Without a clear portrait of a potential client, it is impossible to competently compile a commercial proposal for the sale of a product or service, and it is even more difficult to address it correctly. A portrait of a potential buyer is the target audience who will most likely be interested in your offer. It is compiled using the maximum amount of information about consumer demand for the product.
Separation of business segments
It’s worth starting the topic with the fact that there are two areas of business - b2b and b2c. The first option is business for business, and the second is for buyers. In the first case, as a rule, the question of drawing up a portrait target audience It’s not worth it, since the audience is known to everyone, all that remains is to concentrate efforts on attracting customers. But the second case is what will be discussed further. For b2c, it is always important to correctly identify the audience, regardless of whether it is an online or offline business.
In addition, it is important to know that the target audience for certain activities maybe not alone. Experienced specialists always allocate a main group and several secondary ones for work.
Elements of a potential client portrait
Before moving on to the instructions for drawing up a consumer portrait, it is necessary to understand the intricacies of the concept itself. A portrait of a potential client is a complex collective image of a person interested in your offer. When creating this image, you visually “draw” in the head of the target buyer, to whom all the marketing activities your organization. The portrait of the target audience may have a huge amount various characteristics, because the more there are, the more truthful the image will be.
Basic positions for describing the target audience
Any marketer who is faced with the task of describing the target audience for the first time asks himself several questions:
- How to determine who the organization's target audience is?
- At what period of strategy development should the target audience be selected?
- Where to get data to compile a social portrait of a consumer?
- What characteristics exist to create a buyer persona?
- How detailed should the description be?
Of course, these are not all the questions, but certainly the most basic ones. Next, we will analyze each of the points in more detail. So let's get started.
Target Audience
It can be broad - for example, all consumers of milk products, or narrow (only those who buy low-fat cottage cheese at a low cost). The wider the circle, the more vague the description will be, since it is difficult to determine the distinct characteristics of the audience.
It is necessary to create a portrait of the target consumer based on the prototype of the most prominent representatives, trying to outline the general characteristic features, which will distinguish your company’s customers from the rest of the market audience. When forming the image of your buyer, it is necessary to describe not only regular consumers, but also those who have not yet purchased the product.
At what stage of the strategy should you choose your target audience?
You should start drawing up a consumer portrait after analyzing and segmenting the market, that is, at the stage of developing a positioning strategy. In practice, situations quite often occur when it is necessary to identify the target audience without marketing strategy, this is especially true for specialists who are just starting to work in new organization. In this case, you can do the following:
- Identify the company's main competitors.
- Do comparative analysis your company's product and what your competitors offer.
- Send a mystery shopper to your competitors.
- Describe the value of the product.
- Understand who's on at the moment is a consumer of the product and is loyal to it.
- Describe your ideal buyer.
- Create an image of the target client based on the data received.
Where to get information from
In order to form an image of a potential consumer, it is necessary to answer some questions:
- Who buys the product and who doesn't?
- Why do they buy it or not buy it?
- What criteria are used to choose, how to buy and use?
- How do consumers feel about the organization's other products?
- Application experience.
The following sources will help you find answers to all these questions:
All characteristics on the basis of which the buyer’s image is formed can be divided into several groups.
Geography
Here you will need to set the geographic area where the advertising message will be broadcast. Here it is necessary to determine in which part of the country/region/district they live and are located potential clients. There is no point in advertising throughout the country when your product or service is only available in major cities, for example, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Socio-demographic indicator
It can be divided into three components:
- Gender of the client. Representatives of the female and male sexes are guided by different principles, respectively, and they make different decisions. Therefore, to draw up a consumer portrait in marketing, you must first determine for whom the product is intended. Quite often it happens that it suits both, respectively, the target audience is men and women.
- Age of buyers. This is a fairly extensive block, since each promotion has its own age category. It is impossible to give an unambiguous answer to this question; it will be necessary to establish some kind of framework, for example, the age of the consumer is young people from 25 to 35 years old. Marketing specialists have long divided human life at several stages (school time, student life, the beginning of a career path, the blossoming of a career and its growth, the end of a career, retirement). It is these stages that you should focus on when drawing up a portrait of your target audience, since each service or product has its own age category to which it will sell better.
- Education. This criterion helps to understand how professionally developed the buyer is. Many targeted advertising campaigns make their division according to it; this can be split into those who have one or more formations and intermediate level income. Most often, this example of a consumer portrait is used by organizations that offer goods and services to wealthy people.
Financial situation
One of the most important criteria when developing a buyer persona is determining the income level of your target buyers. Here it is important to understand what kind of check you are counting on and what principles your clients are guided by.
If potential buyers of goods have a low income, then setting a high price for the product is inappropriate. It is also worth understanding that people with low incomes pay great attention to price; more precisely, cost is the key point for them when choosing an offer.
