What is a target audience universe?

A ‘target audience universe’ refers to the total population of organisations or individuals who share common characteristics that make them potential customers for a particular product or service. In other words, it represents the entire pool of people who fit the criteria for being part of the target audience for a specific marketing campaign.

Why is a target audience universe important?

Defining a target audience universe is a crucial step in marketing. It involves identifying and understanding the demographics, psychographics, behaviours, and preferences of the individuals who are most likely to be interested in your organisation’s product or service. This helps businesses tailor their messaging to resonate with the right people.

Key elements of defining a B2B target audience universe include organisation type, job function, seniority, location, and organisation turnover. By understanding the characteristics and needs of the target audience universe, businesses can create more effective marketing strategies, allocate resources efficiently, and maximise their chances of success in reaching potential customers.

Why is it important to know your target audience universe?

Knowing your target audience universe is a vital first step to your marketing and sales strategy. This knowledge should drive your outreach targets and help you better allocate your budget to reach the maximum number of potential clients.

A target audience universe matters in relation to your own B2B database. For example, your client base is focused on UK accountants. Your database may have 2,000 accountancy firms included. But does this represent 10% of the UK Accountancy universe or 90%? Without knowing the universe, it’s impossible to answer.

If you know that you only have 10% of your target audience universe in your database, your product or service is not close to reaching its full potential for your market. You can make a strategic decision to add more budget to growing this number and reaching more clients.

Conversely, if your database represents the capacity of your universe, you should focus on messaging to bring that valuable audience in.

How do I build my target audience universe?

It isn’t always straightforward to start assessing your universe. Many sources, associations and directories are stagnant, or outdated by the time you get to view them. Associations especially, only show a snapshot of a universe, specifically allocated to them, not you.

Usually, a manual effort is needed. Hours of researching, calling, and emailing industry professionals has been the way in the past. Although the answers may vary quite considerably.

A costly alternative would be to purchase data from a broker who advertises the target universe. These are very rarely complete and are not always an effective option for many organisations.

How our automated tool can build your target audience universe

However, technology can make significant breakthroughs. For example, here at The Data Business, we’ve developed an automated building tool that instantly and accurately builds any unique target audience universe. It harnesses business categorisations and combines this with the ability to scrape maps for qualified organisations.

The result produces thousands of additional organisations within a strict perimeter of your chosen geography in an instant. From there, all you need to do is layer your database on top to find the gaps.

To learn more about our universe-building tool, simply get in touch and we can discuss your target audience universe needs.