How to Build an Audience Profile: A Step-By-Step Guide

Have you ever lost an item in your home? Have you ever wondered if you’ve been searching in all the places but not the right one? For example, if you lost your favorite pillow, why would you search for it in the bathroom, attic, or basement?

Whenever you try to do marketing for your business, you should always know who to market for, otherwise, you’d be talking to the wrong people and ultimately getting nothing for the effort that you’ve put in.

The old saying in the world of marketing stays true to this day “always know the audience that you market for.” If you do know, then you will be doing a favor not only for your business but also to the people that actually need the products and services that you offer.

Audience profiling is exactly like knowing who you want to sell to. Building it is one of the most critical points in establishing a growth hacking strategy for a growing business.

In this article, you’ll see some examples of different businesses in varying industries to better illustrate how you can use audience profiling almost everywhere.

The Purpose of An Audience Profile

An audience profile is one of the key points in creating a successful market for your business.

It provides you an overall view of “who” you are selling your products or services to. What they like, and dislike, what content works best for them, and which marketing strategies most effectively meet their attention?

It’s a lot like trying to know a person – sure you can ask them a lot of questions and keep note of their answers on what they like and dislike, but at the end of the day, that’s just details. It’s not knowing entirely who your audience is.

Audience profiling is establishing a relationship with specific groups of people that affect your business. With this relationship, you can craft appropriate strategies to maximize these influencers to grow your business further.

The Benefits of Establishing an Audience Profile

Aside from knowing your audience, profiling can generally help you with almost any aspect of your business, from marketing, product innovation, customer support, accounting, and many more.

For example, with the information you’ve received from researching a specific audience profile of your target market, you can easily create a successful email marketing campaign solely relying on their preference from a design and technical standpoint.

You won’t have to shoot blindly in the dark, not knowing which tactics work best because you have all the information that you would need from an audience profile.

It’s one of the best ways to grow an email list organically.

But there are a lot more benefits, such as:

• Retaining existing customers
• Promoting your products and services
• Penetrating new markets
• Staying competitive
• Establishing a high ROI
• Cost-efficient strategies
• Less risky ventures
  

Establishing an audience profile provides you with much-needed information to make the right choices. With almost anything related to decision-making, the more information you have increased the chances of being successful with your business ventures.

Building Your Audience Profile

Creating your own audience profile can take a bit of effort the first time you do it, but it isn’t impossible. Once you get the ball rolling, it gets a lot easier from then on.

So, let’s get straight into it. How do you actually go about building your audience profile for your business?

Here is a step-by-step guide to creating your very own audience profile.

Search For Possible Audiences

First and foremost, you have to identify the possible audiences that you will be targeting. Identify key groups that you think would directly benefit from your products and services.

Look at the current market and circumstances that are happening in the business world and brainstorm. Certain groups that initially wouldn’t even be a possible audience for your business might just be the most interested ones in a specific situation.

For example, real estate agencies might be in the market for a CRM with predictive dialers for cold-calling as they are currently looking for interested buyers for their hot properties.

Whenever you are thinking about possible audiences to profile, don’t limit your scope to the most obvious choices but also adapt to present or potential future circumstances.

Selecting Your High-Priority Target Audience

Once you’ve established a group of possible audiences to target, you should always make sure to set one as a priority. Trying to target multiple audiences at once to profile can drain a lot of resources and manpower.

It’s important to focus only on one at a time to properly allocate and monitor the process. Ensuring that the entire process is correct in the details and characteristics is the most crucial aspect of creating an audience profile.

Establishing an audience profile would be a great start for a couple of reasons. Let’s look at this in more detail::

• They have a direct effect on customers
• They can sway the preferences of other audiences
• They have a large hold on the platform
• You can influence or control their behavior

Engage in Data Collection

Data collection is an important part of audience profiling as it is the source on which you base your entire perception of the audience you have—creating an image of “who” your audience is essential and making it as accurate as possible to emulate the real world.

You can start with basic items such as Google Analytics to determine the demographic and the numbers related to website visitors and traffic. If you are using other platforms such as Youtube or social media platforms, then there are appropriate analytics platforms for those as well.

Another great way for data collection is to get yourself a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. These are platforms purposely made for creating audience profiles and establishing relationships with your customer analytically.

These are quite similar to cloud accounting services but more focused on customer management.

The data that you intend to collect pretty much depends on the type of campaign that you are going to run.

For example, if you are interested in growing your channel on video-sharing platforms like Youtube, then you should focus on exploring the data located there.

Your data collection might show your competition’s content, and you can use that as a benchmark as to how you can improve and be better than them. If you notice that the competition is using camera stabilizers and rigs to improve their video production, then you can imitate their strategy.