Information channels
This is one of the most important issues when forming a portrait of a potential consumer. Here you need to establish from which specific sources your future clients receive information and answers to their questions. These can be completely different distribution channels:
- Search engines on the Internet.
- Social media.
- Newspapers.
- Magazines and stuff.
If you are going to attract customers to your store on an online resource, then you should pay attention to specialized sites where people with the same intentions gather and discuss issues that concern them. These same platforms can later be used for your own advertising campaigns.
How detailed should the target audience be described?
When forming the image of a potential buyer, it is necessary to describe the most prominent representative. During the process, try to use all the groups of parameters mentioned above. Only in this case will the description be truly portrait. After studying this information, a person should have a clear image in his head. Ideally, you should add a collage of several photographs to the description that will complement the portrait. It is better to prepare two options: a short one, based on 4-5 criteria, allowing you to superficially separate the target audience from the entire market, and a complete one with the maximum detailed characteristics, his habits, characteristics, character and so on.
The picture will be complete and detailed if, during the creation process, you try to describe the vector of development of the target audience in the existing format and as it should be perfectly. This description will help you understand key changes that need to be done in the development and promotion of the product.
Step-by-step instructions for creating a potential buyer persona
Having found the answers to all the above questions and armed with the necessary amount of information, you can begin to build a portrait of a potential client step by step. This plan is suitable even for those who do not yet have a formed client base. In this case, when analyzing, you can use the data of friends who are most likely to be interested in your offer. And only when you have your first real customers (at the first stage it is enough to analyze the first 10 people), you will need to repeat the procedure. So let's get started:
- Reviewing a profile on a social network. From such popular resources as Vkontakte or Facebook it is very easy to obtain some information - gender, age and place of residence of a potential client. This is very necessary data that should be entered on the computer in a special plate.
- Analysis of pages and groups in which clients are members and subscribers. This information should also be entered into the previously created table. What is this for? After a portrait has been drawn up, pages and groups on social networks can be used as information platforms. This means advertising your product on saved pages.
- Three favorite sites. Having information about which resources clients use most often, you can also place your offer on them. This always works very effectively.
- Scope of activity. This point can also most often be found out from a questionnaire, and the presence of such information allows you to understand the capabilities and needs of the consumer.
- Recording questions and problems encountered by the client. This will help “tie” your proposal to their decision.
- Drawing up a client portrait based on the information received. All data is summarized in a separate questionnaire-table for each client. As a result, you will have in your hands finished image potential buyer.
Working examples of consumer personas
This is what well-composed target audience images look like:
- Audience for a family psychology specialist in private practice. An example of a consumer portrait in this case looks like this:
- Female people aged 22 to 44 years from large cities.
- They are interested in psychology and follow news from groups on social networks. similar topics.
- Have at least 3 circles of interests.
- Actively involved in sports.
- They are passionate about philosophy, spiritual values and personal growth.
- High or average level of earnings.
2. An example of a consumer portrait for an online store of youth clothing from designers.
- Female and male people aged 20 to 35 years from megacities and medium-sized cities.
- They are interested in fashion and its trends.
- Everyone has stable employment or is studying at higher education institutions. educational institutions, with active life beliefs.
- They are interested in several sports, participate in competitions, and are members of relevant groups on social networks.
Liya Kanarskaya
Where does any business start? From the client. Do you already know who will want to buy your product or use your services? In this article you will learn how to identify your target audience.
Target audience: what is it and when is it
Target audience (TA) is a group of users to which some advertising activities are directed, in which advertisers are interested and/or which is interested in any information.
The target audience is people who satisfy the need that your product or service solves.
Imagine that you started building a house before you had a soil test done. So it is with the analysis of the target audience:
Ignorance of your target audience entails either the complete failure of the product on the market, or, what is most often found in practice, a significant increase in budgets for the creation and promotion of the product.
Example: The owner of the business spent a lot of money on leaflets and business cards, which were stupidly scattered around the area or in entrances. There were few calls to the site. The advertising costs were not justified.
Find out who needs the services of an on-site makeup artist more often than others.
After analyzing the target audience, the following client portraits appeared:
- brides and their mothers
- women on maternity leave
- residents of remote areas of the city
We established interaction with large wedding salons, left information in kindergartens and schools for teachers and parents, and opened a salon group on the Vkontakte social network.
The chosen strategy for promoting the salon to interact with its target audience contributed to high-quality feedback on the Internet.
After a few months of work, it turned out that the salon group on the social network Vkontakte brings most of clients. At the exit, this was confirmed by the masters themselves, recording the clients’ answers. Refused contextual advertising, focused on social network"VKontakte".
It was also decided to create separate page for the salon administrator, since this method of communication was noted as more convenient for clients.
