Target Audience: What It Is, Examples, and How to Create One Today

ByThiago Sgobero

You know that saying, “if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority,” that we often hear in the workplace? Well, when talking about a target audience, it’s important to keep in mind that “if everyone is my audience, then no one is my audience.” After all, no company is that broad or generalist.

That’s why understanding what and who your target audience is forms the foundation for planning your company’s next steps.

Beyond grasping this key concept, this article has an extra layer… we’ll dive deeper into target audience concepts for paid media.

This way, you’ll understand how to create campaigns for each stage of the funnel, how to define the right audience for each ad, and even get tips from our experts.

Without further ado, let’s explore what a target audience is, its importance, some examples, and how to apply this concept to paid media.

What is a Target Audience?

Target audience, target segment, or even target market refers to a specific group of consumers with common characteristics that a company aims at as potential customers.

“Oh, so I just need to look at the people following my company on social media to understand who my target audience is?” 💁

Not exactly, because defining a target audience is a bit more complex than just observation or intuition.

In reality, defining a target audience must be based on various research and analyses. It starts with market segmentation, which separates groups of people with similar profiles, always considering demographic and behavioral information.

Another important point in defining a target audience is understanding that each audience will be defined and analyzed based on the type of business. In other words, the data collected by B2B companies won’t be the same as those collected by B2C businesses—but we’ll cover that in more detail later. 😉

Why Define a Target Audience?

Remember what I said in the introduction about being too general?

Without a defined target audience, you’ll be talking to everyone and, at the same time, to no one—since your actions will lack personalization and direction. That means the chances of success are almost zero.

Put simply, defining a target audience offers several advantages, such as:

  • Creating more effective campaigns;
  • Speaking to the audience in a personalized way;
  • Taking advantage of the best opportunities;
  • Establishing a strong positioning;
  • Differentiating from competitors;
  • Avoiding wasted money on actions and audiences that won’t generate a return.

And for those who like data to back up arguments, here’s a study by Epsilon: 80% of consumers say they are more likely to buy from a brand that offers personalized interactions.

And that’s not all—the study also found that 90% of consumers have positive feedback about marketing personalization, yet 70% feel companies don’t implement these kinds of initiatives.

Types of Target Audience Segmentation

There are two main types of target audiences: B2B and B2C.

Within this division, there are further subdivisions based on the campaign, where it will be distributed, its objectives, and the brand’s overall goals.

And, of course, what regulations allow. For example, toy advertisements can only be run online, where by design, ads targeting minors aren’t permitted.

Throughout this article, we’ll explore these differences in detail. But for now, let’s focus on B2B and B2C, breaking down their main segmentation criteria.

Right after that, in the next section, you’ll see practical examples of these two audiences—plus two bonus ones.

Ready to dive in?

B2C Target Audience Segmentation Criteria

A B2C (business-to-consumer) target audience is defined by the need for brands in this sector to sell directly to the final customer without intermediaries.

This audience can be a bit harder to pinpoint than its B2B counterpart because it involves a much larger sample of people.

That’s why segmentation efforts are more extensive here. You need to go beyond age groups and lifestyle habits to truly understand what drives your audience to buy—and why they choose to buy from you.

To conduct this in-depth study, we have a great tool in our arsenal: segmentation criteria.

These will determine the key characteristics of your B2C target audience and serve as a guide for conducting thorough research.

Let’s explore them now:

Geographic Segmentation

This divides the market based on consumers’ locations—essentially, where the consumer is from.

The data varies from regional, national, and even international levels.

Criteria include: country, region, state, city, neighborhood, city size, type of area (rural or urban), residential vs. commercial, population density, and climate.

Demographic Segmentation

This segmentation is based on data such as age, gender, income, education level, marital status, family size, socioeconomic status, occupation, generation, religion, race, and nationality.

Psychographic Segmentation

This segmentation analyzes the audience’s values and personality traits, considering factors like: Lifestyle (healthy, minimalist, romantic, creative, activist, etc.); Personality (sociable, authoritative, conservative, etc.); Values, interests, and concerns.

Behavioral Segmentation

As the name suggests, this segmentation studies consumer behavior related to a product or service.

Factors include: User status; Usage intensity; Loyalty status; Purchase stage; Marketing responsiveness; Purchase frequency; Brand loyalty; Willingness to try new products; Price sensitivity.

B2B Target Audience Segmentation Criteria

The B2B (business-to-business) target audience also has its own segmentation criteria—some overlapping with B2C, but others entirely distinct.

The main difference, however, is that B2B is already a segmentation in itself—it assumes that the people you’re targeting work at a company.

Check out some of the key B2B segmentation criteria below:

Business Size

What size companies are you targeting?

This is crucial for defining a B2B target audience due to the concepts of commercial fit and ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)—which we’ll also cover in this article.

Every B2B company has a spectrum of ideal customers, ranging from the perfect fit to those they don’t want (or even reject).

Business size is a key factor in determining where a lead, or potential client, falls within this spectrum.

Industry/Niche

The industry or niche is a key factor for many B2B companies when defining their target audience—but not for all.

Some B2B companies offer products specifically designed for certain industries.

For example, companies that sell agricultural supplies must target businesses in the agribusiness sector.

However, some businesses don’t require this level of segmentation. Take our case, for example: for a company to buy our product, it only needs to have a website with decent traffic and work with lead generation.

Geographic Location

For companies dealing with physical products, the geographic location of their clients is an essential consideration.

Take the previous example of an agricultural supply company based in northeastern Brazil. It would likely incur a loss if it had to deliver products to a farm in the south of the country.

