How to find and describe your target audience (with examples)

A target audience is the specific group of people most likely to buy your product or service, defined by shared demographics, behaviours, and attitudes. It answers the question: who are we trying to reach with this campaign?

A well-defined target audience is critical to the success of your next marketing campaign. If your objectives define what you want to achieve with your campaign, your target audience defines who you need to communicate to in order to achieve it.

The following guide lays out what a target audience is, how to find them and how to describe them.

Or if you didn't want to go through this process, you could let Briefly handle your target audience description. Drawing on all the data you can provide, Briefly can build rich audiences, perfect for inspiring your agency and making your strategy crystal clear.

What is a target audience?

A target audience is the group of people who you want to reach with your marketing message. Typically, they are the people who are most likely to buy from you.

A good target audience should be:

Meaningful

What makes this group different from the general population? What do they have in common?

Sufficient

Are they a big enough group to deliver the business objective?

Valid

What right do we have to win with them? Have you articulated a clear need or want for the target group?

Why do you need a target audience?

Some big brands don't have target audiences - this is sometimes called mass marketing. But for most brands, most of the time, they'll have a target audience. This is because:

• Mass marketing (or not having a target audience) is expensive and few companies can afford to market to everyone
• Value is asymmetrical - 60-80% of your sales will come from just 20% of your customers (sometimes referred to as the Pareto principle)
• Positioning your brand to everyone is difficult and often ends up being bland and generic (and ineffective!)

So, assuming you want to target a specific set of customers, you now need to find them...

How to find your target audience

Market segmentation

The best way to find your target audience is create a map of your market - this is called a market segmentation. There are lots of different ways you can segment your market. You can do so based on:

Demographics

Observable attributes like gender, age, income, occupation, etc.

Example: Women in an established relationship, low to moderate household income

Psychographics

The way they live their lives - the values, beliefs or views they hold.

Example: Wanting a little more spice in her relationship

Product usage

Where, when, and how often they buy, which brand they choose, and why they choose them.

Example: Buy body wash for themselves that's also used by their partner

Buyer segments

What sort of buyers of the category they are - light, medium, heavy, infrequent, occasional, loyal.

Example: Regular users of body wash; non buyers of Old Spice

If you don't yet have a market segmentation, read our article on how to create one. If you already have your segmentation, now is when you get to choose who you're going to target.

Choosing your target segment

There are several things to consider when deciding which segment(s) to target:

1. How big is this segment?
   If all of them bought from you, how much would that be worth? Is it enough to meet your business objective?

2. How much would it cost to market to this segment?
   Some audiences are naturally harder or more expensive to reach (e.g. Fortune 500 CEOs or Himalayan monks). Consider whether the reward of winning their business is worth the cost of reaching them.

3. Is this segment growing?
   Unsurprisingly, targeting a growing segment is often a better bet than targeting a shrinking one (e.g. Imagine it's 2007 and you can target iPhone users or Blackberry users, which would you choose...?)

4. What's your current market share of this segment?
   If 90% of the segment are already customers, capturing that last 10% will be a real challenge. Unless you're trying to defend that 90%, you may be better off targeting a segment with more headroom.

5. How competitive is this segment?
   Some segments will be fiercely contested, likely leading to higher targeting costs. Others might be overlooked and easier to gain a foothold in.

6. What right do we have to win with this segment?
   If you have a 0% share of the segment, it might be because they simply have no need for your product. Targeting them would likely be a waste of time.

7. Does one segment unlock others?
   Some segments are more strategically interesting than others (e.g. Tinder, in the early days, targeted fraternity and sorority houses at American colleges to capture 'the cool end of the market', knowing that the rest of campus would soon follow.)

Once you have decided which segment(s) to target, now it's time to describe them for your agency.

How to describe your target audience

Your job now is to accurately and briefly summarise your audience. We've built a formula as a guide for you to experiment with:

Give them a snappy name

Give your audience a memorable name. You could pick a typical marketing-sounding name, like Digital Innovators and Home Nesters, or you could go rogue.

Example: Big Mac Attackers for McDonald's or Mandroids for Apple.

Provide demographic detail

You can and should have some demographics. But keep it simple and straight to the point. Basics like age, gender, location, household income, household composition - but only when they're relevant!

And remember that demographics alone don't provide the whole picture.

For example, see if you can name someone who:

• Was born in 1948
• Grew up in England
• Has been married twice
• Has 2 children
• Spends winter holidays in the Alps
• Lives in a castle
• Is obscenely wealthy

Did you say King Charles?

Congrats! That's right!

But you'd be just as correct if you also said bat-eating rockstar Ozzy Osbourne.

Provide behavioural insight

Think about the things you'd have to do to be a part of this audience group. These are the behaviours or quirks that define them.

