Definition

In business and marketing, the specific audience segment you're trying to reach, sell to, or manipulate into thinking they need your product. It's the demographic, psychographic, or behavioral group that your entire campaign is aimed at—ideally based on data, but often based on whoever the VP thinks buys stuff. Missing your target means wasted ad spend; hitting it means annoying the right people with your ads.

Example Usage

Our target demographic is millennial women aged 25-34, which means we'll use rose gold colors and throw in the word 'mindful' at least six times in the copy.

Source: Wiktionary via Free Dictionary API

Related Terms

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waterfall strategy

An ad buying method where inventory is offered sequentially to buyers in descending priority order until someone bites. Like a retail clearance rack that goes through progressively less desirable shoppers.

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rebranding

The corporate equivalent of getting a makeover and pretending you're a completely different person—changing a company's name, logo, or image to distance from past failures or chase new markets. It's what happens when focus groups decide your perfectly good brand needs $2 million worth of "refreshing." Sometimes transformative, often just expensive window dressing on the same old product.

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impression share

The percentage of times your ad was shown divided by the total number of times it was eligible to appear, typically in paid search or display campaigns. It measures how much of the available opportunity you're actually capturing.

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time on site

The average duration visitors spend on a website during a session, measured from arrival to departure or timeout. It's a metric that can't distinguish between engaged reading and forgetting you left a tab open.

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win-back campaign

A targeted marketing effort attempting to re-engage customers who've stopped buying, typically through discounts and guilt-inducing subject lines like 'We miss you.' It's the commercial equivalent of texting your ex at 2am.

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demographic targeting

Directing marketing messages based on statistical characteristics like age, gender, income, and education—the paint-by-numbers approach to audience segmentation. Simple, measurable, and often wildly reductive.

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