Audience profiling: The secret to reaching your ideal customers

By Strategically AI. Reviewed by Rebecca Hey.
Updated December 19, 2022
12 minute read
Generate ready-to-rank articles
Strategically writes and edits long-form content that ranks, helping you get found online.

Picture this: You're out fishing, but you've got the wrong bait on your hook. You cast your line and wait, but the fish aren't biting. And they won't bite unless you change the bait. 

The same problem can arise in marketing and advertising when you're trying to reach the target audience. That's why audience profiling is so important. It's all about identifying the characteristics of your target customers, from demographic details to psychographic traits. With the right profile, you can ensure you're fishing with the right bait.

Audience profiling is a powerful tool in the marketing toolbox. It helps you identify your ideal customers so you can engage with them in the most effective way possible. Whether you're a small business or a Fortune 500 company, understanding your audience's wants, needs, and interests is essential to success.

Read along to learn the purpose, importance, four necessary stages, and the process of creating audience profiling.

What is audience profiling?

Audience profiling is a valuable marketing tool for understanding the characteristics of your target audience and honing your message to speak to them. It's the process of gathering and analyzing information about the people who make up your audience to understand better who they are and what they need.

Profiling the targeted customers is necessary for your marketing efforts to be effective. You need to analyze their behavior across different platforms and touchpoints. It will help you craft messages that resonate with them, creating a better chance of achieving your desired outcomes.

Once you collect your consumer data, you segment them into groups based on similar behaviors. This way, you can create your targeted marketing campaigns.

Some critical factors in collecting audience data are:

  • How does your audience perceive and interact with your brand?
  • What social media platforms does your audience engage with?
  • What is influencing your audience to make purchasing decisions?
  • How was your customer journey on your website?

What are the purposes of audience profiling?

The key purpose of audience profiling is to establish a successful target market for your brand. It offers crucial data on who is buying your products and services. For example, their likes and dislikes, which marketing campaign draws their attention, and what type of content they prefer.

The purposes at a glance are:

  • Understanding your audience better. Knowing who you're targeting will help you create content and campaigns that better meet their needs and wants. 
  • Figuring out what makes your target customers tick. It can include what drives them to purchase your product, what motivates them, and what content they find most engaging. 
  • Identifying trends in the target market. It can give you valuable insight into how your target audience behaves, what they respond to, and what kind of content they're interested in.
  • Creating personalized messaging for your target audience. It can help build relationships with your customers, understand their needs better, and provide a better customer experience.
  • Optimizing your campaigns by finding the most effective channels to reach your target market. You can get the most out of your budget and resources by doing so.

In short, audience profiling aims to know your audience by collecting essential details and data. With its help, you can develop the appropriate marketing strategies to build a successful business.

What makes audience profiling important?

Audience profiles are helpful to know your target customer and beneficial for multiple aspects of a business. For example, it can help you generate effective campaigns, product innovation, accounting, etc.

In addition, you can establish a robust email marketing campaign with the information you have gathered from the audience profile of your target market. It's effective in building a substantial email list to base your campaigns on.

Here are some more benefits of audience profiling that make this strategy important for your business:

  • Allowing you to save money on marketing costs
  • Enabling you to tailor strategies for each segment of your audience
  • Making Holding on to existing customers easier
  • Helping to identify and promote your best-selling products
  • Giving the right push to stand out from the competition
  • Helping you with taking less risky ventures
  • Creating a high return on investment (ROI)

What are the four stages of audience profiling?

Before we move on to the step-by-step guide to establishing your target audience profile, let's learn the four crucial stages of an audience profile. 

These stages help in understanding your target audience and achieving maximum success. 

Segmentation

Your marketing efforts will go to waste if you want to reach everyone. For this reason, you need to segment the audience into smaller sections based on factors such as age, gender, interests, and location.

By targeting your message to specific audiences, you can ensure that it resonates with the people who matter most and drives conversions. Segmentation allows you to tailor your content to meet the needs of your target audience, delivering a more relevant and personalized experience at the right time and in the right channel. 

