“Our audience is everyone” is the most common answer to the audience question, and almost always the wrong one. It sounds ambitious. It is actually an avoidance of the decision.
Targeting everyone does not widen your reach. It weakens your message, because a message written to offend nobody ends up meaning nothing to anybody in particular.
Specific messages travel further
This is the part that feels counterintuitive. Narrowing who you speak to usually increases how many people respond, because specific language is more persuasive than general language. A message written precisely for one kind of person is overheard by many others, and the ones it was not written for still understand what you stand for.
Generic messages are not overheard by anyone. There is nothing to overhear.
Targeting is not the same as excluding
Deciding who you are for does not mean refusing everyone else’s money. It means deciding whose problem you are going to lead with, whose language you are going to use, and whose objection you are going to answer first.
Everyone else is still welcome. They are simply not the person the sentence was written for.
The real cost
Broad targeting is comfortable because it forecloses nothing and requires no argument. But it produces campaigns that need enormous budgets to work at all, because they are not doing any persuasive work themselves. You end up paying media to compensate for a decision nobody wanted to make.
Choosing is cheaper. It is just harder to agree on.