Why "Health-Conscious Adults 25-55" Is Not a Target Audience

I've read hundreds of client intake forms in my career. From the brand side, sitting across from the agencies I hired to grow my products. And later, working directly with founders building supplement and skincare brands from scratch.

The intake forms always ask some version of the same question: "Who is your target customer?"

And the answers, almost without exception, say something like this:

"Health-conscious adults 25-55 who are looking to improve their wellness."

It sounds like an answer. It has words in it. There is a demographic range and a psychographic descriptor. If you squint, it looks like targeting.

It is not targeting. It's a description of roughly 120 million Americans. And the moment your agency accepts that answer and starts building campaigns from it, you've inherited a problem that will cost your client thousands of dollars and cost your agency something more valuable: time and trust.

What happens when you target everyone

Here is what actually happens when a supplement brand tells you their target is "health-conscious adults 25-55" and you take that at face value.

You set up a Meta campaign. You build a broad audience around health and wellness interests, maybe layered with some age and income filters. You write three or four ad variations based on the product's general benefits. You launch. And then you wait.

The first week, performance is mediocre. CPAs are high, ROAS is somewhere between 1x and 2x. You're not worried yet. This is the testing phase, right? The algorithm needs data.

Week two, you start seeing pockets of traction. One creative is outperforming the others. One audience segment is converting. You start shifting budget. This is where your skill as a media buyer kicks in, and you are genuinely good at this part. You can read the data, find the signal in the noise, and optimize toward what is working.

By week four or five, you have something. ROAS is climbing. The client is cautiously optimistic. You've found an audience that converts.

But here's the part nobody talks about: you just spent $5,000-$10,000 of your client's money and four to five weeks of your agency's time to arrive at a conclusion that better upfront research would have produced before you spent a dollar.

And that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is that the testing phase stretches to eight weeks, the client's patience runs out at week six, and they leave believing your agency couldn't deliver. You know the real problem was never your campaigns. The real problem was that neither you nor the client knew who the customer actually was. But the client doesn't see it that way. All they see is that they paid you for two months of work and the numbers aren't where they should be.

Your intake form is asking questions your client cannot answer

This is not a criticism of intake forms. Every agency needs them. The problem is that we've confused collecting information, with doing research.

When you ask a supplement founder "Who is your ideal customer?", you are asking them to do something they almost certainly have not done: rigorous audience research. They are a formulation expert, or an entrepreneur, or a brand enthusiast. They know their product. They believe in their product. But they have never sat down and systematically analyzed which specific human being needs this product, more than any other product on the market.

So, they give you the best answer they have, which is a guess wrapped in demographic language. "Women 35-55 who care about gut health." "Men over 40 who work out and want joint support." "Anyone who wants more energy."

These answers tell you almost nothing useful for campaign targeting. They don't tell you what this person fears. They do not tell you what they have already tried and why it failed. They don't tell you what language makes them stop scrolling. They don't tell you whether this person shops on Amazon or is a DTC buyer. They don't tell you what their spouse thinks about them spending $49 on a supplement. They don't tell you whether this person responds better to clinical authority or community validation.

The demographic is a starting point at best. It is not research. And when you build a campaign on it, you are not targeting. You're hoping.

And here's what makes this even more costly than it used to be. Meta's algorithm doesn't just use your ad set inputs to decide who sees your ads. It increasingly reads the language in your ad copy, the hooks, the pain points you name, the desires you speak to, and uses those signals to help determine who the ad gets shown to. The ad set still matters. Demographics, custom audiences, interest targeting, those inputs still influence delivery. But the creative now plays a much larger role in targeting than it did even two years ago. Which means when you don't know how your customer actually talks, what words they use to describe their problem, what language makes them stop mid-scroll, you're not just writing weaker ads. You're giving the algorithm a weaker signal. Vague ad set inputs plus vague ad copy equals a vague audience. Knowing the customer's language isn't just a copywriting advantage anymore. It's become a targeting advantage.

