7 Steps to Create an Audience Profile for Your Brand

In this guide, we’ll look at creating an audience profile as part of building a successful marketing strategy.

You can’t just spray and pray with your marketing messaging – you need to be strategic and know who you’re communicating with. Creating an audience profile is the first step in understanding your target market.

Let’s get started!

What Is An Audience Profile?

A target audience profile is an influential tool for determining exactly who your customer base should be. By exploring consumer habits and activities on multiple platforms, this strategy unlocks a wealth of information about your customers about your business.

Businesses can craft customised marketing campaigns that yield higher engagement and response rates by segmenting potential customers into groups and highlighting their shared similarities.

By building campaigns around each market segment, success is optimised, and personal attributes about your customer base will improve.

It allows you to answer questions such as:

• Are we effectively appealing to the audience that matters most?
• How do our customers view and understand our brand?
• What role does our audience play in engaging with our brand?
• How do they typically spend their days?
• What platforms does our target audience use to engage and interact?
• What factors drive our audience’s purchasing decisions?
• What does our customer funnel look like?

You can construct targeted campaigns that will appeal to and engage your customers by utilising the answers to these questions.

What You Need For An Audience Profile

To ensure that you have a well-rounded understanding of your target audience.

Demographic Data

• These are personal characteristics such as spatial location, age group, educational background, job role and income level.

Psychographic data

• This encompasses a variety of characteristics associated with an individual’s personality, interests, values, and way of living.

Pain Points

• In this section, consider how precisely your product or service caters to the needs of its users. What ambitions, troubles, or issues does your target audience have that your product could solve? What words might they type into search engines to find what you are offering?

Audience Values

• What do your targeted consumers appreciate? Think of the greater-picture values that motivate them, such as “the environment”, “interacting with others”, “feeling part of something bigger than themselves,” or “independence in their job”.

Preferred Channels

• For maximum success, it’s essential to identify your audience’s preferred channels. These could be social media sites like YouTube or Instagram and search engines like Google. Depending on the type of campaign you’re running – for example, a paid advertising one- you’ll need to find out if their time is mainly spent on Facebook, Google or any other platform.

Preferred Content

• If you wish to satisfy your audience, it’s necessary to understand the best content format for them. Would they prefer e-books, blog posts, case studies or something more interactive like podcasts and videos? Discovering the correct format will ensure that your readers’ needs are met.

Buying Behaviour

• Suppose you’re selling a t-shirt range; in this case, your target audience is likely to act impulsively while searching during the peak summer season. Does the demand for your product swiftly change during different times of the year? Do your customers require extended periods before buying from you, or do they take decisions quickly?

Target Vs Audience

It’s essential to differentiate between an audience persona and a target market.

Target Market

A target market includes all potential buyers for your product or service, regardless of their needs, goals, challenges, and beliefs.

For example, if you sell software that can be used in different industries with varied use cases, your target market will consist of prospects from each sector who could benefit from it.

Audience profile

In contrast, an audience profile is a fictitious customer you target with your forthcoming campaign.

Whilst a buyer persona pinpoints the person making the ultimate purchase, an audience profile is somewhat different. You will likely want to target those who can influence this buying decision – such as one of their social media directors or managers.

For example, if we were targeting a particular company’s CMO for a product or service, it would be wise to first market to all staff who could sway them in either direction.

Key Considerations

How To Create An Audience Profile

1. Define Your Audience Members

Before effectively communicating with any audience, you must accurately identify and understand who your target audience is.

Knowing your audience will allow you to craft the perfect message. Know their likes, dislikes, cultural cues and typical language style, which will pay dividends as you strategise your campaign.

After mapping out a profile of your target audience, you’re ready to start engaging with them in entertaining and efficient ways. Time to get witty!

2. Research Your Audience

If you’re looking to create a compelling audience profile, research is vital. Knowing your target audience and their motivations will give you invaluable insight into what makes them tick.

Reach out with polls or surveys, which can help with even more insight than relying solely on observations. Think of it as actively uncovering data points from the ground rather than developing a static personification in your mind.

Uncovering all of these details about your target audience helps you create a better profile for them and serves as the foundation for crafting powerful campaigns that speak directly to their needs, wants, values and feelings.

3. Create A Buyer Persona

Creating a buyer persona is essential for crafting and delivering marketing messages that resonate with your desired target audience. It helps you understand the demographics and psychology behind who will likely purchase your product or service and allows you to tailor your messaging and approach to specific groups.