How do people approach purchases in your category? Do they research online? How and where do they buy it? If they don't already buy from you, what do they do instead? How do they use your product, or your competitors' products? You can think outside of the category too - what do they do on a Monday evening?

Consider their attitudes

A simple summary of how people think and shop in your category.

What do people think about your category? Is it an essential, or a treat? What do they think about your brand in particular? If they do, how do they talk about your product? What are the most important factors when it comes to picking between brands in your category?

Define their problems or goals

Round off your audience with the problem they want to solve or the goal they want to achieve by buying a product in your category (this is sometimes called a Job to be done).

What kind of mindset are people likely to be in when they buy from you? What problem in their lives does your product solve for them? Whose opinions do they trust in this category?

Examples of target audience definitions

For example, imagine you were trying to sell tennis rackets and other tennis goods, and knew that amateur players were your primary audience. You might create an audience description that goes something like...

Tennis Part-Timers. 25-44 year-olds who used to play tennis when they were younger. Typically living in Greater London - or at least close enough that every year they say to their friends, "We should really go to Wimbledon this year!"

They buy tennis rackets based on the brands they see their favourite players using. Trouble is, they don't know much about tennis and haven't followed it properly since Federer retired. So their favourite player changes every Grand Slam.

Being marginally better at tennis than their friends is important to them. It's a sport that, if you're half-decent, can look elegant and almost effortless. When they buy in the category, they care the most about toeing the line between looking like a pro and looking like a try-hard.

What does that look like in the real world?

Pepsico's target audience

Pepsico have a tonne of products, each with a different target audience. For Gatorade, that target audience might be:

Young adults, aged 13-24, who are keen to improve their athletic performance.

Nike's target audience

Nike, again, have multiple product lines and will target multiple consumer segments. One of these might be:

Regular gym goers who care about how they look when working out and how they look on their way home from the gym. They post regularly on Instagram, and often buy products they like directly through the app.

Starbucks' target audience

Starbucks' marketing is mostly focused on a global audience (sophisticated mass marketing). However, they still prioritise several key segments. One of which might be:

Middle to high income office employees who are looking to purchase higher quality products. They spend most of their day at their desk and value convenience and quality when stepping out the office.

How to describe your target audience in a brief

A target audience description in a marketing or creative brief should cover four things: who they are (demographic anchor), what they do (behaviour), what they believe (attitude), and what's stopping them from choosing you (barrier). Miss any one and your agency is guessing.

Think of it like a stool. Three legs wobble. Four legs hold. Nail all four and your creative team can picture one specific person the moment they read the brief.

1. Anchor with demographics — but don't stop there

Demographics are the orientation, not the destination. Age, location, household composition and income help your media team plan, but they're useless to a creative team on their own. As we saw earlier with Charles and Ozzy, two people with identical demographics can live wildly different lives. Use demographics to set the stage, then get to the interesting stuff. If you find yourself writing a brief that stops at "women aged 25-44, ABC1", you've written a media plan, not an audience.

2. Capture behaviour with one specific moment

Behaviour makes your audience feel real. Instead of writing "coffee drinkers", zoom in. They buy 3 coffees a week, always from the same place, always before 9am. That's a moment a creative can build a campaign around. Describe what this person does on a Tuesday, not in the abstract. Where do they buy? When? What do they do instead of buying from you? The more specific, the more useful.

3. Name their belief or attitude

Attitudes are the "why" behind the behaviour. What do they think about your category? About your brand? About the problem you solve? An Oatly drinker and a full-fat milk drinker might look identical on paper but hold opposite views on dairy. That belief is the lever your campaign pulls. Write it as a sentence they'd actually say out loud, not as marketing jargon.

🧠 Pro tip: If your attitude sounds like something a focus group moderator would write, rewrite it in the voice of the person themselves.

4. Flag the barrier you need to overcome

Every audience has a reason they're not already choosing you. Maybe it's price. Maybe it's habit. Maybe it's a belief that the cheaper version is "just as good". Naming the barrier gives your agency a job to do. Without it, the brief is decorative — it describes the person but doesn't tell the creative team what to change.

Example brief audience description:
UK parents aged 28-42 of children aged 3-7. They order groceries online weekly and treat Sunday afternoons as meal-prep time. They believe cooking from scratch is the best thing they can do for their kids, but secretly they're exhausted and rely on shortcuts mid-week. The barrier: they feel guilty about "cheating" — we need to make shortcuts feel like love, not laziness.

B2B target audience examples

B2B audiences are different beasts. You're rarely selling to one person — you're selling to a buying committee with a champion, an approver, a blocker and a user, each with different priorities. Cycles are longer, decisions are more risk-averse, and "no decision" is usually a stronger competitor than any rival vendor.