Investing in audience segmentation can lead to stronger customer loyalty, increased revenue, and improved profitability, making it a powerful asset for any business.

Messaging

At this stage, the focus is on understanding the messages that may effectively engage the target audience. You need to consider the language and tone of voice that will best capture the customers' attention. 

When crafting messaging, consider the target audience's values and motivations, so they feel connected to the brand.

Consider getting help from an eCommerce writing solution or content marketing agency to get your message across. 

Engagement

During the engagement stage, you can observe how your target audience interacts with your content, and use this data to further refine your strategy to suit their needs.

Having data regarding your customer's purchasing journey is invaluable for the marketing campaign. It helps you understand when and where your target audience stops interacting with you.

If you can uncover insights into this engagement, you can improve your message and retarget them.

Measurement

The measurement stage is critical in adjusting your strategies for maximum effectiveness. By tracking the results of your marketing initiatives, you can gain key insights into the impact your activities have on your target audience. Use this information later to identify areas for improvement and adjust your marketing plans accordingly.

Analyzing the influence of your audience profiling will help you understand why your business isn't reaching its full potential. So, you can make the necessary changes that can ultimately drive growth.

How to create audience profiling? (A step-by-step guide)

Have you ever felt overwhelmed when trying to figure out your target audience? If so, you are not alone. 

This step-by-step guide will walk you through the process of creating audience profiling to help you zero in on your perfect customers. Read on to learn the essential steps to create highly impactful audience profiling!

Step 1: Search for possible audiences

The first step in establishing an audience profile is to recognize the possible audiences that will be interested in your products and services. You need to examine the current market to create a list of audiences and then consider who can be interested in your business.

However, indeed you'll encounter some audiences who may not be interested, but still, make a profile of them for the future. Remember to expand your research beyond obvious choices to adapt to future changes.

Step 2: Pick high-priority target audiences

Once the list of possible audiences has been created, divide the ones you'll prioritize the most. Otherwise, it'll drain your audience profiles if you want to reach multiple customer segments at once.

Therefore, focusing on the most relevant groups is necessary to monitor easily. In addition, you must be cautious while developing profiles because only accurate profiling can get the best result.

Step 3: Data collection

This step is like the heart of effective audience profiling. Engaging in data collection is a crucial part as it's the source of your audience's perception. Plus, accurate data is important to build precise profile details.

Wondering where to start? Keep it simple and start with basics like Google analytics. 

This tool makes audience analysis easy by giving information about the number of website visitors on each page, their specific location, gender, age, and other essential insights.

In addition, it gives you a deeper understanding of the channels your visitors are coming from, such as search engines, email newsletters, paid ads, or social media.

However, some software like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) also exists. This platform was designed to build accurate audience profiles and develop relationships with them.

It also works as a living interaction record that helps you to lead toward sales. Although cloud accounting services share similar features to this software, CRM mainly concentrates on customer management. 

However, your targeted campaigns usually determine the type of data you can collect from this source.

Social media channels and YouTube are also excellent platforms for collecting data. Suppose you want to run an advertising campaign on Instagram or Facebook. In that case, you need to collect data from that platform to find the right audience.

Step 4: Examine your competitor

This is another great way of creating an audience profile with accurate data. While collecting data, you may find out your competitor's content. Check which audiences primarily interact with them and what content they prefer most.

You need to make sure your contents are better than your competitors. For example, if your competitors mainly focus on keyword research, you should follow their strategy too.

You can use paid tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or SEMrush for search queries and keyword research. It's a fantastic data-driven method to identify consumers' pain points, issues, necessary topics, and needs.

Again, if their website traffic is interested in content similar to yours, create something better to drive their attention to your website.

This strategy is a counterpart of data collection. The better you understand your audience, the more new customers you can generate through your campaigns.

Step 5: Find out the interests of audiences

Suppose you now have quantifiable data regarding your target audience. But your profiles still need to include something to bring pinpoint accuracy.