Types of target audience
In modern marketing practice, the following types of target audience are distinguished:
1. Basic and indirect. The main audience makes the purchasing decision; it is the initiator of the action, as opposed to the indirect one. Naturally, it will be a priority for us.
Example: The main audience for children's toys is children, and their mothers are indirect audience. Although mothers carefully inspect products for defects or safety of use, moreover, they pay for the purchase and are its initiators.
2. Wide and narrow target audience. It's clear from the name. Example: tea lovers – a wide audience, white fruit tea lovers – a narrow audience.
3. Well, a classic example - audience depending on the type of target group. Target audience in the field of business (B2B) and in the field of individual consumption (B2C).
You can also identify your target audience based on the purpose of visiting the site:
- Target audience interested in the site’s content (visitors come for information),
- Visitors who are interested in the site’s products and services for subsequent purchase.
Where to dig? Getting information
You can get data about your target audience using:
- surveys;
- interviewing;
- surveys.
Try to interview as many respondents as possible or conduct a survey of opinion leaders.
Remember that there is a “loud minority” on forums and blogs; their opinions must be carefully collected and analyzed: they form the image of the product. However, it should be taken into account that the statements of the “loud minority” may not coincide with the opinion of the “silent majority” purchasing the product or services.
Example: The release of the third part of Diablo in a cartoon style terribly outraged game veterans, but in August 2015, Activision Blizzard announced that the game had sold more than 30 million copies.
Advantages:
- Easily segment your audience
- A large number of responses from interviewees,
- Minimum investment funds,
- Not required large number time.
When obtaining data, always look for reasons and reasons for consuming a product. You need to accurately represent the nature of your customer.
Example: A survey about possible reasons to have a snack helped Nestle identify a segment of its target audience as “depressed chocolate lovers” who prefer to buy sweets in expensive boxes. New strategy promotion of sweets increased sales and reduced promotion costs due to narrowing the audience.
It is important to conduct interviews with the so-called “purchase initiators”: for example, when buying children's furniture, men's trousers or shirts, women are also included in the target audience, since more often they are the ones who make the decision about the need for a purchase.
Client portrait: what is the benefit
Based on the client's portrait, you can:
1. Create marketing campaigns (advertising, commercial offers, content, etc.).
2. Formulate a competent offer: find out the clients’ problem and promise a solution.
3. Work out the benefits of the consumer, draw up a USP.
4. Identify triggers for client influence and motivation.
5. Find out the main channels of promotion on the Internet, for example, using the compliance index (more on this later).
The more details in the portrait, the more characteristics it takes into account, the higher the chance of creating an offer that best suits the needs of your target audience.
Segmenting the target market using 5W
1. What (what) – description of specific properties of the product/services;
2. Who – characteristics of the potential client;
3. Why (why) - what guides the consumer when choosing a product or service;
4. When (when) – time of purchase;
5. Where (where) – place of sale of goods/services.
Example:
Let's segment the audience:
- Turnkey house construction,
- Internal and external home decoration,
- Carrying out water supply systems,
- Plumbing installation,
- Installation of heating equipment,
- Roofing houses.
- A family dreaming of their own home
- A family wishing to improve their living conditions
- A young family who wants to live separately from their parents,
- Family with children
- A family wanting to move out of town
- A family of working pensioners.
Why?
- Speed of construction or provision of related services,
- Opportunity to save money
- Opportunity to find good builders,
- Opportunity to see project documentation and preliminary calculations,
- Opportunity to receive services in a complex (turnkey),
- Opportunity to evaluate completed work (portfolio),
- Availability of work guarantee,
- Conclusion of a contract.
When?
- After I heard good reviews from friends,
- During the season of discounts and promotions,
- Website,
- VKontakte group,
- Landing.
Use multiple segmentation techniques - work with the entire market, but taking into account the differences between segments.
You should have portraits of real clients with certain types of behavior when purchasing services or goods.
Example:
Based on an analysis of all members of the VKontakte group, a portrait of a client in the group-community of copywriters:
Collected manually or automatically, data about your target audience will allow you to determine the right promotion strategy. Let's take a closer look at the basic parameters for segmentation.
Characteristics to describe the target audience
Determining the target audience may depend on the following parameters:
- Geographical,
- Demographic,
- Socio-economic,
- Psychographic,
- Features of behavior.
Geolocation: what area are you from, kid?
Location information allows us to display a product only to residents of a specified area. Geolocation also allows us to anticipate customer needs.
Example: it’s cold in Novosibirsk, so the demand for down jackets will be clearly higher than for surfboards.
Whose will you be, slave? Demographic characteristics
Needs and preferences, as well as the intensity of product consumption, are very often closely related to demographic characteristics.
Demographic characteristics are easy to measure, unlike other segmentation criteria.
Variables: age, gender, nationality, presence of children and marital status.
Also, when segmenting the market by demographic characteristics, it is worth taking into account the area in which a person works.