Other Specific Information

Finally, this last B2B segmentation criterion depends on each company’s specific operations and what they consider to be their ideal audience.

For example, in our case, since our software focuses on lead generation, our clients need to have website visitors—otherwise, they wouldn’t see any value in the tool.

These specific details are often the most critical buying motivators for a B2B target audience. Each company has its own, and much of defining a target audience comes down to uncovering what those factors are.

Target Audience: Some Examples

Didn’t I tell you that the definition of a target audience varies depending on the type of business? Well, here we will understand the differences and examples of audiences among B2B, B2C, and B2B2C companies.

Check it out!

Example of a Target Audience in B2B

Before talking about the target audience itself, let me briefly explain what a B2B company is.

We are talking about a business-to-business company, meaning a company that provides products and services to other businesses.

With this definition, it is clear that the target audience for this type of business is another company, not an individual.

In this example, we have a company that offers a marketing automation tool and has just arrived in Brazil, requiring a promotional campaign.

To do this, some characteristics of the target audience that might purchase from them were selected:

Brazilian micro and small businesses, with up to 100 employees and annual revenue of up to R$ 4 million, operating in the retail segment, with low maturity in marketing campaign management and distribution.

Example of a Target Audience in B2C

Jumping to B2C, let’s talk about the most common business model among us. After all, it refers to business-to-consumer, meaning the relationship between a company and the final consumer.

Within the B2C market, there are hundreds of segments, but the target audience example below refers to a remote education institution focused on digital marketing that is opening a new branch in São Paulo and needs to attract new students:

Men and women, aged 20 to 40, married or single, Brazilian, residing in São Paulo (capital), with a family income between R$10,000 and R$20,000, without the need for a college degree, creative, curious, and autonomous. They have a busy lifestyle, go out on weekends, work Monday to Friday, and want to innovate in their careers.

Example of a Target Audience in B2B2C

Finally, we have B2B2C businesses—business-to-business-to-consumer—which is the combination of B2B and B2C relationships.

This model focuses on transactions between companies aiming for a sale to the final customer.

An example is companies that offer delivery apps, such as iFood and Rappi. Their target audiences are:

People who want to order food online, either for personal consumption or to share with others. This audience is broader, including all age groups and social classes, but they must have internet access and know how to use smartphones. The other part of their audience consists of restaurants and establishments that want to expand their business and reach a larger audience through delivery apps. And, of course, we can’t forget the delivery drivers who use these platforms as a source of income.

Example of a Target Audience in the SaaS Segment

To wrap up, it’s always good to talk about the SaaS segment, which, despite also being B2B, B2C, or even B2B2C, is usually more focused on B2B.

This is because SaaS in other spheres, such as B2C, takes on entirely different forms and rarely resembles a platform that sells software as a service.

For example, iFood is an app that also serves the B2C audience, right? But what is being sold is not the software itself but mainly the service.

Its B2B side is related to the restaurants it serves.

Let’s think about the target audience of B2B software, mainly related to the corporate world. See the example below:

Our target audience works and consumes work-related content, often within their own company. It consists of men in leadership positions in sector X, earning between R$10,000 and R$25,000, depending on their seniority level. They are constantly looking for new tools to improve their work and are responsible for testing and purchasing these tools.

We have several articles about SaaS on our blog. Check out what we’ve discussed on the topic:

➡️ Is the SaaS Business Model Right for Your Company?

➡️ The SaaS Sales Process: Build, Scale, and Profit!

➡️ How to Do B2B SaaS Marketing? Complete Guide with 10 Examples

What Are the Types of Target Audience Segmentation?

Target audience segmentations have significant differences among them.

First, of course, there are differences in the different purposes of target audience research, which directly determines how this research is conducted and the information gathered.

In other words, there are different segmentations for different types of marketing.

Here are some different types of segmentation:

  • Target audience segmentation for Google Ads;
  • Target audience for Social Ads;
  • Segmentation for organic traffic;
  • Segmentation for e-commerce;
  • Segmentation for physical campaigns and guerrilla marketing.

The term “segmentation” itself, however, is closely related to online advertising.

This is because, in these cases, you are truly segmenting based on your target audience’s interests and habits.

In this type of ad, you literally access the platform and define your target audience based on their preferences.

In other words: you start with an audience the size of Brazil and then narrow it down based on your segmentations, immediately seeing the number of people who will be impacted by the ad.

Other types of segmentation are usually not as precise. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s now dive deeper into the main types:

ICP – Ideal Customer Profile

The ICP is a type of target audience entirely determined by the company. It is the Ideal Customer Profile, meaning the person the company most wants as a customer.

Here’s a simple example: a Latin American air conditioning manufacturer that only cools and does not heat.

This company needs to define its ICP, and of course, it will prefer Brazil and Paraguay over Patagonia. No one needs an air conditioner that only cools in a place where the average temperature rarely exceeds 20°C.

But there are much more subtle examples to analyze. A company that sells software to other companies, for example, will prefer those that already have some level of digital maturity.

A butcher shop has an ICP of non-vegan people. A video game store has an ICP of people who consider themselves gamers.

But here’s something interesting: the ICP is different from the target audience because it is not general. The video game company can very well run a campaign for a casual audience and people who have never played but want to start now.

So, even though the ICP determines a preferred customer type that will generate more sales, it does not mean that only people within the ICP will buy from the company or that they will be the only target audience for advertisements.

Persona

The persona is a creative exercise designed to give a face to a specific target audience or ICP.

For example: the target audience of a specific campaign is defined as a female audience, aged 25 to 35, working in advertising agencies in management or director positions.

The persona uses target audience research data to create a fictional character, making it easier to relate to than just a bunch of data.

