How to create a portrait of the target audience for your business. How to aim and not miss. Drawing a portrait of the target audience for advertising on social networks Portrait of the target audience for the B2B market

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, communication, travel, impressions 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's important to find out what he's doing target client what problems he solves, how he feels and what environment he is in.

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:

1. Identify and take into account the general values ​​of the target audience when promoting a product;
2. 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 there is a separate offer, and ideally one landing page for it;
3. 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;
• Family 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 this is an open question that 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 the following example you can understand how to promote courses in English: 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 your 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 the prospect groups you want to target and decide what to offer them in your ads/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

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 fire you (cut their salary, won’t promote them, won’t hire them 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+ s high level income. The wealthy have traveled halfway around 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.

It is no secret that a product is sold to a specific consumer. Marketing agencies offer several techniques to identify ideal buyers for any product. We will share one that makes it easy to create a portrait of the target audience just for you.

General issues

To create a portrait of an ideal consumer, you need to answer a few basic questions:

• Who, first of all, represents the target audience for a particular company?
• How to develop a strategy specifically for these buyers?
• What should you do before identifying the right audience?
• What information will help you create your ideal buyer persona?
• What are the characteristics to describe this group of future customers?
• Is it worth going into detail about the description of the group?
• Does it affect Common Market and expected competition for the sale of goods to my consumer?

By answering each question as fully as possible, marketers will improve conversion (that is, sales of the product itself).

Let's start with the basics

How to describe it? Initially, decide whose problem the proposed service or product solves. People buy absolutely everything, but the goods sold vary in cost, quality and many other parameters. This is exactly what a marketer should consider.

People buy absolutely everything, but the goods sold vary in cost, quality and many other parameters.

It is also worth determining how wide or narrow the audience for the product will be.

• Toothbrushes are necessary for a wide range of consumers.
• Diabetic products - for a narrow circle.
• Perfumes – for a wide target audience.
• South African spices are only for a narrow circle of lovers.

The larger the company, the more likely its request for broad target group consumers. But even in these conditions, the purchasing power, age limit and general values ​​of the intended customers are taken into account. A properly thought-out advertising campaign is based on an even more detailed and intimate understanding of the client:

• Age is taken into account.
• What are his preferences?
• What is his income level?
• Product consumption rate (a yacht or a bottle of carbonated drink is purchased with at different speeds, differ in price several thousand times).
• Many other additional and highly specialized factors for sales.

Good timing

The target client is determined after a general analysis of the market and the one the future product represents. The ideal option is to “diagnostics” customers who already consume this or similar products, identifying potential buyers and identifying the unique characteristics of a new product or its variations. Don't forget about direct and indirect competitors.

1. Direct competitors. These are those who sell the same product (for example, Nike, Adidas, Ekko sneakers). The emphasis is on innovative approaches to creating a product or on lowering prices to compete.
2. Indirect. These are all the other sellers. For example: a buyer wanted to buy sneakers, but saw posters of his favorite actor and bought a ticket to his premiere show.

Features of real and potential clients

The format of the following study is a table or subject description. It contains the main characteristics and parameters of the target audience:

1. . They describe in detail the psychological profile of the client, based on identifying his values. The product is sold through the emotional involvement of the buyer in the sales process.
2. . Based on the place of residence and cultural characteristics of the selected group of people.
3. . Reveal common features in buyer behavior and help advertisers build the right video and sound sequences.
4. Social. Mentioned above (income, age, social status).

The ideal option is if after such an analysis a visual portrait of the client emerges. This is almost a real character. The company clearly knows his lifestyle and social level. You also know how your customer differs from other people and what motivates them when choosing a product. What price is he willing to pay and how often will he purchase the product on offer?

We should not forget about brand admirers, who can be attracted through brand recognition, loyalty to a particular brand or manufacturer, opinions about the brand and its qualities, and the frequency of purchasing branded goods.

Content marketing requires constant evaluation of quality based on whether it was made for search engines or for real people. If you write content based solely on technical criteria

: , etc. - this approach can no longer be called relevant and “human”. When creating your next article, you must have a portrait of your target audience; you must know their demographics, interests and hobbies.

