Target Market vs. Target Audience: Key Differences (Full Transcript)

[00:00:05] Speaker 1: Hey friends, Catherine here from Research Rockstar. Thanks for joining me here today. And today I'd like to talk about a little bit of a language update. There is some trends going on with jargon in market research. There's actually several, but today I'm going to target one in particular, which is, what is the difference between a market and an audience? These days, you may sometimes find yourself talking to clients who talk about their market, and sometimes you may find yourself talking to clients who talk about their audience. Are these terms interchangeable? Well, the brutal reality is that they are often used interchangeably. That is, I often hear people talk about target market and target audience as if they are the same thing. But if we want to be precise, there are some differences. So let's talk about that for just a second. If we talk about our target market, well, that's something that we in market research have been used to for a really long time, right? We're used to talking about a target market. And a target market, or a market in general that we're interested in, we might define as a group of people who have a common behavior, or a demographic profile, or a set of needs, or maybe a combination of those things. So for example, coming from a market research background, I've done a lot of market segmentation studies where I'm helping clients to divide a broad market into logical subgroups. An example of a target market might be this one. I made up one for a fictional beer brand called Road Trippy, which defines its target market as men and women, 18 to 35, who have a penchant for adventure and nostalgia. That's Road Trippy's target market. Now, that doesn't mean that Road Trippy has a list of people who fit that profile. It means that Road Trippy has identified that as an attractive group, and maybe they've done some research which has shown them that people who have that profile are likely to be favorable towards their brand, or are likely to respond favorably to their products or advertisements. So they know who they're looking for, but they don't necessarily have a list. When we use the word audience, while some people use it synonymously with market, if we're really being precise, the word audience started to become popular as big data became popular and online marketing became popular. And so an audience is a group of people who, like a market, they have a common behavior or demographic profile or a set of needs, and they can be identified and reached. When we do market segmentation and market research, when we identify, say, that Road Trippy has five segments within its market, we're not necessarily giving them a list of people who are in those segments, right? We're talking about those different segments' attributes, what might resonate with them. We might identify whether or not they may have differences for the types of beer flavors or beer categories that they might like, et cetera. But we're not actually giving them a list of people in those segments. Typically, when we hear people talk about their target audience, the assumption is that it's a little bit more precise. It's getting a little bit closer to people who are identifiable, which is why you often hear people talk about lookalike audiences. So in that case, for example, Road Trippy might take a list of its best customers and find a lookalike audience so that it can access a larger database of people who match the characteristics of its best customers. The theory being, of course, that if those are the characteristics of our best customers, those should be our low-hanging fruit. Those should be a good list of people that we can target. So again, people use the terms synonymously, but that's really not what it's meant. Really, when I hear people use the phrase audience or target audience, it really sort of implies a level of specificity that the phrase market doesn't always convey or intend to convey. So the idea is that with an audience, it's identifiable. Now I think it's really interesting because if you actually go onto Google, which I just did a couple of minutes ago, I searched for the phrase in quotations target market and target audience. Which one do you think had the most hits? You know what's going on here, right? Target market had 11.7 million hits. Target audience, 42.8. So clearly, a lot of people are adopting this language, but again, I promise you, when you read a lot of articles about target audience, they are really confusing target audience and target market. But to be precise, audience should be something that's identifiable. Clearly, that's what most people mean, but still, if you're a market research and insights professional who's working with marketing folks, if your end clients are marketing folks, marketing executives who do a lot of online marketing especially, they are using the word audience a lot. So it's really important for those of us in market research and insights to get comfortable with it and to be careful about when we use the phrase market versus audience. Because frankly, if our customers are using the phrase audience a lot, we need to use that language as well, right? It's just what we always tell our clients in market research. It's important to understand your customer's language so you can speak to them in their own language. Same for us. If our customers are now increasingly using the phrase audience, it's important for us to know when to use it and to incorporate it into our conversations. And by the way, I do want to share an interesting example. I happened to be online the other day and saw some ads for Google Surveys. I'm a huge fan of Google Marketing. They just do a brilliant job on marketing, and Google Surveys is no exception. So for those of you who are watching this on YouTube, I'm showing a little bit of a screenshot here, and for those of you who are on iTunes, I'll read it for you, which is this is an ad for Google Surveys. Survey real people, get real answers, hear directly from the types of audiences you care about, and make smarter, faster business decisions. I think that it was really clever of Google in this promotion. They didn't talk about they're surveying your target market. They talked about reaching your audience. Again, they're using the language that a lot of folks are using now, again, mostly people who are doing a lot of online marketing, but how many marketing executives these days aren't highly focused on online marketing? So it really is an important trend to be aware of. I know for some of us coming from our market research background that we like to be precise, and that's great, but we also have to understand that our customers may not always be quite so precise in their use of the phrase market versus audience, so we have to give them a little leeway. I hope this conversation about market versus audience has been useful. If this has been a useful conversation for you, please do like and share and subscribe. The more likes we get, the longer I'll keep the conversation going. Thanks everybody, and have a great day.