Quick! What are five words you’d use to describe your target audience?
Did you have to guess?
What if we told you there are tools that can pinpoint your target audience and which accounts in that target audience are looking to buy from a company like yours soon?
In this guide, we share how to identify your target audience and use that information to capture the attention of accounts ready to convert.
Specifically, you’ll learn:
- The most prominent target audience characteristics for B2B companies
- The difference between target audience and target market
- How to conduct a target audience analysis
- How to leverage audience intelligence tools to scale personalized marketing campaigns
Ready to level up your marketing strategy? Let’s begin!
What is a Target Audience?
Your target audience is the specific group of businesses most likely to be interested in and benefit from what your company offers.
Having a deep understanding of your target audience allows you to craft compelling messages that resonate with potential clients, rather than broadcasting a generic message that misses the mark.
A target audience is not a static entity. It can change and grow alongside your business. However, there are some overarching characteristics of most B2B target audiences:
- Industry Focus. B2B companies often tailor their products or services to meet the needs of specific industries. Understanding which industries are most responsive to your offerings is crucial.
- Company Size. Are you targeting small startups, mid-sized enterprises, or large corporations? The size of a business impacts its requirements and decision-making processes.
- Technology Adoption. Knowing your target audience’s technology preferences and adoption levels helps you craft campaigns that align with their tech infrastructure.
- Decision-Making Hierarchy. B2B purchases often involve multiple decision-makers. Understanding the decision-making structure within organizations enables you to strategically target multiple members of the buying team, which enhances your chance of winning a deal.
- Budget Constraints. Comprehending potential clients’ financial capacity and constraints is essential for offering viable solutions.
- Long-Term Value. B2B companies must prioritize partners that can provide sustained value and solutions over an extended period.
- Geographic Scope. Depending on the nature of the business, marketers may need to consider the geographic locations of their target audience.
The Benefit of Having a Solid Understanding of Your Target Audience
Without a clear understanding of your target audience, you’re likely to waste a significant portion of your marketing budget.
And you know what that means? Having to go through the painful experience of sharing how low the marketing ROI was in your next boardroom meeting. Don’t let that happen to you!
Use the tips and tools below to share to identify the defining characteristics of your target audience. But before we get to those tips and tools, we have another question.
Do you know the difference between target audience and target market?
Some marketers don’t! Just in case, let’s clear up any confusion.
Target Audience vs Target Market
Remember: Your target audience is your company’s intended recipients of marketing messages.
Your target market refers to the overall group of potential customers — whether you are actively trying to reach them or not.
Knowing your target market is just as important as knowing your target audience. Applying insights from both is essential to marketing success.
Here’s a table to help you understand the key differences between target audience and target market, including definitions and strategic implications of each concept.
| Aspect | Target Audience | Target Market |
| Definition | The specific group of individuals or businesses that are intended recipients of marketing messages and product offerings. | The overall group of potential customers that you could conceivably serve. |
| Focus | Emphasis on individual characteristics, needs, and preferences to tailor marketing strategies. | Broad focus on the entire market segment, considering demographics, geography, and buying behavior. |
| Scope | Narrower, more specific segment within the target market. | Encompasses a larger and more general group that may include various segments. |
| Purpose | To create personalized and targeted campaigns that resonate with a distinct set of characteristics. | To identify and reach a broader customer base, often encompassing multiple target audiences. |
| Strategic Impact | Helps in crafting precise and compelling marketing messages, increasing engagement and conversion rates. | Enables the company to allocate resources efficiently, identifying overall market potential and trends. |
By aligning your efforts with both concepts, you can create impactful campaigns that resonate with specific audience segments while addressing the broader market landscape.
B2B Target Audience
This may seem like a no-brainer. But, before we move forward, it’s essential to know how B2B target audiences differ from B2C audiences.
B2C companies tend to define their target audience using the following characteristics:
- Demographics such as age, gender, income, and occupation are crucial as they directly influence consumer purchasing behavior and preferences.
- Psychographic factors — such as consumer values, beliefs, and attitudes — aid B2C marketers in creating emotionally appealing campaigns.
- Analysis of behavioral patterns, such as buying habits, brand loyalty, and response to promotions, is essential for effective B2C marketing strategies.
- Geographic location targeting is prominent in B2C marketing to consider regional preferences, climate influences, and cultural variations that impact consumer choices.
B2B companies may also use some of those same characteristics to define their target audience.
However, due to the complex nature of B2B transactions and the longer sales cycles involved, the characteristics must focus more on organizational needs and professional relationships.
For example, a typical B2B company will define its target audience using:
- Specific industries. Each industry has unique challenges and needs that their products or services can address.
