Knowing your customer base through target audience profiling enables you to make smarter marketing decisions. It informs the creative messaging you create, cuts waste and makes your campaigns more successful.
The best way to learn about a consumer is to talk to them, and market research can help you get started. But don’t stop there.
Market Segmentation
Market segmentation is the process of dividing your audience into specific groups based on their age, gender, income, location and attitudes. This helps you create more personalized campaigns that resonate with your target audience and build brand loyalty.
Without market segmentation, you risk casting your marketing net too wide and wasting your valuable resources. However, performing market segmentation allows you to focus your efforts and increase your ROI. This is important because it will help you make better business decisions for the future. This includes what types of marketing strategies will work and which ones won’t. You will also learn what products and services are most popular with your target audience.
Demographics
The demographics of a target audience are an important consideration when developing a marketing campaign. Demographics are characteristics that can be used to categorize a group of people, such as age, gender, and location. This information allows businesses to craft targeted content that will appeal to a specific segment of the market.
A target audience can also include a persona, which details important information about a fictional character that your business will use to target an advertising or marketing campaign. For example, if your company sells software that can be used across different industries, a target persona may be an influencer or employee who will share a positive message about the company with their network of colleagues.
Psychographics
Unlike demographics, psychographics focus on more personal characteristics such as interests, values and personality traits. This type of audience profiling can help businesses better understand their target market and improve marketing campaigns.
For example, if a company knows that their audience is social and values health and wellness, they can use this information to create targeted advertising and messaging. This will increase their chances of converting customers and growing their business.
Other factors that can be used to profile an audience include hobbies, pastimes and other activities that occupy their time. This could be as simple as what kind of music they like to listen to or how often they attend fitness classes.
Interests
Keeping a profile handy allows a company to create marketing materials that are geared toward the audience, including social media posts and other content. This can also help the business make more informed decisions when contracting out content creation to freelance writers or outside agencies.
Targeting a specific audience also helps a brand to provide more tailored experiences that build customer loyalty and increase revenue over time. This can be as simple as focusing on a certain demographic in your advertising or creating an email newsletter that speaks directly to them.
This method of targeting can even be used to analyze and improve the products and services that a company offers. For example, if one product isn’t selling well amongst a particular audience, a new approach might be necessary.
Attitudes
The more a brand understands the values of their audience, the better they can attract and convert them. For this reason, companies often create a well-rounded audience profile — also known as an audience persona — for each marketing campaign.
This fictitious character is modelled after real-life consumers, and can help marketers craft more effective campaigns. For example, if a company discovers that their target audience likes to be educated about new trends in sales management, they can produce content that speaks to this interest.
Additionally, focusing on the attitudes of an audience can inform their purchasing decisions. For instance, if an audience is sensitive to price changes, it may be best to avoid offering discounts on products they regularly use.
Behaviors
As Orvel Ray Wilson once said, “Marketing is based on what customers want to hear, not what business owners think they should say.” This simple truth makes audience profiling essential for creating successful marketing campaigns.
Understanding customers’ buying behavior allows you to tailor marketing content that makes them feel understood and valued, increasing their loyalty to the brand. This information also helps you prioritize and allocate resources to the most important aspects of your marketing strategy. When paired with robust tracking, like GWIQ, audience profiling enables marketers to measure campaign performance using reliable data that reflects real people, ending the over-reliance on passive tracking and inaccurate assumptions.