4. Audience Motivations

To create a compelling audience profile, you need to understand what motivates your target. To start with, learn about the interests and values of your desired demographic – everything from their favourite TV shows to their spending habits.

While gathering this information may take some effort, it provides insight into why they buy certain products and services, ultimately shaping your marketing strategy. Determining who you’re trying to reach and what drives them can be the difference between success and failure.

5. Target Social Channels

If you want to target the right audience, you have to know where they hang out online. It’s like knowing the hottest club in town.

Know where your demographic hangs out online and where they spend their digital time. Many tools are available to help maximise your search and uncover the places they mingle on the web.

6. Preferred Content

When understanding what content resonates, creating an audience profile first is key. Establish the persona of your ideal customer using demographic information and interests.

Crafting an effective audience profile doesn’t always need to be daunting. Not only will it save time and hassle (not to mention budget) in the long run, but you can focus your content and communication on the right people for your business.

How to Write an Audience Profile

1. Define Campaign Goals

For a well-targeted marketing campaign to be successful, it’s essential to know who it’s aimed at. And putting together a comprehensive audience profile will provide this necessary insight.

Depending on your objectives, your audience profile will differ. Are you aiming to target buyers with advertisements for a product or service? Or are you attempting to increase the number of people attending an event?

This audience profile should reflect your buyer persona if you want to generate more sales with a social media advertising campaign.

2. Uncover Analytic Insights

After establishing your desired campaign goal, leverage data and analytics to form a prototype of your target persona.

Use Google Analytics to discover valuable demographic details about your website visitors, such as age, gender, location and device type. Identify which channels drive traffic to your site – organic search results, social media platforms, emails or paid advertising?

Knowing where users come from will help you create well-targeted campaigns that lead to successful outcomes.

You can identify which customers produce the highest conversion rate with CRM data. For example, you could use this information to determine the industries that convert at a higher rate or even which pages yield more conversions; these analyses will help refine your customer profile based on existing behaviours.

3. Uncover Audience Pain Points By Utilising Qualitative Metrics

To better understand your audience’s pain points, desires, and goals, peruse customer reviews or focus group reports to identify their primary struggles.

With some simple keyword research, you can unearth valuable high-intent keywords related to your products or services, enabling you to identify your audience’s most significant struggles quickly. Plus, it will help determine the keywords for your SEO.

4. Uncover Psychographic Insights

Using Google Trends Or Industry Influencers, tap into the knowledge of influential leaders in your field to inform and shape your audience profile with valuable psychographic data.

If you offer Yoga products, look at their social profiles and blog posts. What are their concerns? What is their daily life like?

These characteristics will help you understand their interests, values, and behaviours to effectively engage your audience.

Wrap Up

There’s quite a bit to digest here – so plan your work and work your plan!

Creating audience profiles is an essential process to remain competitive. It helps marketers and business owners understand their customer base and provides valuable insights on what messaging works best. By gathering customer data and refining it through market research and psychographic insights, you can create a comprehensive and effective customer profile, enabling you to tailor campaigns with higher success.

As you evolve your business, adjust and shape it to remain relevant. This tactic, when done consistently, strengthens a brand over time with brand ambassadors emerging from your audience. And that’s the Holy Grail.

Brand ambassadors enthusiastically connect with the ideology of your brand identity. Part of human psychology is to share what we learn. And this is where these brand evangelists come into their own – these are your best salespeople!

So go out there and be one with your audience – they’re waiting for you.

FAQ

What Is An Audience Profile

Audience profiling is the essential step of collecting and organising customer data into distinct clusters with shared traits so that you can gain insight into your customers to craft targeted campaigns for maximum results.

What Is An Example Of An Audience Profile

To understand your target audience, investigate their demographics, purchasing habits, and motivation for buying. Let’s say you’re targeting single women in their twenties who make more than $30K per year – what is a need they have that your product could solve?

What are the two things to consider in audience profiling?

• Demographics include details such as location, age group, educational background, job type and salary range.
• Psychographics – This category comprises characteristics such as personality, interests, opinions or convictions, and lifestyle.

Piers H. Gardener

Piers H. Gardener is a marketing professional with over 25 years client and agency environments. As well as writing about marketing strategies, he’s also Head of Marketing for a global tech company.