In that case, psychographic data plays a crucial role. The data revolve around the consumer's likes and dislikes, interests, attitudes, morals, personality traits, and values.

However, gathering the data is a little challenging, especially when the profiles are long. In that case, invest your time or hire professionals to create a stronger audience persona.

In addition, psychographic data also ensure the maximum impact of your marketing messages and campaigns. It's because you know the preferred tone, language, style, and best approach to specific audiences.

This insight helps you better understand whether your marketing tactics are working and whether your content triggers consumers' emotions. You can also develop a sense of when and where your brand can get sales or disconnect from its audiences.

Step 6: Identify audience behavior and make changes

This is the purpose of audience profiling: know your customers and operate your brand according to their preferences. While collecting data, focus on consumer behavior and separate them into different sections. 

Check if your target audiences face any issues while engaging with your brand or service. These issues can be lousy marketing, improper communication, product issues, service unavailability, etc.

For example, check how many consumers are adding your products to the cart and leaving your website without purchasing. If the numbers are high, it can indicate that they're facing issues during the checkout process.

Try fixing checkout issues and email them that their selected products are still in the cart. If they don't return, it may indicate other problems like high prices, poor customer service, negative experience, etc.

If you can gather more details on consumer behavior, you can improve your services and products accordingly. Therefore, it's necessary to focus on your customer's difficulties besides their preferences while making audience profiles.

In short, identifying their problems will help you change your business strategy to earn the target audience's trust and generate more sales.

Step 7: Assess your audience segmentation

This step includes dividing your audiences into specific demographics. It's because you need to create a target persona after collecting your necessary data. But still, there'll be some oddities.

The purpose of this step is to have a better understanding of what your audience profile includes. If you find any segment hard to reach, take appropriate initiatives to improve your audience profiles.

This way, you can make each audience group more precise with your brand's ideal customers.

Step 8: Examine influencers and audience drivers

Nowadays, internet users mostly believe in social media and YouTube influencers. If any influencer marks a website as authentic, many people will go for it. 

It means these specific groups of individuals have the power to influence your target customers. Therefore, it's necessary to create detailed profiles to target influencers and audience drivers to your brand and attract more new leads through them.

Step 9: Put it all together

The last step of audience profiling is to create the profiles. Once all the research and analyses are done, you can combine all data and build the profiles. Here is an example:

  1. Key demographics: Audience's gender, age, and job title
  2. Key psychographics: Likes, dislikes, interests, attractions, values, and behavior
  3. Difficulties and challenges: What difficulties and challenges your target audience is facing from your brand as well as competitors?
  4. Preferred channels: Browsing platforms, content consumption, activities on search engine
  5. Preferred content types: The more detail you can gather about content preference, the more helpful it is.

Step 10: Keep updating and making changes accordingly

The step is not integral to the creating process, but it's important to follow after creating the profiles.

You must update your branding characteristics according to market trends and audience personality. It will help you to ensure constant growth and correct the mistakes in the audience profiles.

Unfortunately, outdated data in your audience profile can also go south instead of successful results. However, updating profiles won't cost you a fortune; instead, you can generate a good ROI. 

Therefore, it's worth following this step and investing money rather than losing your initial progress.

Conclusion

So you now know the process of creating audience profiles and how important they are in growing your business. This method helps you find your ideal customer and how to make your marketing objectives more effective to draw their attention.

Audience profiling involves understanding and learning about your potential customers, and also helps in increasing conversion rates, sales, and business growth. 

Check out our professional marketing strategy and content writing service that can give your business a real boost. 

Table of Contents
Photo of the author
Rebecca Hey
Founder of Strategically.co, we’ve created over 10 million words of impactful content, driving organic traffic growth for more than 300 businesses.
Create better content
Access the power of AI and the top 1% of human writers to craft, edit and optimise content that Google wants to rank.
Learn more

Like this article? Spread the word

Share via


Finity has a collection of latest 2,500 jobs to join next companies.