If you see your viewers are interested in other content that is closely related to yours, you can create your own videos about the same topic to aggregate their attention to your channel.

There’s a lot you can do with data collection to profile your audience and see how you can create appropriate strategies to counter competitors and maximize your own gains.

It’s simply a matter of diving deep into research on your audience.

Pinpoint Audience Preference

Now, let’s say that you’ve finished with the quantifiable data from your data collection schemes. You got all the information that you need, but some things are still missing. Your audience profile still lacks personality.

This is where psychographics comes into play.

Psychographics is the data related to anything around a person’s likes, dislikes, interests, morals, values, attitudes, and overall personality. Now, that’s not really easy data to digest, especially considering that your audience profile includes a lot of individuals, but at the very least, you now have a gist of their entire personality if you combine everything.

Knowing these things can highly impact your marketing messaging and branding. You can find out what language to use, what style, and how you approach this specific type of audience.

This is an added insight to your marketing strategies as well because this will tell you whether or not your strategies are hitting the right emotions and targets as opposed to being stale to your audience.

Statistics show that during Black Friday, shoppers spend around $9 billion alone. This is according to one study done by Adobe Data.

Black Friday is single-handedly the highest individual day of eCommerce sales that a business can get in an entire year. This trend has constantly been rising from the measly $2 billion sales from 2013, and it is only getting higher.

It goes without saying that if you’re an eCommerce site, you’d best be maximizing your potential sales during Black Friday. If you have an audience profile and you know exactly what messaging and branding you can use, then you are sure to meet that goal quite easily.

Sending out targeted adverts, promotions, email blasting, and even prompting your web developers in designing your website to match the Black Friday sale theme are great ways to gather more attention to your site and get the most out of your customers.

Knowing what your audience loves and what they hate is a great way to stay on their good side because not only can you retain customers but also attract more of the same.

Identify Audience Difficulties & Challenges

Once you have grasped what your audience prefers, it’s important to move on to the next step, which is getting to know the difficulties and challenges that they face whenever they engage with your business.

These difficulties and challenges can range from a wide variety of things such as bad engagement with your business, marketing blunders, service unavailability, product issues, and more.

Suppose your business is getting a lot of shoppers that haven’t proceeded with the checkout phase and usually just stop with their items in the cart. In that case, that’s a sign that they are generally facing difficulty along the process of buying your products.

There can be a multitude of solutions to fix this issue. The first and foremost step is just to get a cart abandonment email service to send them prompts about the items still in their cart.

If that doesn’t work, then that means something else is wrong, and this can be caused by a wide range of things such as price issues, product unavailability, lack of customer support, negative user experience, and many more.

Having this data on your audience profiles can greatly impact your capacity to improve your products and services. Focusing not only on their preferences but also on their challenges provides you with a much clearer picture of what not to do with your business strategies.

If you notice that your high-priority audience target doesn’t react well to price changes, then it might be best not to drastically change the pricing of your s products or services and think about another strategy altogether.

This gives your business a better idea of the personality of the audience persona that you are creating for your profile.

Evaluate Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is a lot like audience profiling but you split it up further into specific groups. The reason for this is that while you’ve already gathered all the necessary data that you need to create a persona, you can’t deny that there are still outliers that just won’t fit.

Audience segmentation allows you to have a much more in-depth view of what your profile contains. If a particular segment of your profile is much harder to reach, then you can appropriate a specific strategy to maximize your potential in that particular niche audience.

Examine Influencers & Audience Drivers

For any audience that you create, you will also face influencers and audience drivers. These are specific individuals or groups that have a large influence and bearing on what your audience thinks of your business.

They have a large sway on what the general opinion of an audience has on your products and services, which makes them all the more important whenever you are trying to retain or attract new customers.

Constantly Update & Change

Keeping up with the growth of your business, the changing market trends, and the changing personalities of your customers is a must in keeping an accurate audience profile.

After you’ve successfully implemented an audience profile for your business, you must always make sure that it is updated to ensure the accuracy of details.

Outdated audience profiles can cause more harm than good as stale marketing strategies are not only ineffective but can also hamper innovation and growth because of the simple fact that your audience profiles lead to an entirely different result in achieving results.

However, you don’t have to spend too much of your resources on updating your existing audience profiles.

Updating your audience profiles won’t be too costly and can be a good return on investment in the long run. Losing your initial progress would simply be just too much of a waste of time and resources.

Conclusion

Audience profiles are a critical aspect of any business. If you are planning to grow and build relationships with your market, then the best way to go through with this is to create audience profiles for your business.

Simply being involved in data collection and learning audience preferences can already go a long way in learning and grabbing valuable information about who you sell your products and services to, giving you much leverage in executing important strategies to be successful.