Defined by example
People in the target audience are united by a need. In the WEB need is expressed in the query that a person enters into the Google search box.. While the need is not fully formed, potential customers are looking for information on forums, blogs and social networks. We can divide the Internet audience into groups of potential customers at different stages of decision making. To more accurately determine the needs of the group, it is divided into segments by gender, age, financial status, field of activity and so on. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Example of Target Audience Definition
Let’s consider a method for defining the target audience (TA) for a Digital Marketing consultant in Minsk.
The methodology is as follows: we need to create a basic description of target users – without specifics. Next, we determine why the audience is interested in internet marketing. And only then, we analyze how they would search for information about Digital Marketing and at what stage of the search they might need consulting services.
Demographic characteristics (example):
- City residents: …
- Presumably, residents of the ______ districts;
- Men and women aged 25 to 38;
- Middle managers / Entrepreneurs / Office workers;
- Places they visit most often;
- …
Motivation (theses):
- Want to improve their personal brand, but don’t know where to start;
- Looking for tools to promote their projects online;
- Employees at a company that deals with promotion;
- Freelancers who have not encountered setting up advertising;
- ….
Wordstat queries
- SMM promotion
- Setting up ads on Instagram
- Setting up WEB analytics
- ….
Regarding the amount of information – the more we know about the needs of our potential clients, the easier it is for us to find a way to satisfy them. So there are no limitations in this matter.
Methods for Defining Target Audience
The target audience on the internet can be represented as users of search engines, social networks, email clients, or large industry portals. There are many platforms where you can interact with potential clients. One way or another, the methods for searching for information, as well as our interaction with users, will be different for each of them.
Conclusions: audience
We recommend creating the most detailed description – a portrait of a potential client (Customer Profile), which includes their interests, problems, tasks, social and demographic characteristics.
The most effective approach would be to compile and analyze the profiles of your real customers online.
What is a Customer Profile
A Customer Profile, or Customer Profile, is a representation of a real buyer for whom your product solves a problem. A customer profile differs from a target audience description in that it provides a more detailed characterization of the user representing a specific segment of the audience.
Why You Need a Customer Profile
- – Finding new customers. The consumer profile is compared with new users, and the database is sorted into potential customers and interested parties who may purchase your product later or forget about your company. This way, you immediately see the person who needs your product now and the one who is considering purchasing it in the future.
- – Personalized offers. With a detailed customer profile, you can create more suitable commercial offers, advertisements, content on your website, and email newsletters based on their interests and pain points. In other words, it will be easier for you to create a unique offer, find a trigger, and prepare an offer.
- – Choosing promotion channels. The target audience profile helps you understand which channels users come from and what devices they use. The image reflects the psychology of customer behavior. This can be used to strengthen existing promotion channels or launch new ones.
- – Setting priorities. The customer avatar helps the sales department understand who they are talking to – a potential buyer or an interested user. It also helps them decide how to conduct the dialogue and which product to offer.
- – Focusing on a unified strategy. After obtaining the customer image, you can focus on the company’s strategy and choose the direction of business development. The customer profile helps you understand which product to emphasize because most of the target audience chooses it.
Below is a customer profile. An example that shows the goals, motivations, and problems of the user. Alexey is looking for a music school or a professional bass guitarist. Goal: to consolidate knowledge and understand in which direction to move to write his own music.
What Makes Up a Customer Profile
To create a consumer profile, a number of characteristics are used. For retail and B2C, this will be the user’s personal data, and for B2B, we take the characteristics of the person who makes the decision about cooperation, information about the company, and its activities. Let’s figure out how to describe the target audience.
B2C Audience Profile
There are several characteristics, usually divided into four groups.Demographic Characteristics:
- – Client age.
- – Gender.
- – Ethnicity.
- – Nationality.
- – Religious beliefs.
- – Marital status.
- – To sell alcohol, the user profile must be 18 years old or older.
- – Knowing marital status, you can target singles for advertising a dating site app.
Geographic Location:
- – Climate conditions.
- – Location.
- – Cultural characteristics and local features.
- – Knowing the climatic conditions, we can increase sales of snowboards and ski equipment.
- – Cultural characteristics allow us to learn about local holidays. This will help increase sales of gift sets – Metallurgist Day, Valentine’s Day, Halloween. Or turn off ads and not waste budget on products that are not in demand these days.
Psychographics:
- – Emotions.
- – Motivations.
- – Interests.
- – Problems.
- – Values.
- – Habits.
- – Knowing the interests and problems of the consumer, you can create a unique offer that will solve the client’s problem: a gaming laptop takes up less space, while it is not inferior in performance to a stationary computer for gamers.
- – The habit of people constantly fidgeting with something in their hands allowed spinners to become a hit in 2017.
Socio-Economic Data:
- – Income level.
- – Education.
- – Profession.
- – Place of work.
- – Living conditions.
- – Income level allows you to allocate product categories by price: economy, medium, and premium.
- – Knowing the profession, you can offer users a course to improve their skills.
Behavioral Factors:
- – Reasons for purchase.
- – Average consumer check.
- – Seasonality of sales.
- – Consumer set of products.