In this case, the persona could be Maria Luiza, 28 years old. See:

Maria Luiza has always been a copywriter but is now managing her own writing team for the first time. She is afraid of making mistakes and is anxious about the team’s differing treatment.

She also plans to keep growing in the agency, with dreams of an executive position and choosing her own accounts.

Personas are entirely based on target audience research. They can only be created with data and are primarily a creative interpretation exercise, never the entire work.

Personas typically include:

  • Name;
  • Age;
  • Residence;
  • Job;
  • Main goals;
  • Main challenges;
  • How the brand helps overcome challenges and achieve goals.

Personas are also widely used alongside the Empathy Map, an old marketing technique that is still applied in digital marketing today.

Target Audience for Paid Media

The target audience for paid media is strictly formalized within the parameters of each platform.

However, it is also important to highlight that this target audience can change from campaign to campaign and from ad to ad.

For example, here at Leadster, we work with different audiences depending on the campaign being run. We have a B2B audience with ads focused on selling our products.

At the same time, we also have another B2B audience, but a different one: agency owners who want to form partnerships to attract more clients.

Notice how one is broader while the other is highly specific. It is quite common for target audiences in paid media to be diverse, depending on the goal and strategy of each campaign.

Normally, these target audiences are prototyped before research is conducted, which helps confirm some and eliminate others.

Conducting this research requires time and money. Therefore, marketing agencies and departments often create several hypotheses and formulate questions to test them.

The result is a strong alignment between the ICP—based on what the company considers ideal clients—and the data, ensuring a well-informed target audience that is also aligned with the brand’s business objectives.

Target Audience for Organic Traffic

The target audience for organic traffic is somewhat different from paid media.

By the way, just a side note: don’t worry, we will discuss these two audiences in more detail throughout the article, as each has its own explanatory section.

But moving on: the target audience for organic traffic needs to reflect the main difference between paid media and content marketing—what people find interesting to read.

This includes several factors: their main questions, the type of content they usually consume, their favorite social media platforms, their preferred YouTube channels, etc.

All of this, of course, falls within the broad profiles determined by the ICP and the general target audience research for ads.

After all, you don’t just want readers—you want people who are interested in your content and who also have a good chance of becoming customers.

Target Audience for Physical Campaigns

How do you determine the target audience for a campaign using sales promoters in supermarkets to demonstrate your brand’s products?

This aspect is often overlooked because it falls outside the scope of digital marketing. As a result, many marketing and trade marketing professionals rely on intuition and disregard data.

However, major companies do not leave this to chance. Based on their research, often conducted in the field, they create primary audience profiles that should be targeted.

These profiles inform all aspects of the campaigns, including:

  • Where they will be conducted;
  • The days and times they will take place;
  • Which people should receive a more detailed explanation of the product;
  • How the product will be presented;
  • Which products will receive more emphasis;
  • What the sales pitch will be;
  • The ideal profile of the sales promoter;

Among other details.

How to Define the Target Audience? 5 Steps to Get Started

  • What is a target audience? – Check ✅
  • Why define a target audience? – Check ✅
  • Examples – Check ✅
  • Target audience, persona, and ICP – Check ✅
  • Types of segmentation – Check ✅

Phew… the first part of our content is coming to an end, but before we wrap up, let’s go over five initial steps to help you define and understand your own target audience.

Let’s go:

1. Conduct Research on the Market and Current Landscape

The first step in defining your target audience is to thoroughly understand the market in which your company operates.

It is essential to learn about industry trends, opportunities, and challenges, as well as the competition.

Market research also helps you understand consumer needs, desires, and behaviors—essential information for defining your target audience.

In practice, if your company does not yet have a customer base, you can talk to family and friends who might be potential buyers to gain insights into their pain points, needs, and desires. Another option is to visit (either online or in person) similar local businesses to analyze their marketing strategies and see what is being done.

However, if you already have a customer base, you can send out a questionnaire via email or schedule calls with customers to conduct qualitative research.

Oh, and remember, you can always hire specialized research firms for this as well. 😉

2. Get to Know Your Brand Inside and Out

Completed your research and market analysis? Great! Now, become an expert on your own brand. 😉

Understand your values, mission, and vision, as well as what your company offers customers. Ask yourself, “What problem am I solving?”

By doing so, you can identify the characteristics that attract your ideal target audience and differentiate yourself from the competition.

🔎 Read also: Unique Selling Proposition: What It Is, Advantages, and How to Create One

3. Segment the Market

Now that you have a broad understanding of the market and the key characteristics of your business, it’s time to define the basis for segmenting your market.

Remember the types of segmentation we mentioned earlier? Now is the time to put them into practice. 😉

By doing this, you can focus on specific groups to better meet consumers’ needs and desires.

4. Choose the Ideal Segment for Your Business

We’re almost there!

Once you’ve segmented your market, it’s important to choose the segment—or multiple segments—that best fit your company and brand.

A good tip is to analyze the potential of each segment, along with the needs and desires of consumers within each group.

Remember, a single brand can cater to multiple segments, but it’s crucial to develop specific strategies for each one.

5. Define Your Positioning and Strategies

Finally, with your target audience defined, it’s time to establish your positioning and develop strategies.

This includes crafting a clear and cohesive message that resonates with your target audience, as well as determining the most effective marketing channels to reach them—always opting for the platforms they actually use, based on your research findings.

It’s also important to set marketing objectives and regularly track them.

How to Conduct Target Audience Research in Practice

The first point we discussed earlier was the need to conduct target audience research. But how is this research actually done?

Well, there are a few different ways to go about it. First, there is in-person research, which can be quite expensive but delivers excellent results.

