10 Questions to define your target audience.

When it comes to creating engaging content, you’ll want to know exactly who you’re talking to. Defining your ideal customer will guide your marketing efforts and help you connect with them on a deeper level, creating a personalised experience that provides them with a solution. This will in turn increase customer retention and encourage brand advocacy for lower customer acquisition costs.

Businesses will often try to cast a wider net, looking to increase their chances of catching some customers. But if your messages are too general, then they won’t appeal to anyone and all your marketing will become lost in the great expanse of the world wide web.

The key to getting quality leads is to narrow down your target audience and tailor your content, speaking directly to those most likely to want or need your products or services. This will help you create powerful messages that resonate with potential customers by clearly showing the value of your offer. But how do you define your target audience?

 

 

Building your ideal target persona

 

Your ideal customer profile is essentially who you imagine your perfect customer to be. They are the person who wants your products, needs your services and gets excited when they read your content. Once you know their entire background story, you can set to work creating compelling content that engages them and offers solutions.

Start by defining their basic demographics. This will give you a rough idea of who your product is aimed at and help you tap into their mindset. For example, someone who is in their 20s will have different priorities and ways of communicating compared to someone in their 40s.

 

• Age range
• Gender
• Occupation
• Income
• Relationship status
• Education
• Location
• Children

 

Now let’s imagine we run a premium pet food company. We’re going to call our ideal customer Fran, who is in her 30s, identifies as female, has a degree and works full-time from home as a freelance writer. She has no children, but she does have two cats and is in a long-term relationship.

This is still quite general and doesn’t tell us much about Fran’s story, who she is or what she wants from her pet food. If we’re going to understand what will drive Fran to buy from us, then we need to know more about her values, goals, fears and pain points. By pinning down her interests and the struggles she faces, we can tailor our value proposition and tone of voice to create more relatable content that speaks directly to her.

 

10 Questions to create your target persona

 

When creating your ideal target persona, think about the following 10 questions and take your time to answer each one. You can imagine they’re someone you’re talking to over a cup of coffee, or you can go a step further and carry out your own market research through online forums, surveys or analysing reviews and feedback from team members. Talking to real people will offer valuable insights to go off instead of working from assumptions.

 

1. What are their values?
2. What do they care about?
3. What challenges do they face?
4. What are their goals in life?
5. What are their pain points?
6. How do they spend their time online?
7. Where do they go to get their news?
8. Which social networks do they use?
9. Do they choose quantity or quality?
10. What would drive them to choose your products or services?

 

Once you have answers to these questions, use them to create a background story and delve deeper into who your customer really is. This will give you a better understanding of how they behave and what leads them to make a purchase.

Here’s our example of a target persona for our premium pet food company:

 

Fran and her partner are proud homeowners with disposable income. They like to have the odd takeout, but don’t drink very often and use their spare money to go on trips. When shopping, they look for quality items from sustainable brands with eco-friendly packaging.Fran adores her cats. Her phone is filled with pictures of them which she keeps having to delete to make room for more. They even have their own Instagram and TikTok accounts, which she updates almost daily. Fran takes the very best care of her cats, which she calls her “fur babies”, and she wants to do everything she can to keep them healthy and happy.As they grow fussier about their food, Fran is getting concerned about her cats’ health. The vet reassures Fran that they both look to be in good condition and suggests changing their diet. She looks into this further and does her own research on the topic using reliable, scientific sources.Fran knows how important it is for people to eat a healthy diet and sees no reason why animals should be any different. She wants to know exactly what she’s feeding her cats, but is struggling to find clear information on pet food labels. As well as the ingredients, she wants to know how the food will benefit her cats, giving her reassurance that she’s making the right decision.

Tailor your marketing strategies

 

Fran is just one example of a perfect customer for our premium pet food company, and depending on what products or services you’re offering, you might come up with several. Once you have them pinned down, use these personas to guide your marketing efforts, shaping everything from the channels you use and your tone of voice to pricing, packaging and what message you want to send.