Knowing your primary audience is one of the biggest advantages your business can have. While you may want to bring everyone through the door, there’s a payoff in establishing strong relationships with customers in your target market. That’s why it’s important to know who is buying your products and whether or not you are using effective communication to reach them.
Most consumers today expect companies to offer a tailored experience. A successful marketing strategy requires understanding the difference between various audiences—and their behavior. Once you do, you can create campaigns that reach your ideal customer, instead of casting a net so wide the fish you’re seeking slip right through it.
Let’s take a deeper look at the different types of audiences, how to identify them, and what you can do to keep them in your orbit.
What is a primary audience?
Your primary audience is the core group of people you are attempting to target with your brand messaging. They bring as much value to your business as you bring to them. These are the people most primed to spread the word about your business after buying your products or using your services.
You can break your primary target audience into different categories to personalize experiences for different types of customers. This practice, known as market segmentation, is about refining your process and approach based on the different categories of customers engaging with your brand.
Suppose you have a budding perfume brand and want to appeal to influencers and young professionals working in the beauty industries. You might reach this audience via their most trusted magazines, Instagram and TikTok accounts, or podcasts. Customers in this category are also likely to value exclusivity or finding the next big thing. It might be worthwhile to connect with them through exclusive events or an email newsletter tailored to insiders.
Most important types of audiences
There are different tiers of your target audience you’ll want to pursue, all with distinct levels of intensity. These are the most important audiences for your business to research and target:
Primary
Your primary audience is the main focus of your marketing strategies. Understanding the behavior of this audience is crucial for marketing success. These are the people most likely to buy your products and form a relationship with your brand. Once you do, they’ll be able to influence every other audience tier to follow their lead.
Imagine you own a sustainable sneaker company. Your primary audience might be environmentally conscious millennial influencers who seek eco-friendly footwear. These customers drive your marketing decisions. You’d craft targeted ad campaigns highlighting your recycled materials, sustainable business practices, and modern designs because those messages resonate with them. When they buy, review, and share your products, they also become natural brand advocates who influence others.
Secondary
Your secondary audience plays a supporting but powerful role in your marketing strategy. They don’t buy right away but still engage with your brand and often follow the lead of your primary audience. By keeping them interested and informed, you create opportunities to convert them and expand your reach.
In the sneaker company example, this tier includes casual shoppers, friends of your primary audience, and people curious about sustainability trends but not ready to commit. They might encounter your products through social media shares or influencer partnerships. They may form a positive impression of your brand even if they don’t purchase right away. By nurturing their interest, you create opportunities to convert them over time while strengthening your brand’s reputation through broader reach.
Gatekeeper
Gatekeepers are individuals or organizations who may control whether or not a message reaches your primary audience. Unlike primary audiences, who might shape the secondary audience’s purchasing decisions, gatekeepers decide whether or not information transmits at all. An example of a gatekeeper could be the organizers of industry-based events or conferences. They decide which companies and industry members will have the chance to participate and gain access to their network.
Today, a company might also navigate the algorithms on its social media pages, which act as a kind of digital gatekeeper. The recommendation systems within popular applications like Instagram or TikTok (which are famously opaque) determine whether or not your content is seen.
Primary vs. secondary audience: What’s the difference?
A primary audience consists of the decision makers most likely to purchase and become brand ambassadors for your products. By contrast, the secondary audience consists of all the people around those decision makers (e.g., family members, friends, and social media followers). This ripple effect helps spread brand awareness and drives additional sales beyond the initial target group.
For example, a company selling premium noise-canceling headphones might target remote professionals (the primary audience). They create ads focused on productivity, sound quality, and comfort. As those professionals buy and use the headphones, they showcase them during video calls or social gatherings. This influences their coworkers and friends (the secondary audience) to want the same product.
What’s a hidden audience?
A hidden audience is a group of users who might interact with your brand—whether that’s buying products or browsing your site—while remaining anonymous. Data collection is key to ecommerce personalization. Without key information like geography, age, or gender, it might seem impossible to get a clear picture of this audience.
A visitor to your pages can do so anonymously, most likely by using services like VPNs or IP address masking to hide their personal data. Your company can still personalize their experiences, though. Although you won’t be able to collect identifying information, you’ll still have data on the user’s behavior while on your site like session times, products browsed, and referral sources.
You can leverage this data to show related products. If you see one particularly popular referral source, you can approach them for a collaboration. You may even offer their users a special discount for purchasing a product in exchange for signing up for a newsletter.
How to identify your primary audience
- Analyze existing customer data
- Gather feedback from customers
- Build customer profiles
- Conduct a competitive analysis
Each business’s primary audience may come from a different set of demographics. Here are some steps you can take to identify the right group of people to target:
1. Analyze existing customer data
Data insights from your social media accounts and website (via tools like Google Analytics and Shopify analytics) can help build a valuable foundation for understanding who your customers are. Those analytics will give you an idea of the gender, age, and location breakdown of their audience through various channels.
Depending on the platform, you can find invaluable data capturing user behavior and a customer’s values. You can also look at the commonalities amongst their most engaged users, and use those patterns to get an even more specific idea of who they are.
2. Gather feedback from customers
In addition to analyzing existing data, you can gain deeper insights into your market by actively soliciting feedback from your customers. This will help you get a clear, accurate sense of who your average customer is and what might be missing in their experiences.
Maybe you allow users to review their purchases or ask them to share their thoughts via an email survey after making a purchase. This kind of boilerplate surveying, however, can lead to flawed data, since users mostly give feedback on very good or very bad experiences.
Instead, you could conduct a longer, more qualitative survey with survey questions that seek to understand your market on a deeper level. To incentivize users, you could offer discounts or gifts to those who complete these surveys.
3. Build customer profiles
Through feedback and analyzing data insights, you can begin to paint an accurate picture of who you’re reaching. For example, a clean beauty brand might already know that its target audience is women concerned about harsh chemicals in cosmetics. Through studying customer data and conducting surveys, they might find their most engaged customers are athletic women over the age of 35 who spend a lot of time outdoors. The profile of that specific person can serve as a springboard for ideas. It can help refine their product or marketing strategies to better serve this type of customer.
4. Conduct a competitive analysis
Understanding who the customer is can also be a key foundational step for any competitive analysis. Through it, you may learn how your business is positioned within the market. You can also gain insights from the success (and failure) of companies targeting the same audience.
Running a competitive analysis involves researching the approach of your rivals and using that information to refine your business strategy. Perhaps you’re mostly focused on growing your primary audience through increasing the open rate for your newsletters. Services like MailCharts show how your content stacks up against your com target="_blank"petitors, and analyzes what makes their content attention-grabbing and unique.
Primary audience FAQ
What is an example of a primary audience?
A fitness brand might consider its primary audience to be athletes between the ages of 25 and 45. They may particularly target customers from this demographic with large social media followings or who live in major urban centers because of their ability to influence more people.
What is a primary and secondary target audience?
A primary audience is the main people you target—like athletes between the ages of 25 and 45 for a fitness brand, for example. The secondary audience in the same example would be the family members, coaches, social media followers, or coworkers who interact with the core customers.
How do you identify primary and secondary audiences?
You can identify primary and secondary audiences with website analytics, competitor analysis, and customer feedback. For example, if a software company launches a new project management tool, its primary audience might be team managers who make purchasing decisions. Once the managers buy in, their decision naturally exposes employees (i.e., the secondary audience) to the product.