Example:
Target audience: main – girls from 6-12 years old, students primary school, secondary - their mothers, usually married, of all nationalities.
Initial view of the recruitment announcement for a studio school:
Changed after much debate:
It was not possible to convince him that the VKontakte address was not needed. However, the responses appeared, thanks to the balloons!
Socio-economic: do you have money? What if I find it
The characteristics of the consumer are considered: his employment, education, source and amount of income, which serves as the basis for purchasing power.
Example: teenagers - schoolchildren or students, dependent on parents, small income. Gift promotions for schoolchildren or discounts on student cards. “Show your diary without grades and get a gift,” as a marketing technique.
Gender differences, age and capabilities of consumers influence the type of goods or services purchased.
However, consumer activity depends on psychological characteristics, which also needs to be taken into account when drawing up a consumer portrait.
Psychographic segmentation
A real Klondike for the study of the target audience: lifestyle (homebody or adventurer on his own), values, life principles, speed of decision-making, presence of role models, fears, problems and dreams.
Knowing about a person’s propensity for constant change or, conversely, about his conservatism, you can make the text of the publication attractive to a specific group of consumers.
It is very important to understand the specifics of promoting a product or service in fan communities.
We often make purchases on an emotional level, under the influence of positive emotions, such as tenderness, a feeling of nostalgia, and the joy of recognition. Find out what your customers dream about or miss.
Those who believe, fly, those who are greedy, run away: behavioral characteristics
Behavioral market segmentation is the identification of those parameters that can describe the moment of choosing, making a purchase and using a product.
Some of them:
- What is driving force purchases: level of service, confirmation of status, opportunity to save, price, speed of service, etc.;
- What is the reason to purchase a product/use a service: an everyday purchase or a special occasion;
- The nature of the client’s expectations from the purchase of a product or service;
- How urgently the problem needs to be solved - the degree of involvement in the purchase.
Right here attitude towards the brand– how one feels about the product: loyal, hostile, indifferent, etc.:
1. Loyal users: know the brand, buy the brand, are absolutely loyal to the brand and do not switch to competitors;
2. Loyal users: know the brand, buy the brand, but sometimes buy other brands;
3. Weakly interested: they know the brand, but do not buy it;
4. Not interested: do not use and do not know.
Another indicator - how often does he buy a product/service?, that is, the level of intensity of product consumption (frequency, experience of use, adaptation to the product).
An example of a table of the intensity of consumption of goods by group members
Aim and shoot: working with target audience
Creation of USP
Once you've created portraits of your target groups, take the time and effort to create separate ads, banners, or landing pages for each target group. Create something unique for them trade offer. This will be an accurate hit on the bull's eye.
If you make a USP for a narrow segment of the target audience, the conversion to the target action will be higher!
Example:
Company selling heating equipment, water supply and sewerage.
The Gidromontazh salon carries out wholesale and retail sales heating equipment.
"Will fulfill installation work, any complexity, heating systems, water supply and sewerage networks. Drawing up projects, selecting equipment and consultations are FREE.”
Key parameters are taken from the head and do not take into account real characters and their motivation for purchasing.
After analyzing the target audience. Hypothesis - middle class and above, live in luxury houses, unlimited budget, deadlines are running out, confirmed. After studying the target audience of related groups, we place universal emphasis on warranty and quick installation:
“A heating boiler from Italian manufacturers is an excellent solution for a home with many water supply points.”
“The Gidromontazh salon offers only certified equipment and high-quality components.
15 years on the services market. Quick installation of water supply systems in a private home: an experienced team of installers with their equipment in three days.”
Affinity Index
The fit index helps determine how well a particular advertising channel matches the desired target audience. It significantly affects the efficiency advertising campaign and the cost of contact with the target audience.
By comparing the Affinity Index with other indicators - visits, bounces, conversions, you can determine the preferences of visitors who convert best.
Of the total number of site visitors, 10% watched your video, and among women 11% watched this video, and among men - only 7%. For women, the correspondence index is: 11/10*100=110. For men 7/10*100=70. In this case, we can say that this video is more suitable for a female audience.
Target audience and promotion channels
Target audience: search robots. Selection keywords and phrases, bringing the site into compliance with the requirements of search engines.
An incorrectly defined target audience will lead to errors in the list of key queries for search engine promotion.
Content Marketing
The topics of your content should be of interest to your target audience and be among the topics in which you are an expert.
A successful strategy doesn't mean you have to produce viral content. You just have to be consistent and sincere with your clients.
Targeting allows you to work only with that target audience that has certain characteristics, and show ads only to a selected group of people.
New Nielsen Study: Targeting mobile advertising in 60% of cases it achieves its goal; more than half of mobile advertising impressions from April to June in 2016 found their target audience. In 2015, the coverage was only 49%.
