Widely known in the marketing industry, your target audience is key to the success of your marketing strategy, regardless of budget spend, chosen channels or industry. Whenever you are looking to determine your target audience, you must pay attention to demographics, taking into account geographic location, age, sex, religion, marital status, income and other important elements.
Whether you have just a rough idea of who you’re trying to target or you have already developed a more complex description of your target audience, it is important to dig deeper and really narrow it down to factors beyond demographics in order to start building up your marketing persona.
Sure, knowing that you want to target young women in the 25-30 age group based in London begins to paint a picture of who your audience is and, while this is helpful, it’s just the first step in the journey of determining your marketing persona. Now is where you want to look at psychographics and learn which of these young women would genuinely be interested in what you’re offering. What are their psychological tendencies? What are they passionate about? What does their lifestyle look like? You also should find out their interests and hobbies, where they get their favourite products from and their expectations and experiences with products or services that are similar to yours.
Understanding their lifestyle will help you to really determine what impact it has on their consumption behaviour and that will contribute to your overall strategy and get you a step closer to achieving a better conversion rate.
All of this might sound overwhelming but follow these steps and you will have gathered a lot of useful information about your marketing persona before you even know it.
Firstly, you need to really define your target audience as a group through the demographic characteristics.
When looking at demographic factors, they might not all be relevant for your target audience, but you should still consider them all when determining your ideal audience.
Here are some elements you should analyse:
- Age
- Sex
- Ethnicity
- Education Level
- Income Level
- Marital Status
- Occupation
- Living Status
- Nationality
- Political Affiliation
- Religion
Once you have already created a group of people that you plan on targeting based on demographics, it’s time to narrow it down and research the psychographic information to start building your marketing persona.
These should consist of:
- Lifestyle
- Interests and Passions
- Beliefs
- Personality Traits
- Activities
- Preferences
- Values
- Opinions
When you supplement your demographic persona with psychographic elements, you will have a much more complex profile. All that’s left to do now is make sure this profile is relevant to your brand. You now know a lot of information about your marketing persona. You know about their behaviour, their personality, where they are located and a lot of additional information from researching their generation. This can all be incorporated into your marketing strategy when creating campaigns targeted at them. Your final milestone is taking all this information and using it to understand how and when your brand is relevant for your marketing persona.
To achieve this, create a document or a slide and add everything you have learnt about the persona you’re building, adding as much detail as possible, even assigning them a name. A good strategy, suggested by Quicksprout, is to use your marketing persona’s demographic information to identify when they were born, look for the top baby names in that year and choose one for your persona. By the end, you will be able to see a complex profile which will provide valuable insights into which marketing techniques will maximise conversions and really speak to your audience.
If you’re not sure where to begin, a good starting point might be to look at statistics and research general psychographic information for the generation of your target audience. From there, you will be able to find out more about other details and don’t forget to look into credible and multiple sources to ensure you have accurate data.
