When you are doing business, you, of course, are familiar with these two terms target audience and target market. You might have seen in different places that people often use these terms interchangeably, but have you ever thought that these terms are not the same at all? If you already have known it, you’re golden, but do you know all the key differences between them? Just read this blog “Target Audience vs Target Market: Key Differences in 2023” to get a complete idea of it and all other relevant details.
What is a Target Audience?
A target audience means a certain part of a greater group of individuals who are most prone to buy a service/product from your company. Your company must recognize and acknowledge your target audience during building marketing materials. It allows your marketing team to apply specific images, themes, or terms that will attract your target audience and which in turn, will increase sales.
Generally, a target audience is a selected or smaller group of individuals, like marketers in a specific industry or employees of a particular company. For instance, if your company produces clothes, your target audience will include garments and boutiques.
What is a Target Market?
A target market indicates a huge group of individuals that you assume can be benefited from the offerings of your brand. They are the individuals who you anticipate will look for, identify, buy, and consume your services or products. Your target market will contain similar demographic attributes like age, gender, race, income, ethnicity, marital status, education, location, occupation, and the like.
Each of your marketing functions needs to focus on it and each marketing campaigns need to refer to it. You need to remember that the target market is quite broad. It might have a few demographic similarities but it’s quite a less-defined association of end users.
Target Market vs. Target Audience: How Can you recognize a Target Market from the Target Audience?
Here are a few differences between a target market and a target audience:
| Point of Difference | Target Market | Target Audience |
| 1. Definition | A target market indicates a huge group of individuals that you assume can be benefited from the offerings of your brand. | A target audience means a certain part of a greater group of individuals who are most prone to buy a service/product from your company. |
| 2. Group Size | The definition suggests that here the group size is huge because it’s the total group of individuals. | The definition suggests that here the group size is generally small because it’s a selected group of individuals. |
| 3. Example | When a dental equipment supply company targets to market or sell its products to a certain city, the city’s total population represents the target market. | And groups such as dental clinics represent the target audience. |
| 4. Probability of Completing a Sale | As the target market includes all prospects that your company wants to sell to whether they have any interest in your service/product or not, the probability of completing a sale is low. So, while creating marketing campaigns try emphasizing the general advantages of your product so that it seems helpful to a specific group other than your target audience. | As the target audience generally includes consumers who can have a specific interest in your product, the probability of completing a sale is higher. So, marketers plan promotional elements that attract especially your target audience to enhance the selling chance even further. |
| 5. Alternative Users | The term target market is mostly used by marketing people, as the term generally only refers to consumer groups from the perspective of them, buying a product. People from other industries like business development and sales also use this term from the same perspective to describe the total consumer group in which they expect to buy the product. | Alternative users of this term other than marketing, sales, and business development are the people in the publishing and entertainment industry. Target audiences in the publishing and entertainment industry mean gender groups, age groups, or fans of specific production companies or genres. |
| 6. Decision-making | Generally, the target market has an impact on the decision-making of business and marketing departments. | The target audience plays a special role in the campaign decisions. |
| 7. Inclusion | The target market includes the target audience because it’s a subset of the target market. | The target audience can’t include the total target market. |
| 8. Number | You have just one target market. | But you can have various target audiences to use in various advertising and campaign strategies. |
It’s clear from the above discussion, what are the differences between target audience and target market.
Final Words
Now, you must have become confident that the target audience and target market are not the same terms from my blog “Target Audience vs Target Market: Key Differences in 2023”. If you have further queries please check the FAQ section and if you want any digital marketing services like content writing, SEO services, local SEO services, social media marketing, Google Ads services, and app store optimization, please contact digiSocial.