Adapt the created content for different social networks.
How to make a potential client an offer that is difficult to refuse? Clearly define what he needs, what motivates him in making decisions - and focus on this in advertising.
In this article, you will learn how to properly study clients and draw up portraits of the target audience using a specific example.
How to understand who your client is
The target audience is everyone who has shown interest in you in one way or another + those who don’t know about you yet, but who may need your product or service.
Real customers who have already bought from you, and perhaps more than once. Failed customers who contacted your company but made a purchase from competitors. And finally, the entire competitor base.
However, this is a very abstract definition. In practice, you need details that you can cling to when describing the benefits of the product. For example, it is wrong to think that visitors to English courses buy the courses themselves. They buy a dream - career growth, communication, travel, experiences that will become real thanks to knowledge of the language.
It is best to study the target audience in detail using a collective image / typical character. These are personal characteristics, needs, motives, internal limitations, and characteristics of perception. It is important to find out what the target client does, what problems he solves, how he feels and in what environment he is.
For a deep understanding of the psychology of the audience, ask yourself 10 questions from the famous business consultant Dan Kennedy and try to answer them:
- What makes them wake up at night?
- What are they afraid of?
- What/who are they angry at?
- What are their 3 main experiences of the day?
- What trends are living in their business/life?
- What do they secretly dream about?
- What is their system of thinking? (example: engineers - analytical, designer - creative)
- Do they have their own language?
- Who is successfully selling similar products and how?
- Who can't do this and why?
As a result, you get several characters with different unique needs that do not overlap - this is the character map, or portraits of the target audience.
Portraiting helps:
- Identify and take into account the general values of the target audience when promoting a product;
- Compose advertising text and materials so that potential clients feel that you are addressing them and your offer is specifically for them; The principle is this: for each character - a separate offer, and ideally - one landing page for it;
- Choose advertising channels where you can catch the attention of target users.
What information is needed
Describe clients in your own words based on your experience interacting with them (if you don’t have any, it’s better to delegate the task to an employee who communicates / has communicated with the audience). Set aside a few days for this, so as not to be limited by templates and stereotypes, but to approach the issue thoughtfully.
Then complete the portrait point by point. There is no universal set; they depend on what qualities of the audience are more important to you. They vary in different sources, but basically they take the following parameters:
- Gender and age;
- Geography (if there are several options);
- Income level;
- Education;
- Marital status;
- Interests, hobbies;
- Problems, fears.
This knowledge will help predict consumer behavior and understand:
- What problems will your product solve;
- How the client will use it;
- What terms of acquisition are suitable for him;
- What will positively influence the choice in favor of your company;
- What will make you refrain from buying from you;
- What does the client expect from the product?
Also, in order to trace in detail the path from the first touch to the order, it is useful to see live how the target audience behaves and what it says, to “get used to” its image. Or at least monitor online behavior.
Sources of information about target audience
Online chat logs
This is the honest opinion of users who want to buy the product. Pay attention to what words, phrases, questions, assumptions are repeated, what topics concern you most.
Records of initial incoming calls
Study leads' requests and see what language they use and what objections they express. This will help trace their decision-making logic.
The following methods are suitable primarily for beginners, however, they will also work for “experienced” people. Check whether your idea of the target audience matches reality.
Reviews and testimonials
This is social proof, which also allows you to collect data for quantitative research and study the language of the audience.
There are special sites - “review sites”: Yell, Irecommend.ru, Otzovik.com, etc.
Quote from Otzovik.com:
Things that a real buyer noted as important to himself are marked in red.
Social networks, blogs and forums
Here people share their shopping experiences voluntarily and without bias. They use lively language, clever words and express valuable opinions.
Track mentions of you using monitoring services.
Study what both fans and haters are saying on topics that interest you.
If you haven't found the desired topic on a forum or on social networks, you can purposefully create your own topic in discussions. I want to buy [name of product or service], please advise me how to choose. The main thing is that it is open question, which cannot be answered in monosyllables.
One of the features of the service is to understand what else the target audience “breathes”. Similar queries will tell you about this:
From following example you can understand how to promote courses English language: for whom (beginners, children), why the audience is going to study it (intensive course - we can assume that for travel or work) and in what way (Skype, tutor).
Facebook Audience Insights
In addition to Wordstat, you can look at Facebook data if your product is suitable for users of this social network. In Ad Manager, open the Audience Insights menu and select the data you need. For example, let's look at the demographics of Russian Facebook users who are interested in English.
We get diagrams by gender and age:
Also - “Marital status”, “Level of education” and “Position”:
Using these diagrams, you can study your competitors' audiences.
There is also a Lifestyle chart, but it can only be built if the Location field is set to the United States.
