Creating a customer portrait: how to increase the effectiveness of audience engagement

Understanding how to identify a target audience is essential for tailoring your marketing efforts and ensuring your product resonates with the right people.

If you know the characteristics of your real consumer well – from age and marital status to goals, interests, and concerns – you can make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Marketers are constantly telling us that we need to study our target audience. To ignore their advice is to make your business a deliberately hopeless endeavor. To put it bluntly, selling four-stroke engines for motorboats to young mothers on maternity leave is not a good idea, is it? And to effectively sell a batch of Harry Potter wands, it’s better to choose an audience under 50+ and a period closer to the Christmas holidays, rather than before 1 September, when stationery is more relevant than magic accessories.

Untapped audiences are a waste of advertising budget and a clear loss in the competition. In this article, we’ll help you get closer to understanding your target audience (TA), tell you how to create a customer profile for a specific business, and explain how analyzing this profile can significantly increase sales.

Target audience and customer profile: how understanding it increases sales

The entire advertising strategy is based on the analysis of the target audience. All campaigns, PR actions, and marketing activities are a waste of time and money if they are not based on the client’s needs. Let’s take a closer look at what the target audience is and what the term ‘customer profile’ means.

The target audience is people who are interested in your product. They have already bought it, want to buy it again, plan to buy it, buy related products, and look at yours, in short, all these are real and potential customers of your company.  To better understand this group, it is essential to define their characteristics and create a client portrait that accurately reflects their preferences and needs.

A customer profile is a collective image of a customer that consists of demographic, social, and behavioral factors and other characteristics. The more detailed and accurate this portrait is, the more accurately your marketing will hit the target. It will come in handy in many cases:

• during the planning of commercial projects;
• during website development;
• for the development of groups in social networks, blogging, creating a YouTube channel;
• for media planning and targeting settings (determining the most effective
• communication channels and choosing the format of advertising campaigns);
• during the development of product design and packaging design;
• to conduct effective PR campaigns;
• to develop new markets and expand the customer base.

Why are mistakes in understanding your target audience so scary for business? Because they negatively affect the effectiveness of communication with the client. It is important not only to offer the right product to certain people who are ready to buy it, but you also need to present it correctly (a successful advertising message). Not only that, all this must be done on time.

Only the components of a marketing strategy tied to an understanding of the needs of the target audience will guarantee you success. An intelligible advertising message and an effective offer are converted into increased conversions, and repeat sales, bring maximum profit with limited investments.

How to identify your target audience

Competent determination of the components of the target audience is carried out using various modern methods. One of the most popular is the classic of the genre – the 5W method (What, Who, Why, When, Where). Interpreting the answers to five basic questions will help you create a target audience picture and develop actionable insights: 

• What is the client interested in?
• Who is he?
• Why does he make a purchase (motivation assessment)?
• When and under what conditions does the customer make a purchase?
• Where can you find buyers and, accordingly, attract them?

Taking this simple scheme as a basis, we will delve into a detailed study of the information and its subsequent structuring. The question: “Who is our client?” implies that we must know everything about him – from gender, age, place of residence, and marital status to hobbies and phobias.

A few practical tips on how to choose a target audience will be a good help for entrepreneurs who are planning advertising campaigns, regardless of their field of activity:

1. Use analytics services to collect customer data. Use Google Analytics, built-in Facebook Audience Insights, and other accessibility features.
2. Conduct surveys and carefully analyze the answers. This helps to decide which messaging resonates best with your audience. Try to formulate open-ended questions in questionnaires as accurately as possible to get detailed answers and correct information (which you will then successfully use in advertising messages). Find out what your customers are dissatisfied with, what they want to change, and what they lack for happiness at all.
3. Analyze existing customers and communication channels to choose the most effective ones. Constant research of the audience guarantees a deep understanding of it.
4. Engage in “espionage” among competitors. Evaluate their advertising campaigns, view pages on social networks, and study the content. Based on the data obtained, build hypotheses and test them in practice. Feel free to use the most effective methods of competitors to attract new segments of the target audience.
5. Segment your audience into smaller groups and create detailed consumer portrait examples for each segment to better understand their specific needs. Divide a wide target audience into narrower segments, determine the main segment (which brings maximum profit), and create a detailed portrait of the client – establish his personality, and character traits, recreate a life story 76to fully imbue yourself with the desires, interests and fears of your client.