Enterprise software buyer

The Risk-Averse Modernisers. IT directors at mid-market UK retailers with 50-250 employees. They hold the budget but need CFO sign-off on anything over £50k annual spend. Their day-to-day pain is legacy system downtime — every outage puts stores offline and their phone starts ringing within minutes. They care about SOC 2 compliance, uptime SLAs of 99.9% or higher, and a migration path that doesn't put the Christmas trading period at risk. They read G2 reviews before they'll take a sales call.

Professional services buyer

The Roster Wranglers. Marketing directors at mid-size consumer brands, responsible for the efficiency and output of an agency roster of 4-6 partners. They spend their week reporting up to the CMO, chasing agencies for status updates, and justifying spend to finance. Their pain is visibility — they genuinely can't see which project is at which agency, what's been briefed twice, or where the budget is leaking. What they care about: a single view of creative work in flight, and the ability to answer "where are we at?" in under 30 seconds.

SMB tool buyer

The Hat-Wearers. Founders of 10-30 person creative studios in the UK, Netherlands or Australia. They're the CEO, CFO, head of new business and occasional art director all at once. They don't run procurement processes — they buy based on a 14-day trial, a recommendation from someone they follow on Twitter, and whether the onboarding docs pass the "read this on the train home" test. Price matters, but speed-to-value matters more. If a tool hasn't earned its place by day 10, it's gone.

How to describe a target audience in a creative brief

When writing a target audience for a creative brief, you need to go beyond demographics. Age, income, and location might help your media agency, but they won't help your creative agency make better work.

Focus on attitudes, behaviours, and tensions - the things that actually unlock creative thinking. What does this person currently think, feel, and do? And what do you want them to think, feel, and do after they've seen your campaign? That gap between the two is where the interesting work lives.

Keep it to one paragraph. Your agency doesn't need pages of data, they need a vivid picture of who this person is. If you can make the reader feel like they've met this person before, you've done your job.

And if you're looking for the insight that connects your brand to this audience, our guide on generating insights will help you find it.

Finding and describing your target audience can be a time-consuming and challenging task. But getting it right is a key step to effective marketing and, in turn, great briefs. Now you've got your target audience, it's time to bring it all together in your marketing brief. Or if you're ready to start on your messaging, what do you want to say to them?

Of course, if you want to make writing a great brief easy, you can always try Briefly

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a target audience?

A target audience is the specific group of people most likely to buy your product or service, defined by shared demographics, behaviours, and attitudes. It's the group you're writing your marketing to — not the total universe of people who could theoretically buy from you. A good target audience is meaningful (genuinely different from the general population), sufficient (big enough to hit your commercial goal), and valid (you have a real reason to win with them). Without one, your marketing either tries to talk to everyone and connects with no one, or chases people who were never going to buy.

What is a target audience example?

A target audience example for a premium running shoe brand could be: "Runners aged 25-40 in UK cities who race 2+ half-marathons a year, spend £200+ per pair on trainers, and follow gear reviewers on Instagram." The specificity is what makes it useful.

A B2C example for an oat milk brand like Oatly: "Flexitarians aged 22-35 in urban areas who've already swapped dairy in their morning coffee and want their choices to feel a bit rebellious rather than worthy."

A B2B example for a creative ops tool like Briefly: "Marketing directors at consumer brands managing 4+ agencies, who spend their week chasing status updates and can't answer 'where are we at?' without three Slack messages and a spreadsheet."

How do I find my target audience?

To find your target audience, start with your existing best customers — the people who buy, stay, and refer — and describe what they have in common across demographics, behaviour, and attitude. Three steps:

1. Look at your sales data. Who buys the most, the most often, and the most profitably? Pull the top 20% — they likely drive 60-80% of revenue (the Pareto principle).
2. Find the shared patterns. What do these people have in common beyond the obvious? Age and location are table stakes. Look for shared behaviours (how they buy, when, where) and attitudes (what they believe about your category).
3. Validate and size it. Check the segment is big enough to hit your commercial objective. If it isn't, widen your definition until it is — without losing the specificity that makes it useful.

What is the difference between a target audience and a target market?

A target market is the broad group of consumers a brand could potentially serve; a target audience is the narrower slice you're speaking to in a specific campaign. Your target market for a coffee brand might be "all UK coffee drinkers over 18" — a segment measured in millions. Your target audience for a specific spring campaign might be "young professionals buying coffee on their commute into central London". The market defines your opportunity. The audience defines this campaign's job. For more on carving a market into workable segments, see our guide to market segmentation.

How specific should my target audience be?

A useful target audience is specific enough that if you read it aloud, you could picture one real person who fits — but broad enough that there's a commercially meaningful number of them. If your audience description fits only your cousin Dave, it's too narrow. If it fits half the country, it's too wide. The test: would two different creatives, handed the same brief, picture recognisably similar people? If yes, you're in the right zone. If one pictures a 24-year-old student and the other pictures a 50-year-old parent, you need to tighten it up.