This type of research is a favorite among large B2C companies, and if you spend enough time downtown, you’ll likely come across someone with a tablet ready to take 30 minutes of your time.

There’s also online research, conducted using simple questionnaires and broad distribution, along with benchmarking.

Let’s dive deeper into these two methods now. Follow along:

How to Conduct In-Person Research

In-person research is conducted through an agency specialized in this work.

This agency carries out the research itself but will need some information from you to create the briefing and develop the best questions and strategies.

Here, the process can vary: some companies simply provide the briefing, and the research agencies handle everything else, including crafting the questions, defining objectives, and formalizing results.

Other companies prefer a more hands-on approach, either formulating the questions themselves or holding brainstorming sessions to develop them collaboratively.

Below are the steps for conducting in-person research:

Objective

This is the first factor to consider when creating target audience research: What do I want to learn from it?

Am I trying to validate a hypothesis? Do I already have a target audience in mind and want to confirm if it truly represents reality?

Or do I have no idea who my target audience is? Or maybe I have one, but it’s so outdated that it’s no longer useful.

Perhaps I want to gather specific information, like: If my brand isn’t available, which brand does my target audience prefer?

All these questions help define the overall objective of the research, which serves as the foundation for creating your briefing and formulating questions.

Thesis

A quick digression here before we talk about the questions.

If you have a preliminary idea before conducting the research, it needs to be formalized into a thesis.

A thesis is nothing more than a set of data, information, and arguments that will provide a stronger foundation for this idea.

The more data you have and present, the more effective the research will be in proving or disproving your initial idea.

For example: you believe that your preferred target audience consists of people over 40 years old.

Your thesis will then need to contain the reasons leading you to this conclusion: sales numbers for that age group, for instance.

Questions

And finally, we come to the questions. They are based on the objective and the thesis and serve as the primary way to truly understand your audience.

When questions are created by a research agency, they follow a series of tested and proven techniques developed by that agency.

If you decide to create your own questions, it is always a good idea to research their main components and understand how to relate them to your main objective.

How to Conduct Online Research

Online research follows the same key components: objective, thesis, and questions.

However, instead of field research, it utilizes much simpler resources and allows for greater democratization of responses.

With this method, you can receive thousands of responses while spending little to no money.

The downside is that the preparation work for questions, objectives, and the thesis tends to be much greater, as you do not have the support of a dedicated and experienced research team.

Another point to consider is that online surveys often include many false responses, especially when you offer something in return, such as a discount coupon or even a small payment.

Here are the main resources and techniques:

Forms

The vast majority of online surveys today are conducted through Google Forms.

These forms are free and allow you to include as many questions as you want, but be careful: since the approach is not in person, users may drop out halfway through if the volume is too high.

Online surveys should be short. Set a limit of up to 10 minutes for completion, and consider that even this duration might be too long for some respondents.

Benchmarking

Another way to conduct research at no cost is through competitor benchmarking.

You can, for example, spy on competitors using Facebook’s Ad Library to understand their advertisements and target audiences.

You can also visit competitors’ websites to analyze their copy, blog content, and other materials to understand whom they are targeting.

We have an entire article on this topic here on the blog. Dive deeper below:

Target Audience and Paid Media: Mapping Your Campaigns According to the Funnel Stage

The first part of the article flew by, and you barely noticed! 🦫

Now, let’s focus on target audiences and paid media, so you can become an expert in planning and executing your campaigns.

To start, let’s understand how to map your campaigns according to the funnel stage.

Besides considering personas and ICP as a foundation for building different target audiences in media campaigns, it is also important to account for the different funnel stages.

Before diving into audience segmentation, let’s first discuss the most commonly used types of ads in each conversion stage.

For each stage of purchase maturity, different objectives, campaigns, and often creative strategies need to be designed to achieve the desired results.

Here are the funnel stages and their characteristics concerning ads:

Top of Funnel Campaigns

The goal of the top of the sales funnel is to attract and generate qualified traffic.

At this initial stage, the consumer is not yet considering a purchase.

They encounter your ad in the same way someone comes across a billboard on the side of the road.

(Well… not exactly the same way, since you will create a specific audience segmentation for this ad.)

Regardless, this means the user does not yet perceive a specific problem or show much interest in doing business with you.

Therefore, the company’s mission in top-of-funnel campaigns is mainly to ensure new consumers engage with the brand by promoting content that is interesting, attractive, and useful to users.

You can use top-of-funnel campaigns to promote materials such as:

  • Blog posts;
  • Social media posts;
  • Brand YouTube videos;
  • Brand-produced podcasts relevant to the audience;
  • Among others.

Here, marketing and communication focus on visibility, reach, and impressions.

This is the time to capture visitors’ attention and provide educational content through campaigns focused on reach and frequency.

There’s no point in creating only top-of-funnel campaigns and expecting them to generate sales. However, this type plays an essential role in driving traffic to your website.

Middle of Funnel Campaigns

The goal of middle-of-funnel campaigns is to acquire and nurture new leads.

With a better understanding and recognition of the problem, consumers in this stage are actively looking for answers to specific questions (since they now know what to search for).

At this point, the brand begins emphasizing the need for a solution.

Users are directed to specific actions, such as conversions on landing pages, form submissions, chatbot interactions, and more.

For this, you can offer materials such as:

  • E-books;
  • Research reports;
  • Webinars;
  • Free courses;
  • Trial lessons;
  • Product demonstrations;
  • Free trials;
  • Among other value-generating resources.

The goal in this stage is to build a lead base that can be nurtured through a follow-up sequence or a direct sales approach.

Bottom of Funnel Campaigns

Bottom-of-funnel campaigns aim to drive sales.

