Target audience: how to find yours
Posts made for everyone are watched by no one in particular.
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The short answer
Your target audience is the specific group of people your content and marketing are made for: Who they are, what they want solved and where they spend their attention. It is narrower than your target market, which is everyone who could buy from you.
Updated
Market, audience, persona
Target market
Everyone who could buy: for example, people who want to get fit.
Target audience
The group a piece of content is made for: for example, parents who train at home in 20 minutes. One market holds several audiences.
Buyer persona
One fictional but research-based person who stands for an audience, with a name, a job, goals and objections. A tool for writing, not a different group.
Ideal customer profile
The B2B version, describing the kind of company that buys (size, industry, budget) rather than a person.
From everyone to one person
Illustration with an example audience. The dots are not data; they show each step getting narrower.
How to find yours in six steps
- 01
Start from your best customers
List the ten you would most like more of and note what they have in common. That is a better start than a guess about everyone.
- 02
Read their own words
Reviews, DMs, support emails and comments, yours and your competitors’. Copy the phrases they repeat.
- 03
Check your analytics
The audience view in each platform’s analytics shows where your followers are and when they are active. Compare it with who actually buys.
- 04
Look at who engages with competitors
The people commenting on similar accounts are the audience you are competing for, and their questions are free topic ideas.
- 05
Write it as one sentence
“We make [content] for [who] who want [outcome] but [obstacle].” For a real estate agent: first-time buyers in one city who want a home but think they cannot afford one.
- 06
Test it in your posts
Make a week of posts for that sentence. If the comments come from the people you described, keep it; if not, adjust one word at a time.
What to write down about them
Who they are
Life stage or job, location and language. Age and gender only if they really change what you say.
The problem
What they want solved, in their words, and what it costs them to leave it.
What they tried
The tools, people or habits they used before you, and why those fell short.
The words they use
Phrases from reviews, comments and messages. Your hooks should sound like them, not like your industry.
Where they watch
The platforms and the kinds of accounts they already follow.
What stops them
Price, time, trust or doubt. Each objection is a post waiting to be made.
Read next
Your questions, answered
Short answers to what people ask next.
The smallest group inside your target audience that is most likely to buy and come back: the people you would build the business around if you could only reach a few. Write your posts for them first; the wider audience follows.
It can draft one from your website and reviews, but check it against real customers. Percify reads your brand from your website and deals post ideas for the audience it finds there; you approve what fits.
The specific group of people your content and marketing are made for, described by who they are, what they want solved and where they spend their attention.
The target market is everyone who could buy. A target audience is the narrower group a piece of content or campaign is made for, and one market holds several audiences.
Yes, but each post should be made for one. A gym can speak to beginners on Monday and competitive athletes on Thursday, never to both in the same video.
Specific enough that you could name a real customer who fits it, and that a stranger in it would recognise themselves in your first line.
The audience is the group. A persona is one imagined, research-based person who stands for it, used to make writing for the group easier.
Percify reads the audiences your website speaks to as part of its brand read, and you can correct them. Every daily post idea is then written for those audiences, in your tone of voice. Your first brand read is free.