- Business size. B2B companies tailor their offerings based on whether they target small startups, mid-sized enterprises, or large corporations.
- Decision-making structure. This includes identifying key decision-makers and influencers within the organization.
- Budget. Understanding potential clients’ financial capacity and constraints is essential for offering B2B solutions.
- Long-term value. B2B companies seek partners that can provide sustained value and solutions over an extended period.
Target Audience Analysis
Think back to the five words you used to describe your company’s target audience. Why did you choose those words? Where would you look if you wanted to back up your answers with data?
Here are the essential steps to conducting a data-driven target audience analysis.
Step 1 – Define your objectives
Clearly outline the objectives of your target audience analysis to set the foundation for the entire process.
It helps focus efforts and ensures that the collected data aligns with specific goals, whether it’s improving product messaging, refining marketing strategies, or expanding market reach.
For example, you might aim to identify key decision-makers in potential client organizations to tailor communication strategies and product offerings accordingly.
Step 2 – Conduct market research
Comprehensive market research lays the groundwork for informed decision-making, allowing you to align your strategies with your target audience’s specific needs and preferences.
It enables you to anticipate industry shifts, identify potential gaps in the market, and tailor your offerings to address the evolving demands of your target audience.
You can research your market using surveys, interviews, competitor analysis, and data mining methods.
These approaches help gather quantitative and qualitative data, providing a comprehensive view of market trends, customer behaviors, and competitive landscapes.
Explore online and offline channels for customer feedback and engage with industry reports to further develop a well-rounded understanding of your market dynamics.
Step 3 – Analyze existing customer data
Customer analysis can help refine your target audience profile and develop personalized marketing strategies that resonate with your existing clientele.
Examine demographic, firmographic, technographic, and psychographic data points to identify trends and patterns.
By examining demographic information — including age, gender, and location — you can identify patterns among your current customer base.
Step 4 – Refine customer segments
After analyzing existing customer data, refine your customer segments based on identified patterns and characteristics.
By doing so, you can create targeted marketing campaigns tailored to the unique requirements of each segment.
This strategic segmentation enhances the efficiency of your marketing efforts, ultimately driving engagement, conversions, and overall customer satisfaction.
Step 5 – Update buyer persona profiles
As you refine customer segments, adjust and enhance your buyer personas to accurately reflect each segment’s characteristics, preferences, and behaviors.
By keeping buyer personas current and aligned with the evolving understanding of your audience, you ensure marketing strategies remain effective and resonant.
Using 6sense for Target Audience Insights
For a more efficient and data-driven target audience analysis, consider using 6sense’s audience intelligence tools.
With 6sense, B2B marketers can harness the power of predictive analytics, machine learning, and intent data to gain unprecedented insights into their target audience.
By consolidating real-time data from various touchpoints, 6sense allows you to
- Track online behavior
- Predict buying intent, and
- Identify key decision-makers within prospect organizations.
Here are a few specific features and benefits of using 6sense’s tools to identify and target the right audience.
In-Market Buying Signals
6sense’s technology can help you discover accounts in your target audience that are in-market.
These insights come from online research activities that take place in what we call the Dark Funnel, because the activity is normally shrouded in anonymity. 6sense can tie this activity back to specific accounts.
For example, with 6sense, you might discover a prospect is in-market for your offer frequent visits to software review platforms, visiting pages with relevant keywords for your business.
Dynamic Account Segmentation
Dynamic account segmentation empowers marketers to finely categorize their target audience.
For example, you can segment accounts based on which are in-market for a solution, have achieved a particular lead qualification status, or have recently engaged with specific keywords or content.
Since you know which buyers are in-market and understand their online activities, 6sense empowers you to craft highly targeted and engaging campaigns that resonate with your target audience’s needs.
The best part is the automated nature of dynamic audience segments. When a prospect transitions into a target segment, they immediately start seeing ads and other campaign messages that fit their interests and buying stage.
And remember: B2B buying journeys are long and involve a lot of different decision makers. Buying teams’ research shifts as they begin to understand their needs and possible solutions. As their research evolves, they move in and out of segments. Thanks to dynamic segmentation, your advertising messages remain aligned with their evolving needs and interests.
It also means you’ll waste less of your marketing budget since your ads will target the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Conclusion
Understanding your target audience is critical for effectively reaching, engaging, and converting potential customers into long-term advocates for your brand.
We encourage you to follow the target audience analysis framework we provided in this guide to gain comprehensive insights into your audience and make informed decisions.
If you want to scale your business’s personalized marketing and sales campaigns, explore 6sense’s audience intelligence platform.
It can help you uncover hidden opportunities, enhance engagement, and drive meaningful interactions with your target audience. Want to see how?
