What Is Audience Profiling and Why Is It Important to Your Business?

Audience profiling is a targeted approach that allows you to consider your customer's data and demographics to create a personalized content strategy. The content you target toward your customer groups could be a variety of advertising campaigns, including articles, blogs, or marketing emails.

It's easy to start with audience profiling:

1. Consider what your company's ideal customer would be — this is also known as your customer persona.
2. Dive in and research your key demographics. Once you know the primary consumers of your content, you can start looking into what the needs and problems are for your audience base.
3. Use profiling to determine where you can find your customers and expand your customer base.

What Is an Audience Profile?

Audience profiles are research-based analytics your company can use for your marketing efforts. The profile's form can vary based on company preferences. Possible examples include:

• A social media styled profile representing your target persona
• A short story of a fictitious person's life that's based on your target persona
• A list of demographic information your company is targeting
• In-depth background and history of an imaginary person built around your target demographics

Target audience profiles can be kept handy for your content marketing team to refer to when creating something that represents your business.

However, having a target persona in writing is also excellent if you are contracting content out to other companies to produce, since they may not be as familiar with your customer base as the in-house team. An audience profile guides your content creators on how to market to customers or whomever your business wants to reach.

Most of the time, this is geared toward customers. However, many organizations also seek paid and volunteer influencers to spread the word about their products and services, so you may consider creating an audience profile to target influencers as well. Your influencer profile may look very similar to your audience profile, as people will typically attract other like-minded individuals.

What Information Is Included in an Audience Profile?

The profile is your target persona based on targeted demographics, including gender, location, age, and industry. Factors like education and income can also help build out your target character.

Target Audience Profiling Based on Location

Location isn't crucial for every type of content. Niches impacted the most by location are those that rely heavily on seasonal weather trends.

Location-based data can help determine seasonal content and help you organize partnerships with local businesses and brands. The regional alliances are often mutually beneficial for your company and others.

Target Audience Profiling Based on Age

A profile commonly includes age, as different age groups or generations commonly have their own slang variations and speaking mannerisms. When writing content to target a specific age group, keep in mind how your ideal persona communicates. Also, consider the issues that your target persona's age range finds to be most notable.

It's no secret that different age groups hang out in different places. Fortunately, marketers can narrow down where a large portion of your company's target audience spends their time online. For example, specific demographics tend to gravitate toward one social media platform or particular hashtags.

Target Audience Profiling Based on Industry

The industry aspect of your target persona helps align your content with the needs of specific industry professionals. Many products and services would be beneficial and appealing to people in particular industries but not in others. Targeting a niche audience can help you get more views and business traction.

Expanding Your Audience Profile

You can use audience profiles for more than just your consumer audience. They can extend into the subset of employee profiling or influencer profiling.

Influencers and employees can have dramatic effects on your business. Hard-working influencers and motivated employees can help boost your brand's reputation and drive your company toward success. Having an audience profile to target influencers interested in your brand helps you partner with like-minded individuals. People who resonate with your industry's values can pull in a more extensive customer base.

Benefits of Audience Profiling

So why is audience profiling important?

Your company can reap many benefits from this effort. Not only does audience profiling increase your return on investment (ROI), but it can also increase revenue and improve customer relations. Effective audience profiling increases the chances of your marketing campaign having a maximum impact on potential customers.

Benefits of Audience Profiling on Customer Relations

One such benefit is developing and maintaining a relationship with clients through marketing. By targeting your marketing to potential customers who have a high possibility of being leads, you can improve the ROI of your business. The critical benefit you can gain from audience profiling is growing a relationship with consumers. Through a prosperous relationship, you can retain customers at a much higher rate.

A consistent customer base means a consistent profit over time. Just a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% increase in profits.

Benefits of Audience Profiling on Revenue

Having a well-put-together audience profile helps you increase company revenue — targeted content aids in persuading the right buyers and viewers to check out your products and services. Building up an audience profile can also assist you in monitoring consumer behavior. Knowing these trends can help you predict what content will be popular in different quarters.

Benefits of Audience Profiling for an Expanded Audience

Targeting potential employees can help you grow your business with people who resonate with your company values and opinions. There are other essential consumer audiences that you can work into your profile:

• Stakeholders
• Financers
• Distributors
• Suppliers

You can find like-minded people by targeting these groups, enjoying their work, and even spreading a good message about your company among their influence base.

Audience Profile Example

Companies utilize a variety of mechanisms to demonstrate their audience profile. Some create entire full-colored infographics that illustrate the persona. Others have a few text paragraphs. Some businesses put minimal effort into the initiative and include only a bullet point list of the key features.