At this stage, the consumer knows what they want and even the specific product or service features they are looking for.

Now, they are seeking the best option for their purchase, and your brand needs to position itself as the best solution.

No blog posts or e-books here. Bottom-of-funnel ads are much more direct, leading users straight to the purchase decision.

In addition to ads focused on sales, launches, and promotions, remarketing strategies also come into play at this stage.

Monetization, Retention, and Branding Campaigns

The fourth and final type of campaign is aimed at users who are already customers or have previously purchased from the brand.

The main objectives of this type of campaign include increasing customer lifetime value (LTV), reducing churn, reactivating a lead base, and establishing a consistent and positive brand image, turning customers into brand advocates who will refer friends, colleagues, and family.

This type of campaign may include referral programs, loyalty initiatives, bundled purchase incentives, and more.

The best digital advertising strategy is one that is structured to cover all stages of the sales funnel, optimizing the entire journey from traffic generation to final conversion.

Campaigns with clear, simple objectives aligned with the funnel will achieve better results.

Intention, Interest, and Demographics

Alright, back to the target audience…

In addition to considering the stages of the sales funnel when segmenting your ads, it’s important to understand that paid media channels serve different purposes and deliver different results.

When creating an ad campaign on Google or other search platforms, for example, you will be leveraging keywords and the user’s intent behind searching for them, along with some demographic data and interests to refine your targeting approach.

On the other hand, when running campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you will be working with a different dynamic, where you can define specific audience segments based on demographic data (such as location, socioeconomic status, gender, age group, characteristics, and consumption habits) and interests.

This makes a big difference in how you segment your audience. In the first case, even if you don’t have all the demographic details of the user who will be impacted (for instance, if they are logged out or browsing in incognito mode), you already know they have shown purchase intent, meaning they are at a more advanced stage of the funnel.

On social media, however, users are not browsing with a clear purchase intent. Instead, their online behavior (likes, views, followed profiles, etc.) and the data they provide on these platforms (such as location, age, gender, job title, education, etc.) help define…

How to Define the Right Target Audience for Your Ads

Now we reach the key question: How do you define the right target audience for your ads across different paid media channels?

Next, we’ll explore some of the main channels: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.

Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the largest online paid media platforms today.

Together, they account for 58% of the total investment in the digital advertising market.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn Ads is particularly relevant for B2B companies looking to connect with professionals from other businesses.

Across all these platforms, audience segmentation can be done with two main objectives in mind:

  • Prospecting – To acquire traffic, generate new leads, and drive sales.
  • Awareness – To promote the visibility of a brand, product, or service.
  • Retargeting – To reach users who have previously interacted with your brand.

Audience Segmentation in Google Ads

In Google Ads, the first step in creating your campaigns is selecting keywords that align with your objective and then classifying them based on user intent.

Remember our discussion about funnel stages?

That will come in handy here.

Let’s consider the behavior of a user interested in lead generation, a highly relevant keyword for Leadster’s audience.

Depending on the buyer’s journey stage, their search behavior will vary. Here are some examples:

  • Top of the Funnel (Traffic): lead generation, generate leads, what are leads
  • Middle of the Funnel (Leads): how to generate more leads, tips for lead generation
  • Bottom of the Funnel (Sales): lead generation tool, lead generation platform
  • Monetization, Retention, and Branding: Leadster, Leadster login

With just this example, you already have multiple directions to choose from! Select the most suitable keywords for the objective you want to achieve.

Besides this intent-based segmentation, Google Ads also allows you to add audience targeting at the ad group or campaign level.

Here are some audience segmentation options for search campaigns:

Beyond search campaigns, Google Ads also enables campaigns on the Display Network (Google partner sites), Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll cover these formats in another article soon.

Meanwhile, if you want to dive deeper into this topic, check out all the audience targeting options on the Google Ads support page.

Basic and Custom Audiences in Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads covers paid media campaigns displayed on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network (similar to Google’s Display Network).

There are three main audience segmentation profiles you can use to ensure your message reaches the right audience:

  • Basic Audiences: Defined based on demographic criteria (such as age, gender, location, and language), interests (activities, liked pages, etc.), and behavior (e.g., people who made a purchase in the last month, frequent travelers).
  • Custom Audiences: These segmentations restrict campaigns to users who have already interacted with your business. You can display campaigns to people who visited a specific page on your website, your contact lists, your page followers, your app users, etc.
  • Lookalike Audiences: Automatically created by Facebook to include users with profiles, interests, and consumption habits similar to one of your contact lists or existing basic or custom audiences.

Check out all the details of audience segmentation in Facebook Ads here.

Ad Targeting in LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn also has its own advertising platform, displaying ads across the network.

LinkedIn Ads is the right choice for businesses looking to target a B2B audience, as it allows segmentation based on criteria such as job role, title, experience level, industry, and company size.

Additionally, you can create a Matched Audience to retarget visitors to your website, import contact lists, or target specific company profiles for an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy.

This feature is similar to Facebook Ads’ Custom Audiences.

You can also expand your audience to create Lookalike Audiences with similar characteristics (just like in Facebook Ads).

All information on LinkedIn Ads targeting is compiled here.

Target Audience and Organic Traffic: How to Define It?

We’ve talked a lot about paid media and how to define your target audience, but we also need to discuss organic traffic.

This is important because organic traffic delivers results over a much longer time frame.

Typically, the first results from organic traffic begin appearing after a few months of work—usually between three and six months.

However, the strategy gains real momentum over the years. Organic traffic is like a fine whiskey: the older it gets, the better it becomes.

For this reason, a well-defined target audience from the start is absolutely essential.

