Target Audience Template

About the Target Audience Template

Understanding your target audience allows you to market to them effectively. You know how they behave, what they’re looking for, and how to reach them. This gives you a much better chance of success. Without this information, you’re taking a stab in the dark.

With this target audience template, you can visualize who you’re trying to target. You’re able to outline their demographics, location, psychographics, identifiers, and more!

What is a target audience?

Your target audience is the group of people who might be interested in your product or services. This group of potential customers will often share similar traits. For example, they might be around the same age or have similar disposable income.

Finding your target market is an essential step in creating effective marketing strategies, planning marketing activities, and making informed decisions. Without knowing who your ideal customer is, you’ll struggle to target them effectively. As a result, business growth can take a hit.

How to use the target audience template

Miro's target audience template helps you understand your potential customers. Using the different columns, you can add essential information about your audience. As a result, you can picture who they are, what they want, and how they behave.

Here are the five steps you can follow to identify your intended audience using Miro’s template:

Step 1: Collect demographic data

Demographics are a set of criteria you can use to describe audience segments. Some demographics include age, gender, income, education level, marital status, and occupation. You can also use tools like Facebook Audience Insights, Google Trends, and Google Analytics to help you parse demographic data that you can then put into the template.

You can even base this on your current customers to give you a solid foundation. Add all this information to your template to get a better idea of your audience’s background.

Step 2: Collect location data

Defining your audience by location allows you to target those areas specifically. Even if your business is international, you can narrow down your audience by location to target them effectively with the right marketing messages.

Pinpoint your intended audience by neighborhood, city, state, country, or region. Resources like Facebook Audience Insights, MyBestSegments, Google Trends, and Google Analytics might be helpful here.

If you have audiences in different locations, you may want to use separate templates. Why? Because people from various locations might have different expectations of your business. You’ll need to market to them differently, so it’s helpful to have a separate overview for each location.

Step 3: Collect psychographic data

Psychographics are the attitudes, opinions, interests, and activities of your potential customers. For example, you might be interested in targeting gaming enthusiasts, outdoor climbers, toy collectors, or foodies.

Psychographic data is powerful because it can be so granular. For instance, with gaming enthusiasts, you can target customers who prefer board games developed by independent creators. This level of data allows you to drill down into the details of those who are interested in your product or service.

Psychographics can be a bit harder to measure than demographics and location data. To collect this data, you might need to perform a survey and get feedback directly from consumers. If a survey isn’t possible, you can use Facebook Audience Insights to filter audiences by their interests or opinions.

Step 4: Pick 2 to 5 identifiers

Now that you have all this data, it’s time to narrow it down with identifiers. Identifiers are any additional pieces of information that give you more insight into your audience.

When it comes to identifiers, it can be hard to limit how many you use. There can be hundreds of identifiers for one target market, so we’d suggest limiting yourself to two to five identifiers. But why only pick two to five when you have so much to work with?

If you only pick one, your audience will be so massive that it might as well stand in for the public. If you pick all of them, your audience will be so narrow that it’ll be too small to work with.

Step 5: Test your audience

At this point in the process, you’ve got a pretty clear picture of your target demographic. Now, you can test your audience. There are two ways you can approach this:

• Speak to your target markets directly. Spend some time talking to people that fit your target market to see what they think of your product or service. For example, if you’re marketing a dating app, you might go to a college campus and show students prototypes of the app. Ask whether they’ve used a similar service, see if they have any criticisms, and record their opinions. If they seem enthusiastic, you’re on the right track.

• Speak to your audience online. If it’s difficult to approach your target markets on the ground, you can turn to online tools to achieve the same effect. Subreddits, Facebook groups, and message boards are good sources of data.

When you’ve tested your audience, return to the template and make any adjustments. Slice the data in new ways and perform experiments to get closer to your ideal target demographic.

When to use the target audience template

Identifying your ideal customer is helpful for any business. But when exactly should you use the target audience template?

To find out who’s interested in your product/service

Use the target audience template to understand who’s interested in your products or services. Add all relevant research and information to the template, as well as other important artifacts so you always keep your audience top of mind.

To run multiple projects at once

The target audience template is especially beneficial when running multiple marketing campaigns or juggling several projects at once. It allows you to stay organized, sustain momentum, and keep your teams aligned while keeping the potential customer at the forefront of your marketing efforts.

To focus on specific demographics

In some situations, you might want to focus on specific demographics like age and gender. In other cases, you might be interested in psychographics like interests and opinions. The target audience template allows you to switch between the two. It’s also fully customizable, so you can tailor it to suit your needs.

To launch a new product

The template is particularly useful if you’re launching a new product. It allows you to figure out who you should be targeting and what they’re looking for in a new product.

What are examples of target customers?

To better understand this methodology, here are some target audience examples:

1. Men’s Wearhouse

Men’s Wearhouse isn’t only targeting men looking for formal attire, but also the wives and girlfriends who might encourage or influence where their partner shops. By understanding the broader target segment, they can market to all possible customers.

2. McDonald’s marketing campaigns

A company can have different market segments for different marketing campaigns. For example, McDonald’s might have two different campaigns marketing their breakfast menu. One is marketed towards white-collar workers looking for a way to save time on breakfast before work. The other is marketed towards lower-income workers looking for a hot meal to eat at a job site.

3. Injury Attorney law firm

A law firm specializing in personal injury will target injured individuals or people that work in fields where injuries are common. Their goal is to make sure that these people know about their services.

What are the 6 categories of a target audience?

Typically speaking, there are six main categories of a target audience which can be filled in on the template:

• Demographics: this includes age, gender, education, income levels, and more.

• Geographic: this focuses on the location of the audience.

• Psychographic: the psychological characteristics of your customers include their interests, lifestyle choices, and desires.

• Behavioral traits: this outlines how your target consumers behave when shopping online.

• Needs-based: this shows the needs consumers have and how it informs their buying behavior.

• Transactional: this type of customer focuses solely on the purchase they’re making. They’ve probably done a lot of research beforehand.

Miro’s target audience template has four categories — demographics, location, psychographics, and identifiers. The template is customizable, so you can amend the headings to feature other categories and additional columns you may need.