaigns, messaging, media buying |
| Cookware example | Home cooks in the U.S. | Homeowners aged 35 to 55 who just remodeled their kitchen |
| B2B example | Companies that need HR software | HR managers at companies with 100 to 500 employees |
Types of target audiences
Most target audiences are defined by one or more of these five types of attributes. The strongest audience definitions combine at least two.
- Demographic: age, gender, income, education, household size, homeownership.
- Geographic: country, state, city, ZIP code, or climate.
- Psychographic: interests, values, lifestyle, and attitudes.
- Behavioral: purchase history, purchase frequency, brand loyalty, and how people interact with your site or emails.
- Intent-based: the topics people are actively researching online, which signal a near-term need. More on this type below.
Intent-based audiences
An intent-based audience is defined by what people are researching right now, not by who they are. Someone reading about kitchen remodels this week has a near-term need, whatever their age or income. Intent data captures that signal by tracking the topics people read across thousands of publisher websites.
Intent works best layered on the other types. A cookware brand might combine homeowners aged 35 to 55 (demographic) with people researching kitchen remodeling (intent) to reach the buyers most likely to purchase soon. Untitled builds these as intent audiences from 36,000 topics.
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Primary and secondary audiences
Audiences are also ranked by priority:
- Primary audience: the group most likely to buy, which gets most of your budget and shapes your core message.
- Secondary audience: a group that buys less often or influences the purchase, such as gift buyers or a spouse who shares the decision. It gets smaller, separate campaigns.
B2C vs. B2B target audiences
How you define your audience depends on whether you sell to consumers (B2C) or to businesses (B2B).
B2C target audiences
Consumer audiences are defined mostly by personal attributes: demographics, location, lifestyle, and buying behavior. For example:
- A skincare brand might target women aged 35 to 50 in urban areas who buy products for sensitive skin.
- A cookware company might target homeowners who cook at home several nights a week and pay more for products that last.
Much of this data lives in your eCommerce and email platforms, such as Shopify and Klaviyo. Those platforms rarely store attributes like household income or homeownership. Data enrichment adds them, which makes customer segmentation more precise.
B2B target audiences
Business audiences use many of the same attributes, plus firmographic data about the company and the buyer’s role:
- Company size and revenue
- Industry
- Job title and seniority
- Role in the purchase (decision maker, influencer, or end user)
Firmographic data is often missing from CRM records. Enrichment fills in those fields so you can segment accounts by company size or industry, and target the people who make the decision.
Key attributes for B2C vs. B2B audiences
| Attribute type | B2C | B2B |
|---|---|---|
| Demographics | Age, gender, income, education, family status | Company size, revenue, industry, employee count |
| Geographics | City, state, ZIP code, climate | Headquarters location, regions served |
| Psychographics | Lifestyle, interests, values, purchase motivators | Company priorities such as growth, efficiency, or cost control |
| Behavioral | Purchase frequency, brand loyalty, device usage | Buying cycle stage, decision process, vendor loyalty |
| Decision maker | The individual consumer | Job title and role in the purchase |
| Product fit | Preferred categories, styles, or brands | Fit with a specific business problem and expected return |
B2C audience definitions usually center on lifestyle and personal motivation. B2B definitions center on the business problem, the buying committee, and the expected return.
Target audience examples
These examples show what a specific target audience looks like compared with a broad one.
| Business | Broad audience | Specific target audience |
|---|---|---|
| Cookware brand | People who cook | Homeowners aged 35 to 55 who recently remodeled their kitchen |
| Skincare brand | Women interested in beauty | Women aged 35 to 50 who buy sensitive-skin products |
| Running shoe brand | Runners | Runners training for their first marathon who replace shoes every 300 to 500 miles |
| HR software company | HR teams | Solo HR managers at companies with 100 to 500 employees |
| Regional HVAC company | Homeowners in the service area | Homeowners in the service area researching system replacement |
| Marketing agency | Businesses that need marketing | eCommerce brands with in-house teams that need help with paid social |
In each case, the specific version tells you who to target, what to say, and where to find them. The broad version does not.
Questions to define your target audience
The answer to “who is my target audience?” is specific to your business, and most of it is already in your data. Answer these questions about your best customers, the ones with the highest lifetime value or the most repeat purchases.
Who they are
- How old are they, and what life stage are they in?
- Where do they live?
- What is their household income, or for B2B, how large is their company?
- What is their job title or role in the purchase?
What they need
- What problem does your product solve for them?
- What were they using before they bought from you?
- What made them buy now instead of later?
How they behave
- How did they first find you?
- How often do they buy, and what do they buy next?
- Where do they spend time online?
The traits that show up again and again across your best customers are your baseline target audience. To confirm it with website, search, intent, and competitor data, follow the 7-step process in our guide on how to find your target audience.
Frequently asked questions
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Your target audience is the group of people most likely to buy your product. Start with your best existing customers and list what they have in common: age, location, income or company size, the problem they needed solved, and how they found you. Those shared traits are your baseline audience.
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Yes. Most businesses have one primary audience that gets most of the budget and one or two secondary audiences. Each audience should need a different message or offer. If two groups respond to the same message, treat them as one audience.
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A secondary target audience is a group that buys less often than your primary audience or influences the purchase. Examples include gift buyers, a spouse who shares the decision, or a finance leader who approves a B2B purchase. Secondary audiences usually get smaller, separate campaigns.
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A target audience describes a group of real people defined by shared traits. A buyer persona is a fictional profile of one representative member of that group, with a name, goals, and objections. Teams build personas from audience data to make messaging easier to write.
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An ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the type of company that gets the most value from a B2B product, using attributes like industry, size, and revenue. A target audience describes the people you reach with campaigns, including the individuals inside those companies.
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Specific enough that it changes what you say and where you advertise, and large enough to support its own campaign. "Women interested in beauty" is too broad. "Women aged 35 to 50 who buy sensitive-skin products" gives you a message, a channel, and a list you can build.
How Untitled answers “who is my target audience?”
Most businesses have customer lists and website traffic but cannot connect the two to see who their audience is. Untitled connects them.
- AI audience targeting: sync your customer data from Shopify, Klaviyo, HubSpot, or Mailchimp, and AI audience targeting analyzes who buys from you today to build audience segments.
- Website visitor identification: the Untitled ID Tag helps you identify anonymous website visitors and match them to profiles with names, emails, and demographics. Read more about how visitor identification works.
- Enrichment and segmentation: Untitled adds attributes your platforms do not store, such as household income, homeownership, or company size, from an identity graph of more than 300 million person-level records.
- Activation: push saved audiences to Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Klaviyo, HubSpot, the Untitled DSP for streaming TV, and direct mail. See all integrations.
If you don’t have any existing customer data to conduct a proper analysis, check out our intent audiences and search through our topics. And once you’re ready, . We’ll show you how to get started,
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