MARKETING PLANNING

Audience Strategy:
How to Define the
People Your Marketing
and Communications
Need to Reach

Every marketing plan needs a clear understanding of its target audiences — the people and organizations you need to reach, influence, engage, or support through marketing and communications.

Last updated October 2026

A useful audience framework starts with broad audience groups, then adds more specific segments only when meaningful differences require different marketing.

A practical starting point is:

• Target Market

• Prospects

• Customers

• Partners

• Employees

• General Public

• Other

These groups provide structure across the marketing plan without forcing every audience into an overly complicated taxonomy.

What is an audience in marketing?

An audience is a group of people or organizations you need to reach, influence, engage, or support through marketing and communications.

Audience planning helps answer an important question:

Who do we need to affect in order to achieve our business and marketing objectives?

That can include people you want to attract as customers, people already considering your organization, existing customers, partners, employees, the general public, and other groups that matter to the organization.

Seven audience groups to consider in a marketing plan:

1. Target Market

Your target market is the broad group of people or organizations you want to attract as customers.

It may be defined by an ideal customer profile, market segment, need, behavior, geography, demographic or firmographic characteristics, or other factors that identify who is most likely to benefit from what you offer.

People in your target market do not need to have engaged with your organization yet.

This is the audience you may be trying to reach through awareness advertising, content, search, social media, sponsorships, events, or other demand-building activity.

2. Prospects

Prospects are qualified potential customers who fit your target profile and have demonstrated meaningful interest or engagement.

They have moved beyond simply being part of the target market.

Marketing may need to help prospects evaluate options, build preference, overcome barriers, and move toward a purchase decision.

Because prospects can differ significantly in needs, motivations, readiness, and decision roles, this audience often requires further segmentation.

3. Customers

Customers already have a relationship with the organization.

Marketing and communications may focus on adoption, satisfaction, retention, expansion, loyalty, advocacy, education, or ongoing engagement.

Customers may also need to be segmented based on differences such as needs, goals, behaviors, lifecycle stage, products or services used, or value to the organization.

4. Partners

Partners are external organizations or individuals that help extend an organization’s reach, capabilities, distribution, or influence.

They may include channel partners, distributors, resellers, agencies, affiliates, technology partners, referral partners, or strategic partners.

5. Employees

Employees are an important audience for internal communications, organizational change, launches, brand alignment, engagement, sales enablement, and advocacy.

Different employee groups may require different communications depending on their roles and what they need to know, believe, or do.

6. General Public

The General Public includes people who are not necessarily part of your target market but whose awareness, understanding, or perception of the organization may still matter.

This audience may be important for public relations, corporate reputation, community relations, public education, issues management, or other communications priorities.

7. Other

Some important audiences do not fit neatly into the other groups.

Depending on the organization, these might include investors, donors, members, media, regulators, government officials, students, alumni, healthcare providers, or other groups.

The framework should be adapted to the organization rather than forcing every audience into the same structure.

Audience groups, segments, and personas

These concepts are related, but they are not interchangeable.

Audience group – a broad category such as Target Market, Prospects, or Customers.

Audience segment – a more specific group within an audience that requires meaningfully different marketing or communications.

Persona – a representative profile used to help teams better understand a segment.

Personas can be useful when they are grounded in real audience insight. They become less useful when they rely on invented or superficial characteristics that do not affect marketing decisions.

The goal is not to create more labels. It is to understand an audience well enough to know what marketing should do differently.

How to define meaningful audience segments

Good segmentation goes beyond describing who people are.

It helps marketers understand what people are trying to accomplish, what matters to them, what may prevent them from acting, and what role they play in a decision.

Consider the following.

Who are they?

Identify characteristics that are relevant to the marketing and communications strategy.

Depending on the audience, these might include:

• Demographics
• Firmographics
• Geography
• Behavior
• Lifecycle stage
• Psychographics

The purpose is not to collect every possible attribute. Focus on characteristics that reveal meaningful differences in how the audience should be approached.

What role do they play in the decision?

Audience strategy should account for the role someone plays, not simply whether they use the product or service.

In some decisions, one person may influence, decide, pay, and use. In others, those roles are distributed across several people.