Google Trends
This tool shows in which months the demand for a specific service grows and in which regions it is stronger. Are you sure that you know exactly the peak seasonal activity for your product? Look at Google Trends to see the real picture.
All these sources provide insight into what customers pay attention to when making their first choice.
And, of course, make hypotheses. For example, according to search tips. Use own experience. The more detail you take into account in a portrait, the higher your chance of creating a proposal that hits the mark.
How to Make a Character Map
Give the characters names - most often this is a generalized characteristic (pensioner, bore, optimist, hard worker) that most determines behavior.
Describe what each character would want to use your product for and what problems it could solve. Assume his expectations (how he sees your product ideally) and decision-making criteria.
Select promising groups, which you are going to target, and decide what to offer them in the ads/on the website.
Example
Let's take the same English language courses. Why they are needed - everyone has their own answer.
We identified four characters and guessed what benefits would attract them.
Note: The specified characteristics by gender and age are conditional. More precise categories are important when setting up targeting. They can be determined using analytical systems.
1) Schoolchildren
These are students in grades 5–11. Lazy, it is difficult to force them to sit down for lessons. Alternatively, there are not enough basic classes to master all the nuances of the language. The interested party is the parents. They also pay for the training. Therefore, we consider all items from their perspective and indicate their socio-demographic characteristics.
This married couple with average household income and 2–3 children. They care about their future and try to give them a good education.
Parents hope that the courses will help their child fill in the gaps and improve their knowledge in order to pass test points at school. At the same time, they are afraid that it is difficult to cover a large amount of material in a short time.
According to their expectations, we can offer the offer “Improve your English before the exam? Easily! Just a couple of hours a week.”
Counter question: what if you can’t get your child interested? Possible answers to this in the advertising text:
- “Our teachers know: every child is talented, you just need to find an approach to him and awaken interest”;
- “Doubt the result? Read reviews from dozens of satisfied parents”;
- “If you don’t like it from the first lesson, we’ll return your money.”
2) Dreamers
Audience 20–30 years old. These are both students and older people (especially creative professions).
Income is above average. They love music, art, literature, cinema. There are no problems as such, they live for themselves and their pleasure, looking for inspiration.
In particular, they plan to move to another country in the future or have simply dreamed of visiting for a long time.
The following suggestions are suitable for them:
- “Learn to read Shakespeare in the original”;
- “Favorite films in original without subtitles”;
- “How to understand what this beautiful song is about.”
Since these comrades are fickle and it is difficult to interest them in something for a long time, they may have doubts “suddenly I don’t learn anything new”, “suddenly it’s not interesting.”
Therefore, warn in advance about the opportunity to choose or adjust the training program yourself. You need the most individual approach if you decide to target such clients.
3) Careerists
IN to a greater extent these are women. 25–45 years, from higher education. Are looking for a job or career opportunity. Income is above average. Demanding of themselves, hardworking. They love to learn new things and are capable of self-learning.
The problem is that they lack English skills. Therefore, they are afraid that “they will suddenly be fired (salary cut, not promoted, not hired for their dream job).”
Learning or improving English is not a big deal for them; the main thing is to find courses that will help with this.
Formulate the right proposal for them, while considering the following:
Also give them the opportunity to participate in adjusting the training program.
4) Travelers
Single men/single women 30+ with high income. Wealthy people have traveled half the world, but it’s not enough for them; they can’t live without it. Every vacation they visit a new country/location. Therefore, they really want to learn how to communicate freely with native speakers and not get into an awkward position due to ignorance.
Translation services are an additional expense and a stranger is always nearby, which does not suit them.
Possible offers for them:
- “Looking for a translator? Learn to communicate without intermediaries!”;
- “How not to be afraid to ask directions from a charming stranger.”
As you can see, the images of the characters turned out to be quite generalized.
A target audience portrait is a composite, general image of your typical client. It makes it clear how to satisfy the needs of a potential buyer. Includes data such as:
- age;
- place of residence;
- marital status;
- occupation;
- income level;
- typical problems;
- desires and dreams.
This is the most minimum required, which you need to know about your consumers.
Often business owners do not understand who they are selling their services to. The “selling to everyone” approach works against you because you end up not selling to anyone. Generalized advertisements, attempts to create one sentence for everyone usually miss the consumer.
For example, you must know the brand women's clothing Zara. These are clothes primarily for modern women, relatively inexpensive and of high quality. Another brand is Bershka. These are clothes for young people that an adult woman will never wear.
By the way, Both Zara and Bershka are owned by the same corporation(together with other brands such as Stradivarius) – Inditex. But for each category of their clients they created a separate clothing brand. No one is trying to sell youth tops to ladies over 40.
If you want to make your business successful, you need to know who you are selling to, what problems it will solve, and how. Moreover, it is not enough to know that your clients are successful men in their 30s. The better you know your customer, the more successful your advertising campaigns will be.
