One of the most powerful steps to setting your brand on the right path is finding your target audience.
When you know who you’re talking to, you’re giving yourself the chance to communicate more effectively. For all the hard work you put into your product or service, it will deliver more sharply if you can visualize a picture of your target audience with the use of personas.
Getting Started
For those who are not familiar, a target persona is a fictional profile of a person who represents one of your key target audience groups, based on characteristics of your customers. When developing a target audience, we’ve got a few suggestions to make sure your efforts come to more fruitful outcomes.
Beyond Surface Demographics: You might be familiar with creating target audience personas based on demographic information like age, gender, and location. This information is definitely helpful for finding your target audience, for example, you might communicate with your younger target audience via TikTok. However, considering psychographic information such as characteristics, interests, attitudes, and aspirations, will aid in successfully communicating your product or service with poignant communication that resonates with your audience. While these factors are good starting points, they may be customized depending on the industry you’re in. For example, a clothing brand might consider style descriptions along with the psychographic information.
Checking Out the Competition: You may already have some understanding of these factors if you currently run a business, but checking out competitors’ audiences may be a good place to start for new businesses. Although your target audience shouldn’t be identical to theirs, you can get a good sense for a similar audience, and maybe even get a sense of niche markets that are being neglected.
Starting With Benefits: If you’re a new business without a set customer base, try listing out each feature of your product or service. From there, consider the benefit of those features, and who each of those benefits stands to serve, which will eventually lead to a clearer picture of your target audience.
Digging Deep: When you’re creating a sample target persona, you might look at a sampling of your target audience’s social media. A lot of the psychographic information might not be readily available. Rather, you’ll have to do the work of deducing your target’s values via their social media posts, who they’re following, and what they seem to be concerned with.
Do Your Research: Once you’re well on your way to finding your target audience, read up on research relevant to your target. Look out for blogs and articles that might inform you of your audience, along with forums where your target audience voices its opinions. Checking out Reddit forums can give you a good sense of what people are talking about with regards to your topics. You might review survey results, or even conduct your own survey to dive in deeper for information you want.
The Target Persona Worksheet
Because finding your target audience is easier said than done, we’re providing a freebie worksheet to help you create your own target audience persona with ease. If your business already exists, filling out this worksheet might require a bit of investigation into your followers and getting a sense of who they are. If you’re a new business owner, you might take a closer look at the followers of your competitors, or other brands that offer similar services or products. To help you understand how it can be used, we’re including an example of a target audience persona for our fictional clothing brand here.
Getting Hands-on Support
If you’re kicking off a small business and looking to break into your industry with a bang, we offer the Brand Builder Course (an in-person, virtual live event, or online video course) to give you a little more hands-on support. Beyond target audience, the course covers brand strategy, visual identity, and messaging, with helpful worksheets and resources to support you on your exciting journey. Sign up here.
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