Marketing leaders are under pressure. Expectations are rising. Budgets aren’t.

You’re launching campaigns, refining messaging, running webinars, and briefing executives. But something’s off. The results don’t match the effort. The narrative doesn’t land. The leads aren’t converting.

More often than not, it comes down to one root cause: you’re not speaking to the right people, or not in a way that truly moves them.

Audience targeting isn’t a downstream task. It’s not a persona worksheet or an Airtable of job titles. It’s the strategic backbone that makes everything else downstream effective. Without it, even the best creatives, the boldest brands, and the most sophisticated tech stacks fall flat.

What’s Getting in the Way?

1. Lack of Clarity Across Teams

Marketing wants messaging that resonates. Product wants features highlighted. Sales wants new and highly qualified leads.

When these teams don’t align on who the product is really for, the result is confusion and ineffective marketing. You end up chasing shallow segments instead of anchoring in meaningful ones, and even if you’re hitting your content quota and LinkedIn post schedule, the lack of results forces questions about the strategy.  

But this isn’t just a marketing problem. It’s a company-wide clarity problem.

2. Over-Segmentation Kills Focus

In trying to be personalized, many teams over-engineer their personas. You end up with ten “ideal customers,” all pulling in different directions.

What you actually need is prioritization. Who is feeling the pain most acutely? Who is in the market now? Who has the most to gain—and the most to lose—by solving it?

One of the core themes of Seth Godin’s writings is, “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.”

Start with fewer, richer segments that you can connect with. Go deeper instead of broader.

3. Missing the Emotional Why

Knowing your audience isn’t the same as knowing what moves them. And although many in B2B marketing avoid emotional insights, the fact is that humans are still making the core decisions and signing the contracts. 

Most marketers can list a prospect’s job title or tech stack. But do you know what they’re afraid of? What motivates their decision? What moment makes them say, “I need this”?

That’s the gold. And you can’t get it from a spreadsheet. You gain insight from listening, observing, and empathizing with the core champion and understanding what they are trying to achieve and why.

Lisa Fortini-Campbell, in her book “Hitting the Sweet Spot,” argues that great marketing resides at the intersection of logic and emotion. “Emotional insight is the hardest to find—and the most important to act on,” she writes. She urges marketers to uncover not just what buyers do, but why they do it.

To hit the sweet spot, you need to understand:

• The internal pressures and goals that define success 
• The perceived risks of making the wrong choice 
• The moment when logic aligns with an emotional payoff 

And when you speak to that truth? Magic happens.

So what can we do? It Starts with Product, Not Personas

You can’t define your audience in a vacuum. The best targeting work begins by getting brutally honest about what your product does—and who it really helps.

Working cross-functionally with Product will help you identify the core user pain points. Not just the feature benefit. The actual business problem. This insight is your foundation. From there, you can build messaging, campaigns, and journeys that actually convert.

(Tip: When I was a VP of Marketing, we developed a worksheet to help enable conversations between Product Marketing and Product to capture the true value of the problems our software solved for our audience.) 

Think of it this way: if you don’t know who you’re solving for, nothing else works. Not the brand. Not the creative. Not the funnel.

“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.” – Morris Chang

Audience Targeting Is a Business Strategy

This isn’t marketing’s side project. It’s how you drive alignment across product, sales, and marketing. It’s how you avoid wasted spend and bloated funnels. It’s how you build resonance at every stage of the journey. And in a time when marketing is being asked to do more with less, it’s an opportunity to be strategic within your company and drive this initiative. 

Let’s Go Deeper

Big Valley’s Audience Targeting helps marketing leaders take that step back, sharpen their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), uncover real audience insights, and connect strategy to action.

If your targeting feels scattered, undocumented across teams, or worse, is invisible, it’s time to rebuild from the ground up.

📩 Ready to refocus? Let’s talk.

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How did I use AI in this blog post? I love learning how others are leveraging AI in their everyday workflows, so here’s how I used AI in the making of this blog post: 

• In Chat GPT, I have a project folder titled “Writing” and have uploaded several of my articles and posts so Chat has context for my style and tone (great podcast on projects here) 
• I drafted my core thoughts on Audience and Targeting, the research I had, and what I wanted the core audience to learn 
• I used Prompt Maker GPT to write me an optimized prompt to organize my thoughts and show me weaknesses and gaps 
• I edited it again, sharing it back with my chat so that it could learn from my edits and style. 
• And voilà! Chat helped me edit and streamline this post, and now it has the context for future work.