A portrait of your target audience will help you
- think over a competent offer, an offer that your client cannot refuse;
- choose the optimal promotion channels. A simple example: if your target audience is young girls, then it makes sense to try promote on Instagram ;
- think over the presentation format, website design, text style, so that it really works - in other words, you can speak to the audience in their language;
- work out key triggers, hooks that can hook your client.
Let's figure it out.
How to create a client portrait
Each product may have several categories of consumers. Therefore, you will have to make not one portrait, but two or three, or even more. In other words, you need segment your audience.
Let's take shoes as an example. There is a shoe store for women. Sneakers are preferred by teenage girls. A business woman will buy pumps with heels; she is not so interested in sneakers. But a young mother will prefer ballet shoes, as they are comfortable; you won’t be able to walk around with your baby much in heels. Older women love comfortable shoes with a small, stable heel.
As you can see, the product is the same – women’s shoes, but the clients are completely different. The general description “a woman who lives in our city” will not work here.
In the store itself, which has different shoes “for everyone,” sneakers are not placed on the same shelf with shoes. Everything is sorted into departments so that every buyer can easily find what he needs.
Therefore, you need to create several portraits of your target audience. Yes, it will take you a lot of time, but it will save you a lot of money later.
Drawing up a consumer portrait based on information in a profile on social networks
Of course, the easiest way to create a portrait of your target client is through social networks. Let's look at the example of the social network VKontakte.
People simply write about all this on their page, in information about themselves.
Here, a person with an above-average income, a young man, married, two children, a company manager. Education - higher. All this information is scanned in two minutes. 
For example, this person works in the stone processing industry. Listens to heavy music. Interested in tattoos (perhaps he has one or more). He loves hunting and fishing (he is a member of groups dedicated to this, plus he has a lot of photos from fishing, in the forest with a gun). He likes interesting and unique things (follows pages with unique souvenirs and T-shirts).
Match information about groups with what you see on the page.
- As you analyze profiles, enter all data in the table(the set of questions may vary from niche to niche). Separate segments of your target audience will emerge on their own.
Here's what an analysis of a store's target audience might look like: women's shoes, which was mentioned above.
| Questions | Client 1 | Client 2 | Client 3 |
| Floor | Female | Female | Female |
| Age | 15-18 | 18-25 | 25-40 |
| Place of residence | Moscow | Moscow | Moscow |
| Income level | Supported by parents | Earns little on the support of parents or husband | Above average |
| Place of work | Schoolgirl | Student | Own business |
| Hobby | Sport | Active lifestyle | Playing the guitar |
| Hobbies | Running | Running, gymnastics | English language |
| Marital status | Single | Married or have a boyfriend | Single |
| Children | No | Eat | No |
| Typical problems that your product can solve | It's hard to find beautiful, fashionable shoes inexpensively | It's hard to find comfortable and beautiful shoes, but not sneakers | Comfortable and high-quality high-heeled shoes are difficult to find |
| Dreams and wishes | Wants to get beautiful, inexpensive and comfortable shoes, cooler than those of her peers | Wants everyday shoes to last a long time and look elegant | She wants to look her best, and her shoes should speak of her high status. |
| Fears | That my classmates will laugh at my new sneakers | That new shoes won't be comfortable enough because she has to walk a lot | Rub your feet with new shoes before an important meeting |
Even if you don’t have a customer base yet, you can sit down and think for yourself and answer these simple questions. To determine your target audience, go through the groups and forums where your potential consumers live - there you will find many descriptions of typical problems and pains of clients. This will help you create avatars more accurately.
Example of portraits of target audience of Starbucks coffee shop
Let's look at an example of audience segmentation. Take the world-famous Starbucks coffee shops. They offer their clients well-roasted coffee (you can take it with you or drink it in a cafe), sandwiches and cakes, and tea. These cafes are distinguished by their price (above the market average), quality of products, and a special, cozy atmosphere. The coffee shops have comfortable sofas for friendly gatherings and free Wi-Fi.
The target audience of these coffee shops is young people. But to be more specific:
- students: here you can quickly drink coffee, have a snack, and in the meantime go online and prepare for class.
- young women who come for friendly get-togethers with friends on weekends or after work. The cozy atmosphere of the cafe is conducive to warm conversations, and Starbucks also has delicious cakes and a separate line of diet drinks.
- businessmen, freelancers, IT specialists - where else if not here can you meet a client or partner? Yes, and work “outside the home”, there is free Wi-Fi. Take your laptop with you and you can sit and get creative.
As we can see, these coffee shops offer special products and additional services for each segment of their target audience. This is precisely the secret of their success. AND high prices They don’t interfere at all 😄
Target Audience(TA) is the population of people to whom advertising is directed; or a group of users interested in some information.
