How to Create an Audience Profile, And Why You Should [+Examples]

Determining your audience profile is a critical step in ensuring that your campaign is successful.

With an audience profile, you can personalize your campaign messages to reach those most likely to convert and limit the amount of money you might otherwise have wasted on poorly performing ads.

Here you can find out what information you need to include in a target group profile, how to create a target group profile and examples of target group profiles.

We’ll also look at a media audience profile and explain how you can use this type of profile to increase the success of your paid advertising campaigns.

But first – what is an audience profile anyway?

What information should I include in a target group profile?

When creating an audience profile, you need to provide the following:

• Demographic information: This includes personal characteristics such as geography, age, education, occupation and income.
• Psychographic information: This includes attributes related to personality traits, interests, attitudes or beliefs, and lifestyle.
• Goals, challenges or weak points: In this section, determine the goals, challenges or weaknesses of your target group in relation to your product or service. How can your product or service meet your audience’s needs? What search queries does your target group use to find your product or service? For example, if you’re selling an 8-week mindfulness program, your fictional character is likely facing a major challenge in focusing on the present moment and finding time to ground themselves.
• values: What does your target group value? This includes values ​​and motivators in the overall picture such as “nature”, “sociability”, “sense of belonging” or “autonomy at work”.
• Preferred channels: Which channels do your audience spend the most? These can be social channels like YouTube or Instagram or search engines like Google. The preferred channel depends on the type of campaign you are running. For example, if you’re running a paid advertising campaign, you’ll want to see if your audience spends most of their time on Facebook, Google, or some other place.
• Preferred content types.: Once your audience has found your content, what format would they prefer it in? E-books, blog posts or case studies? Or podcast? Video? When you determine the format, you can best serve your audience.
• Buying behavior: Are your audiences impulsive or do they take weeks, if not months, to make a purchase? Are they open for your product or service at any time of the year or only at a certain time of the year? For example, if you sell lounge chairs, your target audience is likely to be relatively impulsive during the summer months when a lounge chair is most needed.

It’s important to note that an audience profile is different from a target market or buyer personality.

A target market includes every single potential buyer for your product or service. For example, maybe you sell software that can be used for different use cases in different industries. In this case, a target market includes the potential customers in each industry who could benefit from your product – all with different needs, goals, challenges, and beliefs.

An audience profile is against it one fictional person whom you are targeting with an upcoming campaign.

An audience profile is also not a buyer personality. A buyer personality is the ultimate person who will ultimately buy your product or service. In many cases, however, you want to market to anyone who can influence the end buyer. For example, your audience profile could be a social media manager, even though the buyer personality is the CMO of a company as they have to permanently opt out.

Next, let’s examine how you can create an audience profile.

How to write an audience profile

1. Determine the goals of your upcoming campaign.

Before you create your audience profile, you want to know who you are targeting with your marketing campaign.

For example, are you creating high-intent advertisements to target buyers with your product or service? Or, alternatively, do you hope to increase the number of attendees at an upcoming marketing event?

Depending on your goals, you create a different audience profile. If you want to increase sales of your product through a social media advertising campaign, your audience profile will be similar to your buyer personality.

If instead you want to increase the number of views on your YouTube channel, your audience profile will look like a fictional character based on your YouTube analytics to determine who likes to watch your content.

2. Immerse yourself in analytics.

Once you’ve set your campaign goal, use data and analytics to prototype yourself.

Start with Google Analytics to find demographic information about your website visitors. Make a note of your age, gender, location, and device types. Also, determine which channels are reaching your audience. Is it usually organic search, social channel, email, or paid advertising?

You can also use CRM data to further study what customers are converting at the highest rate. For example, you can use your CRM to determine which industries are getting the most conversions or which pages have the highest conversion rate to refine your audience profile based on the behavior of existing customers.

Finally, use channel-specific metrics to fill in the missing parts. If you’re planning to run a Google ad campaign, you can look back at previous high-performing ads and see who clicked those ads.

Alternatively, if you’re running a Facebook campaign, you can use Facebook’s lookalike audience feature to reach out to people who are similar to your best existing customers.

3. Use qualitative metrics to determine your audience’s greatest challenges.

To fill in the Challenges / Goals / Vulnerabilities section in your audience profile, you should look at customer reviews or focus group information to identify the biggest challenges your prospects are facing.

Keyword research can also help you find high intent keywords related to your product or service. That way, you can also identify the greatest challenges facing your target audience.

For example, let’s say you’re creating a new ad campaign for a social media listening and scheduling tool.

You can first use Ahrefs or another keyword explorer tool to identify questions that are asked related to a specific search query. In this example, I searched for “social media tools” to find similar questions about the search term:

I also searched for “Social Media Tools” on Google and looked at the “People Also Ask” feature to delve deeper into questions, weaknesses and challenges related to social media tools:

Combined with your qualitative, customer-centric research, you can uncover your audience’s biggest challenges and how you should tailor your campaign to address those weaknesses.

4. Collect psychographic data using Google Trends or industry influencers.

If you work for a B2C company, you should consume content from top influencers in a specific industry in order to uncover psychographic data for your audience profile.

For example, if you sell fitness equipment, take a look at the social profiles and blog posts of the top fitness influencers. What are you interested in? What do you value? What activities do they do on a particular day? These characteristics can help you to round off your target group profile.

If you work for a B2B company, you can read industry case studies, reports, or webinars to help identify your target’s interests, values, and behaviors in a particular industry.

An example of this is “2020 Trends in Sales Management” when you want to address sales managers in your target company.

Are you ready to create your own audience profiles? Let’s look at two examples that you can use as inspiration before making your own.

Examples of target group profiles

1. Example of a B2B audience profile: Marketing Maria

2. Example of a B2C target group profile: Athletic Andy

Media audience profile

Media planning and buying cannot be possible without an audience profile.

For example, buying media – buying campaigns or advertising space on different channels, or sharing targeted campaigns and ads – cannot be done without media planning.

Media planning is essentially about “determining how, when, where and why your company shares media with you audience. The process includes deciding which media to share on which channels to increase reach, engagements, conversions, ROI and more. “

Ultimately, both media planning and media buying require a pre-defined audience to be successful. If you haven’t taken the time to create an audience profile before purchasing ad space, you run the risk of wasting money and resources on audiences who won’t end up converting anyway.

An audience profile can affect where you show your ads. For example, if you’ve created an audience profile, your audience personality may be spending most of the time on LinkedIn. LinkedIn advertising solutions are the best way to reach your target audience.

An audience profile also influences the design of your ad. You want to create a copy of the ad based on the interests, weaknesses, and preferences of your target audience. You cannot do this until you have created an audience profile.

For example, The Economist may have created an audience profile and found that audiences like education and knowledge but don’t like dealing with too much negativity, especially from news outlets. So a simple slogan, “Brighter Days Ahead”, helps attract and convert the right audience through their ads.

Ultimately, your audience profile is an important foundation for ensuring that you are effectively attracting and converting those who are best for your brand.

However, an audience profile can vary depending on the campaign. So you can bookmark this post for the next time you need to change your audience profile for a new advertising or marketing campaign.