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Knowing your target audience is a key step in building a successful brand or business. Your target market or target audience is the group of people who are most likely to want your products or services.
An audience profile or target market profile is a collection of your research into those potential customers, including:
Demographic information
Interests
Buying behavior
Spending power
Barriers to purchase
Pain points and more
Your target market profile will help you define your vision and mission statement, design your brand, and figure out how and when to reach your ideal customer.
How to find your target market
No matter how long you’ve had a business or brand, your marketing strategy should focus on engaging and influencing people in your target market.
Your target audience will be defined by a set of common traits, like where they shop, how old they are, where they live, and what social media platforms they like to use. For example, a high-end pottery studio might be targeting homeowners in their 30s and 40s at a higher income level, in any geographic location.
There are a few ways to get a better understanding of your target audience:
Look at your current customers. Use your website analytics to learn about who’s visiting your website. Or use social media interactions, sales records, and other methods like email marketing surveys and online questionnaires.
Research other brands’ customers. Look at brands in your market or brands with a similar voice and style to yours. Who do they seem to appeal to, and does each brand’s customer base seem to share any common characteristics?
Carry out independent research. Work with a partner to run market research via focus groups, opinion polls, and interviews. Depending on the stage of your business, you can find out what a specific group of people thinks of your brand vs. your competitors or what they’re looking for in your space.
The better your target market research is, the more detailed your customer profile can be. A strong profile will position you to build a brand that connects with your target market.
Read our guide to finding your target audience
What goes in a target market profile?
Once you’ve finished your research, your audience profile should help you understand:
What groups of consumers are interested in your product
How to create marketing messages that appeal to your target audience
How to build brand loyalty with your customers
Collect your audience research and create profiles based on these categories.
Demographic data: This is statistical data relating to your audience’s gender, age, location, annual income, language, education level, marital status, and more.
Interests: Knowing which other brands your audience likes tells you a lot about their tastes. This will help you to shape your brand identity, both tonally and visually.
Social media preferences: Knowing where your audience hangs out online means you can show up in the same spaces, posting content there to drive traffic to your website.
Buying habits: Understand whether your target customers are impulse buyers or people who spend lots of time researching brands, for example. Then you can shape your new product launches and marketing efforts to meet their buying style.
Spending power: How much disposable income does your audience have? This will help you decide whether to position your business as a luxury, budget, or everyday brand.
Frustrations: Study your customers’ pain points, especially what’s not working for their current buying habits. Knowing how your brand can solve their problems will help you speak to their specific market and can also help you with product development.
Barriers to purchase: If your audience isn’t buying from you right now, find out why. Understanding this helps you find solutions to help them overcome that barrier.
Preferred types of content: Is your audience most likely to engage with blog articles? Podcasts? Videos? Targeted content is key to converting your website visitors into your best customers.
Tone of voice: Establish a brand voice that reflects how your audience communicates and encourages them to form an emotional connection with your brand. This helps to turn passive audiences into brand loyalists.
How to segment your audience
Marketing segmentation is when you create subgroups within your target audience based on shared characteristics, preferences, or behaviors. Segmenting your audience helps you focus your marketing plan or business plan. With segments, it’s easier to address how your products or services appeal to just a few different types of people.
For example, the generational differences between a college student and a retiree might change the way they interact with and experience your brand. While both might be part of your target audience, they might not be interested in your products or services for the same reasons, or be drawn to the same marketing or product messaging.
Finding a way to speak to the needs of both segments will help you create more effective messaging than if you were trying to speak to a more generic audience profile.
Creating buyer personas
Once you have a clear understanding of what your audience segments look like, start to develop buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters based on your segmented audience data. A buyer persona will help you imagine a fully realized person when you share updates, choose brand designs, and think about who your new products are for.
Give your buyer persona(s) their own nickname or even their own avatar. For example, one buyer persona might be called "Frugal Frank."
Frugal Frank might be a male in their 30s with a steady career and income who likes to do thorough research before spending his hard-earned money. He wants to understand the benefits and form his own opinions before making a choice.
That might help you create some marketing campaigns targeted at Frugal Frank that quickly show the many benefits of your product or service. Your tone toward him should be helpful and respectful of his desire to consider all options.
It’s all about seeing how a persona comes into contact with your brand, what motivates them to feel something about it, and what will get them to take the next step with you.
When you have a complete picture of the buyer personas you’re speaking to, you are in a much stronger position to start developing branded content that both delights your customers and speaks to their needs. This is the key to becoming one of their trusted brands.
Learn about the stages of marketing to your customers
This post was updated on July 3, 2023.