In other words, the definition of target audience refers to those people whose needs are satisfied by your product or service. These people certainly have something in common or similar: characteristics (demographic, geographic, economic, etc.), perception and attitude towards the quality of the product/service, motivation for purchasing, methods of making and place of purchase.
Ignorance of the target audience usually leads to increased costs for product promotion or, even worse, to the failure of the product in the market.
Target audience of the site
This is a collection of project visitors who find its content useful. The web resource is aimed at this segment of users.
Based on the time frame, the site’s audience is:
- maximum- total number of visits;
- constant- visitors who periodically visit the site;
- irregular- visited several times, but did not become regular visitors;
- active- spend more than an hour a week on the page;
- target.
Target audience is a fundamental concept in website promotion. The effectiveness of promotion and search engine optimization of a web project depends on the attracted consumers, since the promotion strategy is formed based on the preferences, capabilities and desires of the target audience.
This is very important element, since the proposal that best suits the needs of the target audience directly depends on the amount of detail and quality of the portrait. The more characteristics it has, the greater the chances of success.
To compile it, the following scheme of similar features is used that you should pay attention to:
- Demographic - gender, age, marital status, profession, nationality;
- Geographical - location of the region and the dynamics of its development, population, climate, media availability, etc.;
- Economic - income level, employment;
- Psychographic - character traits, temperament, lifestyle, life position, etc.
There are also additional parameters for drawing up a portrait: favorite literature, film genres, car brands, favorite sport, cafes, possible health problems, etc. Using additional parameters in the portrait description will allow you to reach exactly that narrow circle of buyers who will undoubtedly be interested proposal.
TA happens narrow And wide. For example, ice cream lovers are a wide audience, and chocolate ice cream lovers with condensed milk are a narrow audience. The wider it is, the more vague the description of the portrait is, since it will be difficult to identify the pronounced characteristics of consumers.
Therefore, it is not entirely reasonable to focus exclusively on a wide target audience.
An exemplary portrait includes not only current consumers, but also potential ones.
How to determine your target audience
To obtain data about the target audience, the following is used:
- survey
- interviewing
- conducting surveys
Information can be found on the same social networks, blogs and forums. In this way, without wasting time, with minimal costs, you can easily segment your audience. However, it should be understood that the opinion of the so-called vocal minority may not coincide with the silent majority.
How to find your target audience
There is a technique based on finding answers to 5 questions: what, who, why, when and where? The answers to these questions provide a clear description of the target audience.
- Construction of a house
- Home renovation
- Roof installation
- A family who wants to buy their own home
- A family who wants to live outside the city
- Family with a child
Why?
- Speed of construction work
- Opportunity to save your budget
- Possibility of obtaining comprehensive turnkey services
- Drawing up a contract
- Possibility of obtaining a guarantee
When?
- During promotions and discounts
- After hearing positive feedback
- Landing page
- Web project
- Social media
Target audience, examples
Example 1. The owner of a mobile beauty salon invested a considerable budget on printing business cards and leaflets, which were simply handed out to passers-by. As a result, there were so few calls that advertising costs were not justified.
There is only one way out of this situation - to determine who exactly needs on-site cosmetology services. After performing the analysis, the following client portraits emerged:
- brides;
- women caring for children (on maternity leave);
- persons living on the outskirts or in remote areas of the city.
Salon employees left information in wedding salons, kindergartens, schools and created a group on one of the social networks.
Interaction with your target audience has borne fruit: high-quality feedback has been established. After some time, it turned out that it was through the social network that the largest flow of clients was recorded, so all the emphasis was placed on this method of interaction with clients.
It follows that segmentation and analysis of the target audience should be carried out even in the process of initiating an advertising campaign.
Example 2. A consumer profile based on specific parameters, i.e. demographic, geographic, economic and psychographic.
Buyer of designer clothes:
- Maria, 28 years old.
- Lives in Kyiv.
- Marital status: married.
- Field of employment, position, wages: manager, 10 thousand UAH.
- Desires and needs: Maria loves to stand out, wants to wear exclusive and beautiful outfits. She loves designer items and doesn't mind showing them off to her colleagues and friends.
Example 3. TA can be primary, indirect and peripheral.
The main consumer is the daughter, who asks her mother to buy an interactive doll. Mom agrees to buy a toy if father gives the go-ahead. Dad and mom, in turn, run for advice to Aunt Lila, who has already purchased the same doll for her daughter.
Everyone in this chain in one way or another acts as a buyer, but each of them needs different approach and various tools for conveying information about the product (doll).
Bottom line
Knowing the desires of the audience is the key to successful web page promotion, reducing advertising costs and the ability to design further development.
The portrait of the target audience is changeable, so it needs to be created anew or edits made before the next advertising campaign.
Found a grammatical error in the text? Please report this to the administrator: select the text and press the hotkey combination Ctrl+Enter
Loading...