Content is also a product; in traditional business, marketers and entrepreneurs have long been personifying their typical buyer according to certain characteristics - this is called a consumer portrait.

In our online space, you can find out the demographic indicators of your users using web analytics, but this will not be enough. All we get are cold numbers and indicators like gender, age, social status and geographic location. Although these statistics help to determine the target audience of the site at the start, is there still something missing in it? - A human face!

Portrait of the target audience

<Личность>has become important over the past few years, and it implies the need to project a human face onto the cold statistics used by those creating content or product. . Thus, personality was introduced as a metric that helps marketers evaluate and utilize the human side of available statistics.

Individuals have their own problems, goals and aspirations, just like each of us. Newspaper publishers have been taking these factors into account for a long time at the most primitive level, and thus determining what will work best for the front page. Editors and journalists have long been guided by the principle “more content - more views.” Individuals have characteristics, fears, desires and needs. Demographics are age, gender or university year.

So, it doesn’t matter whether you are a blogger or an SMM specialist. You need to try on the portrait of the target audience using statistical data.

Example of a target audience portrait

Personalities can be quite prescriptive or even provide you with a whole image of a typical reader or potential client. I offer you an example of the personality of the target audience for a humorous video portal, a portrait of someone who will not only consume content, but also create it themselves and enter into dialogue with other users.

What questions should you ask?

To develop your own potential user persona, you should ask yourself a few questions.

• What are the most challenging problems and challenges in their work?
• Where do they get their information from? Blogs, magazines, books?
• What can stop them on your website/online store?
• What seminars or exhibitions do they attend?
• What media resources do they use? Youtube, newspapers, podcasts?

By answering these questions, you will be able to create at least some characteristics of the personality of your clients.

Creating a personality profile is both an art and a science. Your task is to create material that will simultaneously touch both the heart and mind. The content should not only answer questions, but also be in the interests of the potential client. This could be a video, a blog post, or a presentation, or all three. If you can get those creating your content to put themselves in the shoes of buyers, then you can say that you are already halfway to success.

What should you do?

If you ask a business owner: “Who do you sell your product to?”, in most cases you will hear the answer: “Everyone.” And this is the wrong answer, because selling to everyone means not selling to anyone.

There are no universal answers, no universal advice. There are no trousers that would fit well on you and on Baba Varya from the next entrance.

You buy your favorite Lakomka sausage (fictitious name) for lunch because you like its taste, and your earnings allow you to buy an elite variety of sausage. And in general, it is considered natural, and you watch your diet. But the same woman Varya, the most she can do is buy a ring of “liver” once a week and eat it in half with her favorite red cat.

Both you and Baba Varya are customers in a butcher shop. But you are completely different buyers, you are interested in different products, and you have different purchasing capabilities. If the quality of sausage is important to you, then for a pensioner, its price is important. Do you think an advertisement telling about the taste and quality of sausage, which costs 5th of her pension, will work for her? Hardly.

And an advertising campaign, the messages in which will tar you and Baba Varya with the same brush, is doomed to failure. You are not attracted to cheap, because you know that cheap is not of high quality, and you can’t buy a pensioner a healthy diet - the availability of the product is important to her.

Therefore, it is very important to segment your audience. And in order to do this, you need to know it. Study and draw up portraits of your clients, understand what they need - then your advertising will hit the target.

Why do you need to create a portrait of your target audience?

1. With the right audience profile in hand, you can choose the right marketing channels and tools. For example, if your target audience is young girls, it is best to look for them on Instagram.

2.A correct portrait of the target audience will help you create such advertisements and messages that will reach exactly the people you want.

3. By studying the needs of your audience, over time you will be able to improve the quality of your product or service based on this data.

Making a portrait is not so difficult, but for this you need to think a little, sit a little, and study a little about the “habitat” of your clients. This takes time and some effort. Because, as a rule, small companies They don’t bother with that. They create universal advertising campaigns and universal messages “for everyone.” As a result, there are either no conversions or few of them.