You don’t want to rewrite everything you’ve done over the past five years just because you realized too late that you were talking to the wrong audience, right?

Here are the main components of a target audience strategy for organic traffic. This applies to non-ad content, such as blog articles for lead generation, social media, and YouTube:

Intentionality

What do people typically consume in your industry? This determines what you should talk about on broad-reaching platforms like social media.

What do people search for on Google about your industry? This determines the keywords you need to target in your blog articles and YouTube videos.

Intentionality relates to how and why people consume your content. Your content must align with their expectations to ensure it is useful and engaging.

For blog and YouTube content, this is achieved through keyword research. More on that now:

Keyword Database

Keywords are the terms people use to search for specific topics.

This article, for example, has “target audience” as its primary keyword. Our goal is for this article to rank first on Google whenever someone searches for this topic.

This also applies to YouTube, which uses similar algorithms to deliver video results.

Intentionality plays a big role here. Conducting keyword research will help you understand why someone is searching for a particular topic, allowing you to create better content for your brand.

We have two articles on this topic. Check them out below:

➡️ Content Marketing in 2023: What’s Changing and Best Strategies
➡️ Keyword Research for Generating Results

How to Conduct Target Audience Research by Spying on Your Competitors’ Meta Ads

Target audience research can take different approaches than what you might be used to.

A great example is Meta Ads. You can use them to understand exactly what your competitors are doing and who they are targeting with their ads.

Unfortunately, you can’t see all the audience settings your competitors have chosen for their ads.

And believe it or not, that’s a good thing. You can’t see other brands’ data, but they can’t see yours either.

Your task is more about investigation. Depending on the ad, you can infer the target audience just by looking at the creative.

For example, check out this ad below, extracted from our “Top 100 B2B Ads” guide:

By the copy itself, it’s clear that this is an ad aimed at other businesses, and more than that: businesses that haven’t worked with online ads yet.

If you’re an agency, for example, and you see an ad like this on Facebook Ads, you immediately understand that your competitor offers this kind of service well enough to be part of an ad strategy.

See below how you can conduct this research and what kind of information you can extract:

How to Access the Facebook Ads Library?

Accessing the Facebook Ads Library is quite simple. The easiest way is to use the direct link, which is open to everyone. You don’t need an account to access it.

Then, just use the search box that the page offers. See a screenshot below:

Simply set the filters, enter the name of your competitor or the brand you’re studying in the field provided, and voilà: you can start your research.

Here’s an example from Leadster, featured in our deeper article on research in the Ads Library:

Notice how not all ads appear, only those that are currently running at the time of your search.

It’s possible to do historical ad research, but only in specific cases, such as social campaigns and election-related campaigns.

You can also access the ads directly from the Facebook profile of the brand being analyzed.

Just click on the “Page Transparency” section, available in the profile under the top “About” menu. See below:

You can also do this directly on Instagram. Simply go to the profile you want to analyze and click “About This Account.” Then, click on “Active Ads.”

Important: as with everything our friend Zuckerberg offers, this view can be a little unstable. Some profiles have it, others don’t.

Try the other methods if this direct Instagram option doesn’t work. And remember: the Ads Library also shows Instagram ads!

But let’s dive a little deeper into what information you can find in these searches?

What Information does the Ads Library Provide?

The Ads Library allows you to find a variety of information.

However, it’s somewhat limited for more in-depth strategies. For example, you can’t know exactly how much the brand spent on each ad.

The information provided by the Ads Library includes:

  • Different versions of the ad;
  • Ad start date;
  • Placement location (Facebook or Instagram);
  • Number of impressions;
  • Linked landing pages;
  • Creatives;
  • Post captions;
  • CTA;
  • Channels and placements.

🤿 Dive deeper: 11 Examples of Facebook Ads — How to Choose the Best

How to Spy on your Competitors on LinkedIn Ads

Unfortunately, LinkedIn Ads doesn’t offer a large Ads Library where you can search and find different brands.

What it does offer is the ability to see active ads from each brand directly on their profile.

It’s quite simple to do. You just need to access the brand’s page to be analyzed, click on “Posts,” and then on “Ads.”

See the screenshot below:

Simple, right? You can also track ads from your competitors or brands that inspire you through Google Ads. Here’s how it works:

How to Spy on your Competitors on Google Ads

For a long time, the only platforms allowing this type of research were LinkedIn and Meta Ads.

And investigating ads on these platforms is very important, but most truly strategic ads are on Google Ads.

That’s because Google Ads offers a much broader range of ad types, and much more control over them. Brands can advertise directly in search engines, on partner sites, on YouTube, and even in Android games.

And for audience targeting, researching in Google Ads is even better. Depending on the ad format and placement, you can get great insights into the audience it’s targeting.

🌍 Discover: What is Google Ads and How to Advertise on It

Conducting this search is absolutely simple. First, you need to enter the Google Ads Transparency Center through this link.

Then, simply enter the website of the brand being analyzed in the search bar, and voilà: the active ads, sorted by type and account, will be displayed.

These are the three methods you can use to find ads from your competitors and the brands you’ve been analyzing for your marketing and target audience benchmarks.

But now we need to address a topic we haven’t discussed yet in the article.

Let’s suppose you already have a well-defined target audience, but it needs some updates. How do you do that?

The process is similar to creating a target audience from scratch, but it comes with some specifics worth mentioning.

Follow me, as the topic now is this. Let’s go!

How to Update your Target Audience?

It’s always a great idea to periodically update your target audience.

First, because the market is always undergoing changes that can alter your audience.

The launch of a new product by a competitor, a successful TV campaign, or even the emergence of new work modalities in your field can increase or decrease the number of people who could benefit from your product or service.