In B2B marketing, relevant roles may include:

• Decision maker — Has final authority and gives the final yes
• Influencer — Shapes the decision and can help advance or block it
• Implementer — Leads the department responsible for successfully putting the solution into practice
• User — Uses the product, service, or solution in day-to-day wor

B2C decisions can also involve different influencers, decision makers, purchasers, and users.

The important question is:

What has to happen with each person for the decision to move forward?

What are they trying to accomplish?

Understand the audience’s goals and the progress they are trying to make.

The Jobs to Be Done framework encourages marketers to think beyond the immediate product or service and consider the higher-level job the audience is trying to accomplish.

In B2B, the job might be to excel in a role. That creates opportunities to educate, coach, and provide useful guidance that can eventually lead to the products or services that help someone perform that role more effectively.

In B2C, the job might be to plan a successful camping trip. Within that larger job are smaller jobs, such as determining the right size of tent, before someone begins comparing tent types, brands, features, and benefits.

Starting with a broader view helps marketers create useful content around the audience’s goals, not just around what they sell. That content can help build awareness and engagement before the audience is actively evaluating a specific product or service.

Ask:

What are they trying to accomplish, and how can we help them make progress toward it?

Learn more from the Christensen Institute’s Jobs to Be Done Theory.

What do they need or want?

What are they trying to solve, achieve, improve, gain, or experience?

Understanding needs and wants helps marketers see what matters to the audience and what progress or outcome they are seeking.

What motivates them?

What outcomes matter most?

Key motivators might include growth, convenience, recognition, control, reduced cost, lower risk, improved performance, confidence, enjoyment, or a better experience.

What holds them back?

Understanding barriers is as important as understanding motivation.

These may include risk, effort, cost, uncertainty, switching costs, organizational resistance, existing habits, or satisfaction with the status quo.

How do they think?

Psychographics can reveal attitudes, beliefs, values, priorities, preferences, and perceptions that influence how people evaluate a decision.

These insights can help explain why people who appear similar based on demographic or firmographic characteristics may respond very differently to the same marketing.

Make segmentation
actionable

A segment is only useful if it changes what marketing or communications should do.

If a subset of a group would receive the same strategy, message, offer, experience, or level of investment as others in the group, it may not need to be a separate segment.

The test is simple:

What should we do differently because we know this about a subset of the audience group?

How audiences connect to marketing objectives

Audiences define who marketing needs to affect.

Marketing objectives define what marketing needs to accomplish with those audiences.

For example:

Target Market + Awareness
Increase awareness among the people or organizations the company wants to attract.

Prospects + Preference
Increase preference among qualified potential customers considering their options.

Customers + Adoption
Help customers successfully begin using a product, service, or capability.

Customers + Advocacy
Encourage satisfied customers to endorse and share their experience.

Connecting audiences with objectives creates a stronger foundation for determining strategy, initiatives, campaigns, channels, messages, and tactics. Explore our guide to setting and prioritizing marketing objectives, including eight journey-based objectives that clarify what marketing needs to accomplish with its audiences.

Start broad, then add specificity where it changes the marketing

Audience planning does not need to begin with an elaborate segmentation model. Start by identifying the broad audiences the organization needs to reach:

Target Market, Prospects, Customers, Partners, Employees, General Public, and Other.

Then define more specific segments where differences in characteristics, decision role, needs, goals, psychographics, key motivators, barriers, or job to be done require a different marketing approach.

The goal is not more segmentation. The goal is marketing that is more relevant and useful to the people you are trying to reach.

Put audience strategy into practice

Once your audience groups and segments are defined, they can become part of the structure of your marketing plan.

Annum is unified marketing planning software that lets teams tag initiatives and tactics by audience, making it easier to see which groups are being supported across the plan, identify gaps or overlaps, and connect audience strategy to marketing objectives and execution.

See how Annum connects strategy to the marketing plan →

Frequently asked questions about marketing objectives

This audience strategy framework was developed by Patty Radford Henderson, Founder & CEO of Annum, drawing on more than 30 years of experience in marketing strategy and planning. She teaches the framework in workshops and conference sessions.