With nearly 8 billion vast and unique people on the planet, it’s essentially impossible that your brand can reach all audiences. That’s why most brands have a target audience — a demographic that is most likely to be interested in the products or services your brand provides. By knowing your target audience, you can make your marketing more relevant and therefore more effective.

It can sometimes be helpful to put a face to your target audience, rather than looking at data. That’s why many marketers create target audience profiles.

What Is a Target Audience Profile?

A target audience profile offers a breakdown of your ideal customer. In creating a target audience profile, you conjure a fictional character within the demographics of your target audience. From there, you break down that character’s wants and needs, as well as the goals that could be getting in the way of those needs. How would your music platform make it easier for indie musician John Jams to promote his new album, for instance?

Why Make a Target Audience Profile?

A target audience profile can be a fun creative exercise, but it can also help you gain valuable insights into your target audience and how to reach them. You can use those target audience profiles going forward when you work with marketers, giving them a sense of the type of person you expect your marketing to reach. Here are a few reasons to make a target audience profile:

• Gain more leads by tailoring your marketing to the audiences most likely to take an interest in your brand.
• Create targeted ads that relate specifically to your target audiences, thus boosting revenue.
• Raise the quality of your content marketing by having a specific audience in mind.
• Enhance your storytelling in presentations to shareholders.

What Is Included In a Target Audience Profile?

A target audience profile often begins with a name that is easy to remember and speaks to the demographic. Something like John Jams for an indie musician demographic, Investor Isaac, Or Adelaide Author. From there, you build a character profile of their preferences, goals, behaviors, and current issues.

Beginning with the demographics, you will need:

• Name
• Age
• Profession and income
• Family
• Location

Next, you dive deeper into creating the character. Imagine them throughout their daily life. Imagine what they do on their day off. What do they like? What do they dislike? What is important to them? This may include:

• Values
• Goals
• Behaviors and habits
• Media that they consume
• Social media
• Challenges

From there, brush off your creative writing skills a bit to write out a story. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, of course. Just a paragraph or two should do. Explain the issue that your character might be having and how that gets in the way of their goals. Envision them finding your brand through one of your marketing strategies and deciding to make a purchase. Then give them a happy ending: because they used your products or services, they were able to overcome their challenge and reach their goals.

Tips For a Great Target Audience Profile

Those steps above give you an idea of how to create an audience profile. But you can really elevate that audience profile to get the best results by following a few handy tricks.

Take Inspiration From Your Actual Audience

Consider conducting a customer survey, perhaps offering a discount or some other reward as an incentive. Once you’ve compiled the results, you can look for common threads. Maybe it’s the way that your current audience found your brand, or why they chose to purchase your products or services. Use this as a jumping off point for your audience persona. You can also gather this information from collected data through app interactions or social media.

Look At Customer Reviews

Another way to find inspiration from your actual audience is to take a look at your customer reviews. These reviews often tell the story of the customer already. You can pull from these reviews to develop the story of how your audience persona would reach the happy ending to their goals with help form your company…because your real customers already have.

Pull From Industry Data

Don’t just use your own past customers. Take a look at data from the customers of your competitors, as well as from industry research about the demographics of your target audience. This will help you to keep from becoming too tunnel-visioned or locking yourself into the same set of customers, without the opportunity for growth.