Understanding your audience is a super cool way to make the most out of your brand and marketing campaigns. It allows you to get a personal, unique perspective on the people who like your products and services, and it creates really great opportunities for optimized marketing (aka making your marketing money go farther).
Target Audience Versus Target Market Versus User Persona
Target Audience
A subset group of your target market that you might be interested in a specific aspect of your company, brand, products or services. Following the same example of a app the gamifies healthy eating practices, a target audience might be people who are trying to lose weight.
User Persona – (sometimes called an audience profile)
A User Persona is a fictitious person who represents the target audience. A user persona exists to make the target audience more real, detailed, and easier for marketers to understand. A good user persona will create a complete picture of who our user is, what they like, what motivates them, outlines their struggles (both in relation to the problem your product solves for them, and in general), how they think about purchasing decisions, what social media channels they follow, etc.
All in all, these each work like a funnel to further narrow down and better understand the people we are targeting with a product or service. It is helpful to know who you are marketing to in order to create a strong brand identity, which will inspire loyalty and connection amongst these exact people.
However, creating user personas (sometimes referred to as audience profiling) also allows marketers and brand designers to create unique segmentations of different people they want to market to. For example, my health gamification app might have one user persona for people trying to lose weight, and another for people who are trying to eat a protein rich plant based diet. These two personas have different goals, they might use entirely different social media platforms, have different hobbies, and entirely different lifestyles. It wouldn’t make sense to advertise to them both in the exact same way.
Does Audience Profiling Actually Work?
Yes, but only if you try.
Some businesses I’ve worked with don’t think it is worthwhile to target an audience and create a user persona because they don’t want to miss out on the opportunities provided by all the other potential customers.
My rebuttal to that is that you cannot create a sense of connection (aka – the stuff that gets people coming back) without an identity that your audience relates to. Back to the example we’ve been using – people who don’t like traditional calorie counting apps would be my jam because I understand that they need to want rewarded for tedious work.
Other businesses I’ve worked with think that the user persona is just marketing fluff, but it truly is backed up by data.
- According to an article shared by Delve, 71% of companies that surpass revenue targets utilize customer personas.
- 56% of companies that successfully utilized user personas produced higher quality leads
- Using personas, Thomas Reuters saw a 175% increase in marketing revenue and a 72% decrease in conversion lead time
So yeah, they work well. However, I think the success of a user persona is dependent on the quality of the user persona.
What Makes a Good User Persona
Understanding Your Target Market and Target Audience
Much like a sales funnel, the understanding of an audience starts vague and general. With honing and asking yourself a lot of questions, you can better understand who these people are.
Start by trying to create a strong understanding of your brand and it’s identity, and then start thinking about everyone that could appeal to. From there, think about specific offerings and unique selling points that might appeal to specific people. From there, narrow down on an identity – who are they? What does a typical day look like for them? How old are they? Do they have a family? What is their job? Their income? Their motivation? What challenges them?
Details
The devil is in the details, and so are the marketing opportunities. It can feel little like tedious guesswork, but when paired with analytics data (or even user interviews!), it can really pay off. Imagine an entire day in your metaphorical person’s shoes and find what makes them tick.
But really, a vague user persona is unhelpful and not a great use of your time.
Data
Data is every marketers best friend. There is no shortage of marketing an analytics tools that break user behavior down by interests. However, this is a great opportunity for your UX team to help you out by sending out user surveys, or even conducting interviews. I just advise you to be prepared with an incentive offer for people’s time, time is money, and that is precious to everybody.
If you find a way to get people to participate in surveys without an incentive, let me know.
Competition Research
If you feel totally lost at where to start, understanding your competition’s audiences is a great place to look. Snoop around on their social media profiles – are they using Gen Z slang? What do the people in the imagery look like? Who’s interacting with their posts?
SemRush also has really great tools for snooping on the competition and analytics about their users, if you are open to a paid option.
Split Testing
Creating any sort of detailed user persona that is based upon your target audience will get you closer to marketing success, but if you are somewhat incorrect about your users in the first try, don’t beat yourself up. There are always learning opportunities.
A great way to get closer, when you’re not right on the dot, is split testing. Is a plant-based protein fanatic more likely to use Threads, or Instagram? We can find out by running the same campaign on both platforms.
Understanding your audience is part of understanding your brand, and building a brand that appeals to the right people. Once you understand your audience, you can segment them into user personas based upon the parts of your offerings they love.
If you want to learn more, please feel free to check out my other blog posts, or reach out! I am available for freelance hire and full time gigs.