Audiences
In marketing, an audience is a defined group of people who share characteristics, behaviours, or interests that make them relevant targets for a particular campaign or communication.
Audiences can be built from a wide range of signals: demographic data such as job title or company size, behavioural data such as pages visited or emails opened, CRM data such as purchase history or lifecycle stage, and third-party data such as industry or intent signals. The more precisely you can define an audience, the more relevant your marketing can be to the people within it.
The concept of audiences sits at the heart of modern marketing because it enables personalisation at scale. Rather than sending the same message to everyone, audience-based marketing allows you to tailor content, timing, channel, and offer to the specific context of each group. This is true whether you are segmenting an email list, building a custom audience in a paid advertising platform, or configuring targeting rules in a CRM workflow.
For B2B marketers, the most valuable audiences are built from first-party data collected through your own platforms: your CRM, your email tool, your website analytics, and your product. These audiences are more accurate, more privacy-compliant, and more durable than those built on third-party data. Investing in data infrastructure to build, maintain, and activate first-party audiences is one of the highest-leverage moves a marketing operations team can make.
What is the difference between an audience and a segment?
The terms are often used interchangeably, but there is a useful distinction. A segment is typically a static or rule-based group defined within your CRM or email platform, such as all contacts in the manufacturing sector with more than 100 employees. An audience, particularly in the context of paid advertising, often refers to a group you are actively targeting in a campaign, which might be built from CRM data, website visitor behaviour, or lookalike modelling. The underlying logic is similar; the activation context differs.
What is a custom audience in advertising?
A custom audience is a targeting group in a paid advertising platform, such as Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Campaign Manager, that you build from your own data rather than the platform’s native targeting options. You might upload a list of email addresses from your CRM, and the platform matches those addresses to its own user profiles, allowing you to show ads specifically to your existing contacts or known prospects. Custom audiences are widely used for retargeting and account-based marketing campaigns.
How do you build audiences from first-party data?
First-party audiences are built by collecting and structuring data from your own touchpoints: website visits tracked via analytics tags, email engagement data from your email platform, form submissions and CRM records, and product usage data where applicable. The data is then used to define rules or segments, such as contacts who visited your pricing page in the last 30 days but have not yet requested a demo. This audience can then be used to trigger an automated email, flag a contact for sales follow-up, or populate a paid advertising campaign.