The “dossier” compiled in this way will allow you to come close to understanding the individual needs of the target audience and compose an advertising message with the most accurate hit on the needs of the client.

How to make a customer portrait for your business (+ examples)

Now that we have discussed the need for a target audience analysis and identified the goals of drawing up a client portrait, it’s time to move on to solving urgent issues. Where can I get consumer information? The sources can be different, and none of them should be neglected:

• opinion polls;
• questioning;
• conducting interviews;
• personal experience and observation;
• professional consultations and training.

If you have an online store, we also recommend connecting the E-commerce module in Google Analytics and analyzing the received customer data.

What specific issues should be covered to create a detailed portrait (avatar or profile) of a client? Their list is voluminous and limited only to the specifics of the goods and services you offer. A marmalade seller, for example, does not need to know on which platforms and what games his customers play. Although, creative marketers may be able to successfully use this “extra” information in an advertising campaign.

Let’s highlight the key groups of questions for assembling the “backbone”, on which you can independently build up more subtle matter over time.

1. Demographics (gender, age, marital status, family size).
2. Geography (place of residence).
3. Lifestyle (education, status in society, financial situation)
4. Psychotype (type of thinking, tasks, goals, problems).
5. Buying behavior (motives, key selection criteria, objections, impulsivity, decision-making methods).
6. Consumption of information (groups, public social networks, desired type of content, etc.).

To humanize a client’s avatar, you need to give it a name. To visualize the portrait, endow it with a face that would be associated with the image. Create a history of the client’s collective image relationship with your company. Allow him to feel, to experience, to experience difficulties.

As an example, we sketch a portrait of a female buyer of niche perfumery.

1. Alina, is 29 years old, unmarried, with no children.
2. Lives in Kyiv, in a one-room apartment.
3. Higher economic education, middle manager, income level – 600 USD
4. Alina likes communication with people in her work, but she still considers it routine and time-consuming. Alina strives for more freedom and control over her life. She loves to travel and dreams of her own business, which will open up new opportunities for self-realization and earnings. She has quite high demands on the future chosen one and a solid experience of unsuccessful relationships.
5. Alina appreciates fashion accessories and status items that she does not always afford. Overloading with everyday responsibilities gives rise to the need for compensation, which is embodied in impulse purchases.
6. She maintains pages on Instagram and Facebook, has many subscribers, and maintains an active correspondence with them. She is interested in groups with topics – travel, healthy eating, sports, and art.
7. Alina is ambitious and feels that she deserves more than she has. She provides for herself at a basic level, but she is depressed by the lack of many inaccessible attributes of comfort. Buying expensive perfumes becomes an urgent need for her, since a delicate aroma emphasizes her chosenness, makes a spectacular impression on others, and raises self-esteem.

There is an opinion that it was the compilation of customer portraits that once helped Proctor & Gamble become a leader in the household chemicals market. The rapid rise of companies and success stories are invariably overgrown with tales and legends, but we tend to believe that the walls of the Proctor & Gamble marketing department are hung with photos of avatars with short but comprehensive dossiers.

Nothing prevents you from borrowing the successful experience of business sharks to form your effective strategy.

Conclusions

A customer portrait is a unique marketing tool that allows you to fully satisfy the needs of the portrait target, which is equivalent to the commercial success of the business. Using the collected information, you automatically rise to a new level of advertising communications. A portrait of a real consumer will save you from unnecessary “throwing beads”, “shooting sparrows from a cannon” and other allegories describing wasted budget expenditures.

Without knowing all the characteristics of your consumer, it is impossible to understand his hopes, fears, problems, dreams, and motives for actions. However, the possession of this information opens the way to the most valuable acquisition – gaining the trust of the client. By understanding your customer, you can create not only an attractive product for him but also a ready-made solution to his specific tasks and urgent problems.