At a minimum, the audience profile incorporates the demographic information of your target customer:

• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Industry
• Education level
• Income range

Detailed, full-color infographics and character-based audience profiles include more target details to aid with marketing. Once you gather demographic information, you can research the personality behind the demographics. You can glean information that can help form this character via audience profiling tools:

• Marital and family status
• Likes and dislikes
• Problems
• Values

You can create a fictitious character built from the information gathered to embody your entire consumer base and inspire your company through the product-making process.

You can add some personal touches to your character to make it even more comprehensive:

• Name
• An image or illustration
• Job title
• Manager in the workplace
• Job stresses
• Professional interests
• Content consumed regularly
• Browsing history

You can place all of these items and more in your audience profile, depending on how in-depth you want it. Targeting your marketing to a specific person keeps sales more aligned with the company's road map and marketing objectives. Accurate audience profiling prevents your company from floundering or chasing after every trend.

Audience Profiling Tools

You have probably realized at some point that having an audience profile, no matter its scope, is beneficial to your business. Now, you're probably wondering how you gather and compile all that information into one place. You use audience profiling tools, which fall under two separate categories: customer data management platforms and identity data management platforms.

Data management platform companies range in scope as vast as the profiles themselves. It's up to you and your company's preference to determine which specific brand or management platform to engage. Discussing it with your marketer can help.

Data management platforms essentially all work the same way. Your company gathers emails from known sources, or cookies, typically a form of anonymous data. You can run it through one of the data management platforms to separate your demographic information and known customer base. These platforms help you find new customers based on other people with similar interests and internet usage habits.

Data management platforms play a crucial role in marketing. You will receive instruction from them on when, how, and where to focus your marketing strategy for the best results.

These platforms are constantly gathering data to compare and analyze, and they have access to a variety of vendors.

Other Tools Involved in Audience Profiling

There are other tools involved in audience profiling that you can use to collect user data and compare it around the web:

• Aggregate calling
• Web analytics
• Customer relationship management (CRM)

How Marketers Can Perform Audience Profiling

Marketers can utilize audience profiling tools to compile information about your company's target audience. Your website can be one of the first vital steps in this process, as you can track users with cookies and collect emails to learn more about your current customer base.

Once marketers have this data, they can contract out to a data management platform, or you may have access to a market that also runs one. Either way, a marketer can gather more information by cross-referencing your current customer base with other known bases. Known bases of internet users can help to expand your existing audience based on reviews of their internet habits and connections.

Audience profiling is a four-faceted operation for marketers that involves:

• Segmentation
• Messaging
• Engagement
• Measurement

Segment Your Audience Profiles

Once the data has been collected and cross-referenced with various audience profiling tools, marketers can get down to business by creating audience segment(s).

Segmentation is the process of splitting apart your audience based on demographics. You may have more than one demographic set or persona who values your company.

Types of Segmentation

There are several types of market segmentation. The ones used most commonly are.

• Demographic segments
• Geographic segments
• Behavioral segments
• Needs-based segments
• Psychographic segments

It's essential to know these different personas so they can be targeted individually with a more direct approach. It will keep customers' attention the longest, make them feel valued, and help build better customer relations.

Design Messages for Your Audience Profile

Next is the actual targeting. Marketers will begin customizing a targeted approach via various messaging strategies to get your audience's attention. There are many options for sending messages:

• Social media platform announcements
• Emails
• Calls and texts
• Snail mail

Your base customer demographic will help your marketer determine which avenue is the best for reaching your target audience.

Engage With Your Target Audience

Once a messaging plan is in place for your company, your marketing strategy will focus on engagement. Company engagement is the process of initiating the flow of messages and interaction between your company and potential consumers. Marketers will take into account some essential demographic research collected from your target audience during this stage, including:

• Platforms used by your audience persona
• Time of day that your audience persona typically uses the platform
• Content consumption
• Publication preferences
• Length and frequency of use

Each engagement initiative is called a campaign.

Measure Results

Typically, a marketer will measure the statistics after each advertising campaign to see how your audience engaged with it. It's the most effective marketing strategy because your business can quickly pivot if something isn't going well. You can also expand and receive more traffic when your business sees success.

Once your company has consistent results from your marketing strategy, you will further build upon your marketing foundation:

• Engage more.
• Provide more value.
• Develop a better understanding of the customer journey

In turn, customers will provide your company with more revenue. After capturing your audience's attention, you can guide their purchasing decisions, provide them with relevant content, and target them further by asking for testimonials.

Armed with the knowledge of audience profiling, reach out to target consumers today for better ROI and empower customer relations.