- – Knowing the set of products, you can make a consumer basket for a week and advertise it on the food delivery website.
- – Seasonality helps to track the peak sales of demi-season jackets.
B2B Customer Profile
The image of the client in the B2B sphere is the person in the company who makes decisions, data about the organization, and its activities. Let’s figure out how to create a target audience profile for wholesale companies, manufacturers, and distributors. The profile includes the following data:- – Position of the employee who makes the decision.
- – Business needs. They can be internal and external. Let’s use an example to explain how to distinguish between needs: internal ones are the organization of workspace in the office, external ones are cooperation with a company for the delivery of goods for the company’s clients.
- – Company size – one office or a network of enterprises around the world.
- – Region of coverage: by city, by country, or worldwide.
- – Company activity.
- – Total number of employees.
- – Sales volume.
- – Annual turnover of the company.
- – Business needs include stationery products for company departments. After receiving a customer profile for the B2B sector, you can create an individual commercial offer for wholesale supplies of stationery.
- – Region of coverage for companies operating worldwide. Suppose they have one warehouse and need to set up logistics. We can analyze their competitors in the regions where the company plans to deliver goods and offer favorable rates.
Where to Get Information for a Consumer Profile
You can collect information about your users in various ways. We recommend conducting analysis from all the sources we’ll discuss in this section.
Audience Surveys
You can obtain the necessary information through surveys conducted:
- In specialized survey services – Google Forms, Anketolog, and others. An example of creating a survey for users in Yandex.Vzglyad. This is a service for researching the target audience and their attitude towards your products. The constructor offers various templates for designing questionnaires. Surveys are created by marketers, entrepreneurs, and managers.
- In your social media community. An example of a survey in the VKontakte social network in a group selling motorcycle equipment. The surveys are conducted by the business owner. From the survey, you can find out which motorcycle is the most popular in the city and, based on the data, increase the advertising budget for urban-style equipment, reinforced for enduro or sports.
- On your website. An example of a selection survey on a website selling mattresses. This form is designed so that the manager, before calling the client, already knows what kind of mattresses to offer them.
- In email newsletters. The example below shows a survey-study for marketers and IT specialists. The study will help to understand how users came to the profession of a marketer. The data can be used for advertising courses to a new audience. And to attract the client to take the survey, the organizers offered prizes for participation.
After compiling the questionnaire, you will receive a link in your email that you can insert into the text on the website, send in a newsletter, or add to your social media posts.
In the screenshot from the Yandex.Vzglyad service, the task “User Behavior” is selected – you can find out from the audience what products they use and what is important to them.
In-Depth Customer Interviews
To obtain more detailed information about users, you can conduct in-depth interviews. You need to prepare questions for the client and invite them for an interview. To encourage clients to agree to an interview, offer participation in a raffle or a discounted product.
The questions will relate to their name, date of birth, place of residence, profession, your product, problems they face, their emotions, and motivations.
**Example of additional questions for the client:**- – What are their habits?
- – How do they see their typical day?
- – Family.
- – What do they dream about?
- – What are their fears?
- – How do they make purchasing decisions?
In-depth interviews also help to create a psychological portrait of the client. It will be easier for you to understand their emotions, values, motivation, and problems.
Prepare questions for the client, ask them to take a psychological test, or conduct an interview with a psychologist. This method is complex, as few people will agree to such research.
To attract people for such tests, gather a focus group of your clients. Offer them cooperation options so that they agree to provide valuable data. For example, an annual subscription to an app, a gift product, a discount for the B2B sector, or providing your products for trial.
Want to know how to write a psychological portrait? To do this, you need to select a bright representative from each segment of the target audience and conduct testing.
**Main personality traits that you can identify in a client:**- – Temperament.
- – Character.
- – Abilities to achieve success.
- – Intelligence.
- – Emotionality.
- – Willpower.
- – Sociability.
- – Self-esteem.
- – Self-control.
- – Ability to work in a team.
- – Personality traits: communicative, friendly, emotional, can be impulsive.
- – Temperament (Eysenck’s test): sanguine, easy to communicate and meet new people, quickly establishes contact with people.
- – Intellectual qualities (Cattell’s test): developed abstract thinking, quickly memorizes information received.
- – Motivation (Mehrabian’s test): strives to achieve the intended goal.
- – Emotionality: average, excitability, and stubbornness are manifested.
- – Sociable qualities: active, communicative, there is a desire for leadership, good adaptability in society.
Social Media Analysis
Look at your customers’ accounts on social media. Check their interests, hobbies, and user information.
Web Analytics Data Analysis
When creating a website and launching online advertising, you connect analytics services to track user behavior. From the data of these analytics systems, you will learn through which channel the client comes to you, from which city and country they are, what device they use to access your site, and much more.
Call Tracking Analysis
Call tracking helps track conversations between the sales department and customers – you can get personal information from customer responses.
Find a service with dynamic call tracking that will record the conversation in text format and capture user information: call time, customer number, and their location.
If you link CRM with call tracking, the system will automatically create a new user or link the call to an existing customer. This helps to analyze customer questions and answers about themselves and select the necessary information.
