Have you ever found yourself scrolling on a food delivery app, endlessly flicking past pizza, sushi, Thai, and fast food options? Eventually, you make your way back up to the top of the scroll, and that’s when you notice the “Recommended for You” section: a curated list of all the places the app’s algorithm thinks you’ll be interested in.
You are that group of restaurants’ intended audience, or the person they’ve been trying to find. Based on your eating history and what you’ve been clicking on, the app has decided these are the places for you. And you can do the same thing for your business. This is all you need to know about finding your intended audience (so you can get back to ordering dinner).
Table of contents
What is an intended audience?
An intended audience refers to the people most likely to be interested in your product or service. They’re the people who are right on the brink of saying yes. In an ideal world, everyone is your audience; everyone is interested in buying your products or services. In the real world, however, there’s a certain segment of potential customers most likely to engage with your brand who are most deserving of your marketing resources. That’s your intended audience.
Intended audience vs. target audience: What’s the difference?
An intended audience is a smaller subset of the target audience. It’s a small but important distinction, because it will allow you to effectively find your highest-intent, ideal customers among your broader target audiences.
Continuing with the food delivery example, imagine you’re on a delivery app looking for lunch. As someone who is hungry and looking for food, you are already the target audience. The “Recommend for You” section is where you become the intended audience: a smaller subset of the target audience who, thanks to segmentation, geographic location, and other factors, is most likely to hit Add to Cart.
8 ways to find your intended audience
- Get to know your current audience
- Create audience personas
- Conduct market research
- Use social media
- Leverage online communities
- Explore niche markets
- Look at industry trends
- Use analytics platforms
There are several ways to find your intended audience, and chances are you’ll end up using more than one of these strategies:
1. Get to know your current audience
Whether you’ve been in business for 10 years or 10 days, if you’ve had even a few customers, you’re already on your way to finding your true intended audience. Through segmentation and data analysis, you can better understand your current customers’ behaviors, which can help you find more potential customers like them.
Research the average age, education level, geographic location, and other defining characteristics of your existing audience to create marketing strategies and marketing campaignstargeted at more people like them.
2. Create audience personas
Once you know your current audience, you can start the fun work of creatingaudiencepersonas. Audience personas, sometimes called buyer personas, are fictional biographies created using data you have about current customers. These personas can help you createmarketing strategies you can use to identify your intended audience. Having even a rough sense of background information and interests, and knowing the different ways your customersidentify, can help marketing teamscreate dynamic campaigns to connect with your intended audience in the real world.
3. Conduct market research
Once you know your current customers, it’s time to turn your eyes toward potential customers and transition from looking inward to looking outward at the general public. Market research may include conducting surveys and focus groups or analyzing industry trends—anything that helps you understand who and where your potential audience may be. Market research is also an opportunity to look at competitors, analyze what else is happening in your space, and hone marketing efforts to your intended audience. Use Shopify’s free market research template to get started.
4. Use social media
When done intentionally, engaging with social media followers can give you first-hand knowledge and contact with potential customers. When done well, social media can be a strategy for turning a target audience into an intended audience.
To find your intended audience via your social media marketing strategy, keep tabs on the types of people who engage with your posts the most. Post regularly so you have more performance data to observe. Once you do have an audience to analyze, use the social media platforms’ built-in analytics tools (like Instagram Insights) to understand your engaged audience’s age, gender, geographic location, and interests.
5. Leverage online communities
Of course, there is an online world beyond social media, and understanding how to tap into that world can help you build trust and relationships with your intended audience. Reddit groups, online forums, and local community networks offer opportunities to speak directly with and learn from a specific audienceinterested in your industry. This is also a great way to build a relationship with your ideal customers and help them trust your business.
As Nadya Okamoto, founder of the menstrual product brand August, says on an episode of Shopify Masters, “I think that the most important thing we did prelaunch was just a lot of community conversations and being really flexible with our timing. … Our launch date and our initial product order got pushed back numerous times. And I think that that’s something that we were really flexible on because it was in service of better understanding our community. We were talking to thousands of people to understand the vision for menstrual equity, better period care, and more transparent period care.”
6. Explore niche markets
Sure, looking at a general audience will allow you to cast the widest net, but, as we all know, quantity doesn’t always translate to quality. Looking into niche markets can help you see pain points within the market and identify an ideal audience looking for solutions your business can provide. Rather than asking marketing teams to talk to everyone, understanding how to talk to a specific target market or target group can yield an untapped intended audience.
Visit trade shows, networking events, or virtual mixers to speak directly with niche audiences within your industry.
7. Look at industry trends
Pizza has always been pizza, but the way pizza has been marketed has changed over time. Staying on top of industry trends allows you to follow your intended audience and shape marketing efforts and marketing campaigns without needing to pivot your business strategy. This might involve looking at competitors, developing a new content strategy, or reimagining the ways your specific product or service serves your intended audience.
To stay up to date, sign up for newsletters that cover timely news. If you run an ecommerce store, for example, follow Shopify’s enterprise blog for the latest industry insights and trends.
8. Use analytics platforms
If your business uses a website or social media platform, there are a lot of free digital analytics tools that can help you hone in on your intended audience and connect with them more effectively. For example, with Google Analytics, you can understand how people navigate to your site and what parts of your website they’re engaging with most regularly. This is helpful because you can focusmarketing efforts on the places they’re coming from to find similar audiences.
Intended audience FAQ
What is an example of an intended audience?
Imagine a company handing out free chip samples at a grocery store. Everyone in the grocery store is that business’s target audience; however, the people who approach the sample booth are the business’s intended audience because they are interested specifically in the brand’s products.
How do you know who your intended audience is?
Knowing your intended audience involves a combination of research, analysis, and ongoing observation. Looking at your current customers and social media followers, speaking to your audience directly through focus groups and surveys, and joining relevant online forums are all excellent options for finding your intended audience.
Why is it important to know your intended audience?
Knowing your intended audience is essential to a business’s longevity. People move, needs change, and customers grow in and out of their desire for certain products and services. It’s important to think of your intended audience not as individual customers but as a group of customers that share traits, demographics, and needs that your business can cater to.