The question that changes everything

In 25 years of leading brands at Compaq, 5.11 Tactical, and Nutrabolt, I sat through hundreds of marketing reviews. I asked one question more than any other, and it was the question that separated the campaigns that worked from the campaigns that burned budget.

The question was not "What's the ROAS?" or "What's the CPA?" or "Which creative won the A/B test?" Those are optimization questions. They are important. But they assume the foundational work has already been done.

The question was: "Who exactly are we targeting, and how do we know?"

How do we know. That second part is where the conversation usually fell apart.

The agency would say "We're targeting fitness enthusiasts 25-45." I would ask how they determined that. They would say they looked at the competitive landscape, reviewed the product positioning, and combined it with their experience in the category. Which is a polished way of saying: they made an educated guess.

And I would think, but not always say: We are about to spend $200,000 over the next quarter. And the foundation of that spend is a guess?

That gap between what agencies execute and what they know, is the most expensive problem in DTC marketing. It's not a skills gap. The media buyers are talented. The creative teams are strong. The agencies are good at their jobs. The problem is structural: the upstream research required to identify the right customer does not exist in most agency workflows. It is simply not a step in the process. The process jumps from "sign the client" to "launch the campaign" with a thin intake form bridging the two.

What it looks like when you actually know

I worked with a sports memorabilia brand that came to me targeting "collectors and sports fans." Their ROAS was hovering around 3x. Not terrible, not great. They were spending money on broad audiences and letting the algorithm sort it out.

When we dug into the actual data, the answer was much more specific than "collectors and sports fans." The customers who were buying repeatedly, spending the most per order, and referring others shared a very specific profile. The targeting shifted. The ad copy shifted. The landing page shifted. ROAS went from 3x to 12x.

The product didn't change. The campaigns were built on the same platform. What changed was that we stopped targeting a category and started targeting a customer. A specific person with specific motivations, buying at a specific moment in their life, for a specific reason.

That's the difference between a demographic and a target audience. The demographic is a bucket. The target audience is a human being. And when you know the human being, everything downstream gets better: the creative resonates because it speaks their language, the landing page converts because it addresses their specific objection, the email sequence retains, because it reflects their actual buying cycle. You're not optimizing in the dark anymore. You are optimizing toward someone you understand.

The hard truth about agency onboarding

If you run an agency that serves supplement or skincare brands, I am going to say something that might be uncomfortable. It is not a criticism. It is an observation from someone who spent 25 years on the other side of the table.

Most agencies do not have a methodology for identifying the target customer. They have an intake form, competitive research, platform experience, and good instincts. And for a skilled team, that combination can produce strong results. But it is not a methodology. It is a process of elimination funded by the client's ad budget.

The clients who stay are the ones where the process of elimination happened fast enough that they never noticed. The clients who leave are the ones who did notice. And they usually leave without telling you the real reason. They say "We are going in a different direction" or "We are bringing some of this in-house." What they mean is: "I paid you for months and you still couldn't tell me who my customer is."

This is not about your ability. It is about a gap in the process. And closing that gap doesn't require you to become a different kind of agency. It requires adding one step to the beginning of every engagement: real research into who the customer actually is, done with enough rigor that you can build every subsequent decision on it with confidence.

One customer

Every product has one perfect customer. Not a demographic. Not a persona template. One specific human being whose fears, desires, and buying triggers align so precisely with the product that every ad feels like it was written for them, because it was.

Finding that customer before you launch a campaign isn't a luxury. It is the single highest-leverage thing an agency can do for a client. It turns the first 60 days from an expensive guessing game into a targeted execution plan. It turns the agency from a vendor who runs ads, into a partner who understands the business. And it turns a monthly retainer that the client can cancel anytime, into a relationship built on a strategic foundation that no competitor can easily replace.

"Health-conscious adults 25-55" is where the conversation starts. It should never be where the strategy starts.