If you know your client, then you understand what he really needs.

How to create a portrait of the target audience?

Each specialist has his own methods, but there are some general algorithms. Let's look at them in this article.

From the very beginning, you need to think about who your customers really are. Let's say you have an inexpensive hair salon. Men and women come to you to get their hair cut, and sometimes they bring their children to get their hair cut. It is important for them to keep their head in order, but not to overpay - there is no extra money for expensive salons. Based on this, you have three categories of clients: men, women and mothers. It is mothers who choose where to take their child for a haircut. The child himself has not yet decided this, and will not respond to your advertising. Since yours is inexpensive, your clients’ income is average or below average.

This is in very general terms.

Before you start drawing up a portrait of your target audience, you still need to understand yourself and your product/service.

Tell yourself or your marketer (hired specialist, freelancer, other contractor):

1.What problem does your product or service help solve?? In the case of a hairdresser, this is to remain beautiful or beautiful for little money. Remember that your goal is not to sell a service, but a solution to the client’s problems. Nobody buys a vacuum cleaner for the sake of a vacuum cleaner. A person buys cleanliness in the house, not a device.

2.Who are your customers?? Let's return to the paragraph about an inexpensive hairdresser. This is the answer to this question.

3.Where to find your clients? Do they live on forums and social networks? If yes, in which groups? Or maybe they live in the houses closest to your hairdresser? In the latter case, outdoor advertising will help.

4.What problems does your client have to solve regularly?? And how can you help solve them with your product or service?

In fact, to create a client profile, you need to work through a lot more issues. For convenience, they can be placed in a table:

Already such basic portraits will help you get a general idea of ​​the people to whom you are trying to sell your product. You will begin to better understand how to present yourself, your company, your product so that the client really understands that he needs it and decides to buy.

You can group customers into separate segments based on similar problems, similar desires or fears.

What does customer data tell you? How to use it?

It’s clear, you say, for example, knowing the problems or dreams of the target audience, I can address them or “press on the sore” in advertising messages. But what does gender, age, geography give me?

Men and women respond differently to advertising. While men rely more on logic and compare different offers, women are more emotional and their purchases are more impulsive.

Age information is also important. Different age categories have different values, different ways interactions with advertising, different decision-making processes. For example, in the business of one of my clients, the main category of clients are women 45-55 years old. Guess which device we get the most visitors to our site from? That's right, from a computer.

Who should draw up a portrait of the target audience?

Ideally, your marketer, if your company has one; if there is no such thing, then the hired specialist to whom you entrusted the management advertising campaign. If he doesn’t do this, think about whether he’ll drain your budget by chance.

But remember - the business owner must take part in drawing up a portrait of the target audience. Answer the specialist’s questions, or “give” him help to someone who will help with this - for example, your sales manager. Who knows, he definitely knows your clients. The better the contractor understands the specifics of your business and your clients, the better he will be able to customize advertising. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s context, SMM or SEO.

How to create a portrait of your target audience using social networks

If you don’t trust anyone and want to do everything yourself (or you, my reader, are a novice advertising specialist), then here is a simple algorithm for studying your target audience from pages on social networks.

Social networks are a storehouse of useful information about a person. Without suspecting anything wrong, we post everything about ourselves here. And if you know where to look, you can glean a lot directly from a user's profile.

Select a few people from your client base – ten will do. And get started:

2. Write down your position, place of work, age, place of residence, marital status, children in the table.

3.Select 3-5 groups they belong to.

4.Look at what sites they visit and where they repost from.

5.Analyze the profile and messages on the wall - what problems worry the person, what he dreams about, what he most often faces.

All that remains is to enter all this into the table above - and the client’s portrait is ready.

A customer profile will help you write accurate ads, choose the right advertising tools, and even create content for your blog and social media. If you attach a portrait of the target audience to technical specifications for a copywriter or designer, they will only thank you. Because it’s much easier to write text or draw a design when you know who exactly should react to it and how.

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