A clear example of this: the launch of RD Station in 2012 expanded the target audience for digital marketing agencies.

Before, companies looking to automate digital marketing had to know a lot about the subject and use solutions from abroad, like HubSpot.

The launch of RD Station opened a new audience for many agencies: businesses that wanted to start doing marketing automation but never knew how.

That alone was enough to update the target audience. Suddenly, all the marketing efforts of these agencies needed to reflect this new profile.

The same can happen in any segment. New technologies are emerging all the time, so it’s always good to stay alert about your target audience.

But how do you update it? Is it as difficult as creating one from scratch? Sometimes yes, but other times, not so much.

Come with me, and let’s talk exclusively about this. And right after, we’ll talk about some tools that will help you with this work.

Creating a New Hypothesis

The first step is to try to understand what changed and look for a plausible justification for updating your target audience.

This is the famous: “Do I really need to update? And why?”

At this point, don’t forget the true meaning of the word hypothesis. You’re trying to understand if the update is truly necessary, not just looking for arguments to justify doing it or not.

This hypothesis can be justified by several factors. Let’s say you launched a new product. Could it be used by a different audience? Does it spark the interest of that audience? Do your competitors sell to them?

Or maybe the hypothesis is that a competitor is working on a new campaign. Could this campaign make the interest of an audience you haven’t reached yet become relevant?

All these questions need answers and data-driven justifications. More on that below:

Seeking Information from your Current Customers

Another point that indicates the need to update your target audience is the natural evolution it undergoes as your company grows.

Sometimes, your audience may have changed years ago, but your marketing is still working with the same one.

And here’s something interesting: you can even generate leads and sales with an outdated target audience. The issue is that you could be generating much more.

Try to understand your key customers today and see how they fit into the target audience you’re working with.

Are there differences? Where? Are they big or small?

Big differences are the ones that most indicate the need for an update. For example: your target audience indicates companies with up to 10 employees, but your biggest customers are multinational corporations.

See how, in this case, the update doesn’t need to be “targeting multinationals,” but rather “targeting mature companies with a well-defined marketing department.”

Validating the Thesis with Data and Building the Argument

I personally like to create dossiers. When I’m researching the viability of a hypothesis, I like to gather everything into one large document and prove my theories with the data I have available.

It’s simple to do and very insightful. You always learn more about your company.

Do the same. If you start investigating the need to update your target audience, gather evidence.

Include screenshots of your competitors’ campaigns and the sales CRM that shows how other audiences are interested in your brand and product.

Develop your argument with the help of these proofs. Before you know it, your hypothesis will already be validated and proven!

The next step is to present it:

Presenting to the Board

It’s always a good idea to present variations in the target audience to the board. This is because this decision will directly impact the company’s business objectives.

Think about it: a new general target audience implies a new target audience for Google Ads, for example.

And this new audience on Google Ads can either increase the value of your campaigns or reduce the number of leads you generate, even if the qualification becomes easier.

All of this needs to be presented to the board. It’s crucial that this work is done, or you might find yourself in a delicate situation.

But make a great presentation, showing all the points and evidence you’ve gathered.

Unfortunately, there’s not much room for guesses and changes that are not supported by data. Therefore, your presentation must convince on the first try, okay?

And after that, there’s just one last point:

Documenting Everything

Documentation is important for both the present and the future.

For the present, the creation of your updated personas will use all the evidence and proofs you’ve gathered to form a concise and identifiable story for the creatives in your marketing team.

And for the future, it will be important for the inevitable changes in your staff.

To make it easy for everyone to understand, there are some tools that make everything very organized and simple.

But that’s a topic for the next section. Let’s go?

The 8 Best Tools for Creating and Documenting Your Target Audience

There are some tools that will help you a lot to create and document your target audience.

And here, it doesn’t matter whether the audience is new or if you’re updating it. All the tools listed here work for both cases.

Some of them are free and extremely simple to use. Others are more complicated and paid, and may require a longer usage period.

But let’s talk more about the details of these tools throughout the items. Let’s go:

Google Forms for Surveys

Google Forms is the most basic tool for conducting marketing and target audience surveys.

With it, you create a series of easy-to-answer questions and generate a quick and reliable link for responses.

Those who don’t conduct in-depth marketing research, with phone calls and interviews, always choose Google Forms because of its ease.

You can use it to validate hypotheses, mainly. Define a hypothetical target audience and create questions related to your products or services offered.

Then, find ways to promote your form. Perhaps with pop-ups on your website and blog, offering some reward in exchange.

Or you could send it to your list of cold leads, those who didn’t score enough in your Lead Scoring system mainly due to being a poor fit for your target audience.

Google Keyword Planner for Keywords

Google Keyword Planner is a Google Ads feature, free without limitations for those who run ads regularly, and with some limitations for those who only have an account and don’t run ads.

Its function is to find keywords, the terms people are searching for most often on Google.

It is updated quarterly, semi-annually, and annually.

But what’s its role in keyword research? Simple: it shows the “real” interest in a specific term with numbers.

For example, you might be in a very niche market, and your keywords have relatively low search volumes.

But during your target audience research, you notice other keywords that could also be addressed for these new people — more services, new products, needs they have, etc.

This contributes to your argument. “Pivoting from X to Y, we could see a Z increase in organic and paid site traffic.”

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a Neil Patel Group website. It performs a very similar function to Google Trends but with a friendlier and more advanced presentation.

Basically, here’s how it works: you choose a term, and the tool presents the most common questions people ask about it on Google.

It also compiles metrics such as search volume and CPC value.

Answer the Public is interesting because it strategically expands your horizons when creating a new target audience.