How to Create a Customer Profile
Every company will have its own customer profile, but the stages of creating it are the same. Let’s break down all the steps using the example of a customer who wants to buy a new laptop.
Step 1. Defining the target audience and its segments
First, we analyze the customer base and identify those who buy from you: the customer’s gender, age, location, and purchase frequency. It’s important to understand the problems and needs of the target audience.
We take information from sources: surveys, customer base data in CRM, analytics systems, and social networks.
We can also create a verbal portrait – an example is given below. Such a portrait can be obtained by interviewing the sales department and managers of your store.
How to create a verbal portrait?- Ask your managers in the offline store which customers most often come for purchases: alone or with a partner, friend, or loved one; who makes the purchase decision; who pays for the product.
- Ask them to describe them in detail: what they are wearing, how they address you, whether they ask for help in choosing a product, what questions they ask, what gadgets they use.
- Record the data obtained and try to correlate it with the descriptions you already have, as well as analyze customers with target audience segments.
- People from 18 to 40 years old.
- This group includes segments: students, company employees, freelancers.
- The laptop is used for writing term papers, working with documents and data, and also for video games.
- A portable computer is convenient because you can take it with you, and to access the Internet, it is enough to connect to Wi-Fi.
Target audience segments know what functionality they need: a stylish body, modern software, fast response speed, enough memory to store programs and documents, and a high-quality video and sound card.
Based on this data, we compile a list of suitable laptop models: economy segment, medium, and premium. For each list, we describe the characteristics of the laptop.
For example, students from 18 to 25 years old will be suitable for gaming models and laptops for working with documents and homework. Brands among which the target audience segment chooses laptops: Lenovo, Acer, Asus, MSI, DELL, Apple.Step 2. Choosing segment characteristics
For each segment, you need to choose a bright and typical representative. We choose characteristics that will help in creating a portrait: demographic characteristics, geographic location, psychographics, socio-economic data, behavioral factors.
**Example of a client who is planning to buy a laptop.** For our hero, we take the following characteristics: geographic location, age and gender, education, profession, motivation, habits, values, interests, problems, marital status, reasons for purchase, and average check.Each characteristic will help improve promotion channels and create an individual offer for the target audience segment.
Step 3. Questions to customers
After choosing the characteristics, we make up questions that we will ask users. It’s good when one question is aimed at collecting information for a separate group of customer characteristics.
Questions can be asked in newsletters, during a call to the client, in a survey on the website, on social networks, or through an advertisement. Additionally, you can involve a psychologist to analyze the answers received – this will help to create a psychological portrait of the user, understand their values and emotions.
To attract the consumer to take the survey, you can offer a discount or create a personalized selection of laptops based on their interests.
Step 4. Creating a customer profile
From the questionnaires, we select the same answers and create a single portrait for each segment. To design a customer profile, use special services or a regular text document.
How to Design a Customer Profile
You can design a customer profile manually or use specialized services.
Manual Design
There are several options for manual design: in MS Office, Google Docs, or in presentation format. In this case, you design the profile in the way you like best. But don’t forget to stick to a clear structure so that it’s easy for you to navigate the data.
Design in Online Services
Let’s look at a few options for designing using templates in special services that allow you to create beautiful customer profiles.
Uxpressia
A website for working with user information: creating customer profiles and customer journey maps (CJM).
Miro
A website for working with data design into beautiful infographics. There is a customer profile template, but you can create your own images using a wide range of settings.
Mistakes in Creating a Customer Avatar
General description without details. This results in a copy of the target audience description. Solution: add more personal information.
A large number of portraits. When you have two or three customer portraits for one segment. This can lead to confusion and misunderstanding about which segment to focus on. Solution: try to combine similar information into one portrait. Formula for success: one segment = one portrait.
Never create customer portraits. This leads to not knowing your audience. The result will be a large waste of advertising budget. Solution: analyze your target audience, put the data in electronic format, and never keep this information in your head. You may miss details or forget them.
Not changing or supplementing the customer avatar after its creation. Customers change over time, companies develop, as does the entire market. To always be in trend, you need to know the needs of your customers. Solution: analyze and update information before you feel a decline in sales.
Not considering all the people who make the purchase decision when creating a profile. For example, when buying a new apartment, a woman will consult with the whole family – and the deal will eventually be made by her spouse. Solution: analyze the consumer’s environment and work with clients, taking into account objections.
Conclusion
In this article, we have analyzed the customer profile and its main characteristics. We have prepared a checklist summarizing the key points:
- – The customer profile is created based on information about those who are already your consumers. We do not include users that you only want to attract.
- – Use all possible sources to obtain data. But don’t forget to inform the client about how exactly you will use their data.
- – Sources for data collection: web analytics services, social networks, surveys, in-depth interviews, call tracking, and the help of a psychologist for creating a psychological portrait.
- – Try different methods of creating portraits: manually or using online services. Choose the one that is convenient for you and your team to analyze data.
- – Update the customer avatar once or twice a year. Follow the development of your audience and their needs.
- – Look at the portrait from different angles. The more detailed your story about the client, the better you can develop your product and your team. You will know how to attract the consumer and how to help them.
