Audience profiling

What does audience profiling mean?

Audience profiling is all about getting customers' data and segmenting them into groups with similar behaviors. Your aim in this process is to understand your audience to a greater extent so that you can craft personalized campaigns and increase results. 

It involves defining who your ideal customers are and unlocking your audience by analyzing consumer behavior across several touchpoints and platforms.

By grouping your prospects into segments that all share similar behaviors you are able to create targeted marketing campaigns. These campaigns are built focusing on smaller market segments so that they are personalized and optimized for that market segment, thus making them more effective.

The process of audience profiling involves data mining and statistical analysis so that you can answer important questions such as:

• Are you targeting the right audience?
• What is your audience’s perception of your brand?
• How does your audience interact with your brand?
• What does an average day look like for your audience?
• What social networks does your audience use and engage with you over the most?
• In what way does your audience make purchasing decisions?
• What does the customer journey look like for your audience?

When you have the answers to these questions, you can drive heavily targeted campaigns that resonate with your customers to a greater extent.

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Why is audience profiling important? 

Brands carry out audience profiling exercises so that they can understand their market and figure out the best areas for them to dedicate their resources in order to earn the highest returns. When you know who your audience is, you’ll be able to pick a target group that would be most likely to complete the goals that you want them to complete.

Audience profiling is extremely important because it enables you to tell the difference between marketing campaigns that bring you a healthy return on investment (ROI) and ones that do not. When you do not engage in audience profiling, you run the risk of devoting your resources and energy to marketing campaigns that cater to customers who aren’t your ideal customers.

You need to carry out audience profiling so that you can understand your customers and address their needs, wants and preferences. 

What are the types of audience profile?‍

You can create multiple audience profiles based on purpose of your analysis.

1. Demographic profile: Demographic profile includes information about the age, gender, income, education level, and other demographic characteristics of your audience.
2. Psychographic profile: Psychographic profile includes information about the attitudes, values, interests, and lifestyle preferences of your audience.
3. Behavioral profile: Behavioral profile includes information about how your audience behaves, such as how they interact with your brand or products, how often they make purchases, and what factors influence their purchasing decisions.
4. Technographic profile: Technographic profile includes information about the technology that your audience uses, such as their devices, operating systems, and internet browsers.
5. Geographic profile: This type of profile includes information about the geographic location of your audience, such as their country, region, or city.
6. Firmographic profile: This type of profile includes information about the business or organization that your audience works for, such as the size of the company, industry, and job title.

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What are the benefits of audience profiling?

Here are some of the benefits of audience profiling:

Helps you understand customer behavior

Through the use of data mining, you can track customer behavior at scale. This empowers you to create accurate audience profiles and cover every aspect of your customer’s path to purchase. It allows you to your audience’s age, gender, income, location, as well as their with attitudes, lifestyles, and interests. 

Allows you to personalize your marketing campaigns

Seth Godin talks about going after your smallest viable audience. You aren’t wasting your time creating campaigns that the mass market doesn’t care about, with audience profiling, you get to create campaigns that a small segment of the market really resonates with.

Increases customer loyalty

By helping you understand your customers, audience profiling does not just allow you to craft better marketing campaigns, it also helps you improve your offerings, so that they match your customers' needs to a greater extent. This ensures that you can always offer your customers what they’re looking for, which makes them far less likely to stop doing business with you, thus increasing customer loyalty and your customer lifetime value.

Helps you optimize your marketing strategies

When you gain a deeper understanding of your customers, you get to tweak your campaigns so that they strike a chord with your target audience and convert more prospects into customers. 

Increases your conversions

Audience profiling helps you understand exactly where they should invest their marketing resources. It allows you to capture your target audience’s attention and influence their purchasing decision by providing them with access to valuable free content, like videos and testimonials, or downloadable guides that provide a wealth of information in exchange for contact information. This helps you build a strong connection with your audience, earn their trust, and thus lead them towards the buying decision, thus increasing your conversions.

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How do you develop an audience profile?

There are four stages involved in developing an audience profile. These stages include:

1. Segmentation

Rather than trying to capture the entire market in one go, audience profiling focuses on dedicating your resources towards one market segment. 

You got to customers into specific demographics on the basis of factors like age, gender, income, family structure, ethnicity and location.

Segmenting your audience into a common variable enables you to use time and resources more efficiently. It also allows you to personalize campaigns to cater to the needs of that targeted segment of the market.

2. Messaging

Defining your audience into segments allows you to  tailor-make your marketing messages for these segments according to their needs, wants, and desires. To pull this off, you’ll need to identify and monitor the entire customer journey. This will allow you to craft content that really speaks to your customers and captures their interest.

3. Engagement

Just like any other marketing campaign, you’ll need to track how your customers flow through the customer journey. Doing this will make it possible for you to see exactly at what point your customers stop engaging with your business. 

These insights will help guide you on how you should tweak your marketing messages, but it will even show you which parts of your customer journey need adjustments and help you understand what kind of changes you should make there.

4. Measurement

If you aren’t tracking your campaign’s performance, can you really call yourself a marketer? Measuring your marketing tactics’ performance allows you to fine-tune them so that you can improve your odds of success.

How do you identify an audience profile?

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There are several ways to identify an audience profile, depending on the type of profile you are trying to create and the information that you have available. Here are some common methods:

1. Surveys: Surveys are a great way to get a good understanding about your audience's demographic characteristics, attitudes, values, interests, and behaviors. You can conduct surveys online or in person, and you can use a variety of question types (e.g., multiple choice, open-ended) to gather the information you need.
2. Social media analytics: If you have a strong presence on social media, you can use social media analytics tools to gather data about your audience's demographics, interests, and behaviors. These tools can provide insights about the content that resonates with your audience, and can help you understand how they are interacting with your brand online.
3. Google Analytics: If you have a website or app, you can use Google Analytics to gather data about your audience's demographics, geographic location, and behavior. This can help you understand how your audience is using your site or app, and can provide insights about what types of content or features are most popular.
4. Customer data: If you have a customer database, you can use this information to create an audience profile. You can use data such as customer pain points, demographics, purchase history, and interactions with your brand to create a detailed picture of your audience.
5. Third-party data: There are many companies that specialize in collecting and selling data about consumers and businesses. You can purchase this data to supplement the information you have about your audience and create a more comprehensive profile.

List of Audience profiling tools you should use

Here are some examples of audience profiling tools that you might consider using:

1. Google Analytics: GA is a free tool that will provide detailed information about website visitors, including demographics, interests, location, and behavior.
2. SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey will allow you to create and distribute surveys which will help you gather information about your target audience.
3. Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management platform which provides deep insights into the demographics, interests, and behaviors of your social media followers.
4. Brand24: Brand24 tracks online mentions of your brand or specific keywords, which will allow you to see who is talking about you and what they are saying.
5. Qualtrics: Qualtrics will help you gather customer feedback and insights through surveys and other research methods.
6. Ask Your Target Market (AYTM): This tool allows you to create and distribute surveys to gather information about your target audience.
7. Mixpanel: This tool provides detailed insights into user behavior on your website or app, including demographics, interests, and actions taken.
8. HubSpot: This marketing, sales, and customer service platform provides detailed insights into the demographics, behaviors, and interests of your leads and customers.

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