You’re already familiar with your current audience, right? But what about this new one? Do you know what their doubts are or what topics they search for most? Probably not. That’s where Answer the Public comes in.

It’s especially valuable when you’re launching a new product, which will require a new target audience as well.

Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights is a free tool that lets you track information about people who follow your brand and interact with you in general.

It’s especially useful for cases where you’re conducting retroactive target audience research: looking at your customers, your follower base, and their interactions.

With Facebook Audience Insights, you can see real data on the composition of the people who follow you.

This can either confirm your hypotheses or completely discard them, so go with an open mind!

Important: Audience Insights only works for active Facebook or Instagram accounts.

SemRush

SemRush functions similarly to Google Keyword Planner for keyword research, but it goes much further than that.

What SemRush provides is competitor research. You can find information such as the volume of traffic other sites are getting, their main indexed keywords, the composition of their audience, and more.

It’s invaluable for conducting in-depth benchmarks, helping you understand how exactly your competitors’ target audience reflects in their marketing actions, especially for SEO and organic traffic.

Google Trends

Google Trends is also a great tool to understand what’s happening in the market and with a particular target audience.

It shows growth and decline variations for specific keywords over a given time period.

It’s not as precise as Keyword Planner, offering numbers within a range rather than actual numbers.

However, it’s more sensitive to momentary changes. You can see data from one day to the next, something that KWP doesn’t allow.

Notion

Notion is a great tool for internal documentation.

With it, you can create interactive documents with all the features you need since it’s a highly customizable app, even offering a library of templates to help you start writing without many hurdles.

Notion is paid, but it has a free version that allows for a limited number of words and users.

5 Tips from Leadster Experts for Targeting Your Ad Audiences

While you were learning all about target audience segmentation within the 3 main paid media channels, we invited our expert team to share some valuable tips on the subject…

Before we get into them, it’s also worth mentioning that HubSpot offers an online, free course that teaches how to build a paid media strategy from scratch. It could be a great option for beginners! (Oh, and the course is in English, okay?)

Ready for our tips?

1. Spy on Your Competitors 👀

Monitoring what your competitors are doing is a way to learn good practices and references, as well as to identify what should be avoided.

You can also discover how your competitors are communicating with the audience that interests you (tone, arguments, creatives, etc.).

Research what and how your direct and indirect competitors are advertising in paid media.

And don’t just focus on the ads themselves. Pay attention to the channels they use, their ad landing pages, how their copy reads, what types of offers they have…

An extra tip is to observe the comments on your competitors’ ads to gain insights into opportunities they haven’t yet covered, but which the target audience is looking for.

There are two tools that I really like to see what competitors are doing in the media… one of them is the Facebook Ads Library, where you can search for all the ads running on Facebook and Instagram, and the other is the Semrush Advertising Research, where you can learn more about your competitors’ search ads.
 Gustavo Luby, CMO of Leadster

2. Use the Data that is Already Available

If you still need to find out who your ideal customer is to base your personas and help better segment the audiences for each campaign, using available data can be a great solution.

Here, we’re not only referring to the data your own company holds about sales and leads (such as customer and prospect lists), but also to market data and information from your industry segment.

This way, you can identify interests, habits, and patterns among users that will help shape your audiences.

Your sales team has a lot of knowledge to identify who the best customers are. Using this knowledge to apply to your campaign targeting and ad copy can be a great idea.
 Gustavo Luby, CMO of Leadster

The Customer Success team can also help a lot, especially with common questions about the product or service and by pointing out which part of the tool customers show more interest in. Maybe it’s worth covering these points in your landing pages and ads.
 Marco Nasguewitz, Media and Performance Analyst

3. Define who your Target Audience is NOT

Also known as negative audience, this segmentation will include those users who are not likely to close a deal with your brand.

Use criteria such as location, purchasing power, and consumption habits to also understand who wouldn’t buy your solution.

This way, you can exclude this audience from your paid media efforts and optimize your investments.

4. Do Remarketing and Retargeting with Google and Facebook Ads

Another interesting strategy to apply in this context is remarketing/retargeting (two terms for the same concept).

This strategy consists of directing ads to those who have already visited your website or had some interaction related to your brand.

To do this, ensure that pixels are installed on your pages, as without them, these types of campaigns are not possible.

Tracking pixels are tools provided by Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn that can be installed on your site.

They allow you to gather information about your visitors—and they are the ones that enable the development of remarketing and retargeting campaigns.

Remarketing audiences are among the most qualified you have because they are people who have already interacted with your brand. Additionally, remarketing costs are usually much lower than prospecting campaigns.
 Gustavo Luby, CMO of Leadster

It’s also important to exclude certain audiences when creating a remarketing campaign, to avoid targeting people who are already customers of your company or have already completed the desired conversion action. This way, you only spend on leads that actually have a chance of converting.
 Marco Nasguewitz, Media and Performance Analyst

5. Add a Chatbot to your Strategy

Chatbots are systems that generate automated conversations with consumers through pre-defined texts and interactions.

The tool simulates human service within a context that the consumer is already familiar with: instant messaging.

A chatbot can be added to your paid media strategy to interact with visitors to your website or conversion pages, helping qualify leads from the very first moment.

This helps identify whether the traffic directed to your site is truly within your desired target audience, revealing your best paid media channels, bringing new possibilities for retargeting campaigns, and, in the process, contributing to increased conversions.

So, did you like that last part with the tips from our experts?

By the way, the entire article was created with the help of our experts. But we left this part for the end so they could share more practical and less theoretical issues with us.

I hope the result was ideal for you. If you have any further doubts, just let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading!

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