Our Lips Aren't Sealed: A Quick Guide to Creating Target Audience Profiles
Target Audience Profiles: Who You Want to Do Business with Your Organization and How to Talk to Them
Can you hear them? They talk about us. Good - that’s exactly what we want, right? But who are "them" actually? Understanding who you want to talk about your organization, interact with your organization, and ultimately, do business with your organization is a critical component of a marketing and sales strategy that often goes missed.
In this article, we are going to discuss target audience profiles, which provide detailed information on the “types” of people you want to do business with you. We’ll examine why target audience profiles are important and provide a high-level framework for creating these profiles.
Maybe you already have target audience profiles created. This article will be a helpful resource to revisit what you have in place and ensure your current parameters will provide the best outcome for your business.
What Are Target Audience Profiles?
Your target audience profiles, also known as ideal client profiles, are groups of people with similar traits who you want to do business with you. They are a key component of successful marketing and sales strategies because they guide your messaging, campaigns, outreach, and retention activities. They help you understand who these people are, what makes them tick, and how to communicate with them. With this information in hand, you can create specific strategies that are meaningful to different types of people.
Think of your best friend for a moment. Imagine that you are both looking to purchase new cars for yourselves. What vehicle qualities you desire, how you want to interact with sales, how you want to finance the vehicle, and your knowledge of vehicle maintenance are likely vastly different. You and your friend are examples of two different target audience profiles. Let’s learn more.
Target Audience Profiles Are More Than Demographics
For those organizations who do have target audience profiles in place, the biggest mistake we see is that they are focused on demographics – age, race, income, and family. While demographics can provide some insight into your potential and current customer needs, they are surface level at best. A target audience profile that contains “white woman in her 40’s with two children” doesn’t really tell us how to market to her. Purchasing a stock photo of a white woman in her 40s with children, slapping it on a postcard, and writing a sentence about how your company is the best choice for her family is not ideal. By doing this, you’d be making sweeping generalizations about what’s important to her and what motivates her. Here’s what to do instead.
Creating Target Audience Profile Factors That Dig Deeper
If anything illustrates the importance of looking beyond demographics when creating target audience profiles, it’s the comparison between Ozzy Osbourne and Prince Charles. On paper, they are identical – and we know that couldn’t be further from the truth. At 38th & Kip, we use about a half dozen factors when creating target audience profiles, which leverage human psychology rather than demographics. Over the last decade, we’ve found these factors to reveal what truly makes consumers tick and provide the highest probability of creating campaigns that resonate. Let’s explore a few of them.
Motivation
When creating ideal client profiles, we always start with motivation. Motivators are independent of demographics, focusing rather on desire and outcome. Understanding why an individual wants to do business with you and how they believe their lives will change for the better is critical. Motivators include:
Dissatisfaction: a belief that you will provide a better service for them
Goods or services: a need for something to improve their situation, like a car loan or mortgage
Purchase-opportunity: satisfaction in knowing they have acquired the best rate in town
Security: a place to safely store their money
Pain Points
Pain points and motivators go hand-in-hand. Together, they form a robust picture of who your audience is on a deep level. You have a significant advantage over the competition if you understand and can speak to your target audiences’ pain points – in their language. Pain points include:
Relevancy: lack of products for their current needs
Stickiness: A perceived or real sense of hassle from switching products or services
Fear of change: resistance to new technology, people, and situations
Distrust: Previous trauma and negative associations of a certain industry/product/role (think used car salesman)
Level of Industry/Product Literacy
Let’s consider the financial services industry for a moment. Did you know that financial literacy in the US sits at just 48%, based on The World Economic Forum’s 2024 Financial Literacy Index? That’s right, you can expect the average banking customer to understand just 50% of basic financial information, and much less so for underbanked and underserved individuals. Which begs the question…are you talking to your audiences in a way they understand?
Assigning a level of literacy to each of your target audience profiles will help you create campaigns and messaging that speaks their language, especially in financial and technical industries. Consider:
Acronyms and abbreviations
In-the-weeds terminology
Benefits and outcomes
Preferred Communication
How do these consumers want you to interact with them? Many organizations, especially financial institutions, are pushing to increase Millennial and Gen Z customers. A follow-up phone call from a customer services rep probably won’t be the best action to take with profiles that are heavy on these generations. Consider your low income/underserved audience profiles: they often lack consistent cell numbers and wi-fi. Profiles that travel often won’t have reliable access to mail. Consider:
Phone calls – both live and automated
Voicemails
Texting
Live chat
Paper mail
Email
DMs
Considering how each target audience profile consumes information and prefers to communicate is often overlooked, but nailing this factor is key to building trust.
We hope you have found this quick guide to creating target audience profiles helpful to your sales and marketing efforts. Understanding the psychology behind the groups of consumers who you want to do business with your organization will set you up for success for years to come. And remember…what motivates Ozzy Osbourne is very different from what motivates Prince Charles.
👉 If you’d like to learn more about marketing strategy and connecting with your your customers, check out our video on differentiators here.
