$ 0 0 There are many guides out there that tell you the key to effective marketing is “knowing your audience.” But what does this phrase actually mean? How do you differentiate between a target audience, demographic profile, and buyer persona? And does it even matter?The short answer is ‘yes.’ You can’t be all things to all people - to be successful you need to know your target audience and how to reach them. Without a clear understanding of this group you’re simply casting your line into a vast ocean waiting for a bite.Why does audience profiling matter?Audience profiling doesn’t limit your audience, it simply helps you choose where to spend your time and money for the greatest return on your investment. Audience profiling gives marketers the opportunity to make more targeted marketing choices and ensures that you cast your net in the most profitable pond.However, audience profiling isn’t just a method used to understand the target audience, it’s also an important part of crafting a unified goal and vision for your business, brand, or product. Defining the target audience will help every department understand what you’re working towards, creating a more unified effort.This exercise might seem like a colossal undertaking and a huge time commitment that takes away from other important tasks. However, this worthy investment will ultimately serve as the foundation of your entire marketing strategy.Targets, Profiles, and Personas: What’s the Difference?Now that we’ve established the importance of audience profiling, how do you get started? The first step is understanding the difference between target audiences, demographic profiles, and buyer personas. Once you learn how they fit together you’ll be ready to make informed decisions about product development and marketing strategies.The Goal: Identify the Target AudienceNeil Patel draws on Susan Chritton’s darts metaphor to explain the importance of identifying your target audience. Chritton reminds us that one of the biggest mistakes that a brand can make is trying to appeal to everyone.“Think about the game of darts: you have to aim in order to hit the board. (If you let your darts go without aiming them, you probably won’t be very popular.) If you hit the board you score. And if your aim is very good and you hit the bull’s eye, even better!”In the simplest terms your target audience is the group of people that you cater your message to, both existing customers and potential new ones. Ideally, the target audience profile is composed of both quantifiable demographic information and the detailed qualitative information obtained from in-depth buyer personas. Together, these two profiles will help you craft a better understanding of your overall target audience and the best way to reach them.Step 1: Create Demographic ProfilesYour audience profile might include multiple target markets, which will likely have one (or more) demographic characteristics in common. Demographic customer profiles include important data such as age, race, religion, gender, income level, profession, family size, education level, and marital status.If you’re crafting a demographic profile for businesses you might look for information such as industry, geographic location, customer size, number of employees, number of branches, type of product, annual revenue, and the age of the company.Once you’ve compiled your demographic profiles it’s time to get creative and dive into the buyer personas.Step 2: Develop the Buyer PersonaThe buyer persona is “an archetype, a character profile of your ideal or typical customer.” Think of it as a qualitative deep dive that goes behind demographic categories and documents a customer’s needs, wants, goals, desires, challenges, values, and attitudes. The buyer persona is an opportunity to add some depth to the statistics you gathered during your demographic profile. Not every woman with children between the ages of 25-45 will share the same problems, needs, desires, and values. Think of this stage as an opportunity to explore different versions of your target audience and learn how to cater to them.Don’t be afraid to go into extreme detail here. Think about what they do in their spare time, the type of tasks they do at work, and their aspirations. You can add extra depth to your qualitativeThese fictional personas allow marketers to understand and anticipate what a customer needs, and how their product can meet those needs. This will help you develop your product with the needs of your audience in mind, and help marketing brainstorm and choose relevant use cases.A Worthy Time InvestmentNow that you know the difference between the demographic profile and the buyer persona its time to start building your own. There are a number of resources out there to help you create data-rich audience profiles. Consider working through HubSpot’s “20 Questions to Ask When Creating Buyer Personas” or find out how ScribbleLive can help you create more robust audience profiles with progressive profiling.For more info and helpful hints on identifying your target audience, creating demographic profiles, and building buyer personas take a look at these helpful resources:Convince & Convert’s How to Create Customer Profiles to Reach Your Target AudienceNeil Patel & Aaron Agius’ The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal BrandContent Marketing Institute’s How to Create Easy, Yet Actionable, Content Marketing PersonasMarketing Land’s The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Finding Your Audience in Social MediaForbes’ Steps to Identify Your Target Market The post What Is Audience Profiling And Why Does It Matter? appeared first on ScribbleLive - Your Content Marketing Software.