Locating the target audience in 4 stages [+TEMPLATE]

Locating the target audience is not an easy process.

Of course, today we have many automated tools that can make it easier to locate a target audience in an efficient way.

The most important tools are integrated into the advertising ecosystems of existing digital platforms on the market, such as:

• Facebook (Business Manager, Page Audience Insights)
• Instagram (Instagram Audience Insights)
• LinkedIn (Marketing Solutions)
• Twitter (Twitter Ads)
• TikTok (TikTok Ads)
• Google (Google Ads, Google Analytics)
• Bing (Microsoft Ads)

There are, however, many other independent tools we can use for audience location.

The choice of these will depend on the promotion strategy you want to follow and the marketing services you choose.

None of the tools, however, can give you all the insights in a more comprehensive way than a Buyer Persona profile does.

We will discuss this Buyer Persona further.

In today’s article you will learn:

• What is Buyer Persona
• What data contains an ideal customer avatar
• How do you get the data you need to locate your audience in the most efficient way
• The 4 steps to follow for creating a Buyer Persona
• Bonus: a free template, which you can download below:

DOWNLOAD TEMPLATE BUYER PERSONA

Before, however, addressing the proposed sub-topics, I open a small parenthesis to clarify an important point.

Buyer Persona is not an entity in its own right.

The creation of such an ideal customer profile is an integrated activity in the ecosystem of the promotion strategy.

In our case, we are in the second step of the 10 steps of Content Marketing strategy.

Of course, audience localization is a must, regardless of the marketing strategy you choose to follow or the promotion services you opt for.

We have closed the parenthesis and, without further ado, we move on and talk about:

What is Buyer Persona?

Well, Buyer Persona is the name given to a fictional representation of a business’s ideal customer; if you’re an entrepreneur, you can relate to this Buyer Persona as the avatar of your business’s ideal customer.

A Buyer Persona gives you all the insights you need to better understand your customers and potential customers, as well as other equally valuable clues, such as:

• the location of the audience in time and space (where they are and when)
• adapting marketing content to their specific needs, behaviour and concerns
• anticipating the goals they want to achieve
• Understanding the challenges they face

A Buyer Persona done right gives you the ability to correctly locate your target audience.

After all, the data entered into this ideal customer persona will help you fully understand your audience profile.

By clearly defining your target audience, you will receive valuable clues to their spatial and temporal location, in addition to other equally important insights.

It’s all about how you collect the data you need to enter into your ideal customer’s avatar.

So, before anything else, it is necessary to understand what data needs to be integrated into a Buyer Persona.

Target Audience Location
What date contains a Buyer Persona?

A properly crafted Buyer Persona profile should contain a set of identifying elements of the ideal customer, which will help you better understand…

• who
• cand
• where
• how
• why

…you need to present your product or service to her.

A Buyer Persona can be based on a structure structure, but the localization elements that populate this structure can differ from case to case.

In principle, in the list of characteristic elements to be found in a Buyer Persona profile, there are data such as:

• Name
• Age
• Sex
• Venitals
• Location (urban, suburban, rural)
• Level of education
• Job
• Company information (domain, size, etc)
• Function held and details about it
• Skills
• Family status (married, single, divorced, parent)
• Passions
• Personal goals
• Temeri
• Provocates
• Main sources of information
• Motivations and buying habits

While locating the audience by creating a Buyer Persona is a fictional process, the characteristics you assign to this ideal customer profile do not have to be what you think they should have.

In contrast, the ideal customer profile should incorporate the characteristics that the ideal customer actually has.

Therefore, this process must be based on serious research of data that you either already have or can obtain through various methods.

We’ll talk about these methods later.

Target audience location.
How do you get the data?

The process of gathering the data needed to complete a Buyer Persona profile is not that easy, since the ideal profile must be based on real data.

This means that the data you will integrate into Buyer Persona must be real.

Well, now, you’re probably wondering:

Where do I get the information I need to create a Buyer Persona?

Well, we were talking at the beginning of the article about the tools you can use for audience tracking.

These tools provide you with data on the profile of customers and potential customers who have come into contact with your business so far as a result of the promotional campaigns you have carried out in the past, using different digital marketing services.

What do you do, however, when you’re just starting out and these tools have nowhere to provide you with this data?

Well, for this situation too, there are certain practices, which we will discuss in the following.

But until then, let’s start with the insights you can glean from the tools at your disposal.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an invaluable resource of data about the users who come into contact with your website.

Besides being able to track in real time:

• number of visitors to the site
• total time spent by each visitor on the site
• time spent on each page of the site
• the browsing behavior of each visitor
• the tools used to get to the site and many other such insights…

…this tool offered by Google provides you with a lot of extremely useful data in building a Buyer Persona.

To get this data you need to go to the “Audience” section, where, as you can see in the screenshot below, you can access data:

• demographics
• of interest
• of geolocation
• behavior
• devices used and other insights.

All data provided by Google Analytics reveals audience profiles through the lens of browsing behavior in the ecosystem of Google-controlled platforms.

The insights you get from this tool are consistent.

However, to get an even clearer picture of the ideal customer avatar, my advice is to also collect the data provided by the Social Media platforms’ tools.

To that end, you can start with:

Facebook Business Manager

Facebook’s Business Manager platform helps you effectively manage the business pages you own on this social network.

Within the platform you will find a dedicated section of Audience Insights, where you will find a lot of essential data about the target audience of your business.

To access the Audience Insights section you must first have a Facebook page (not a personal profile!).

The next step is to create a Business Manager account.

Once created, in the menu on the left side of the main page you will find Audience Insights section.

In the Audience Insights section of Business Manager you will find data about:

• age
• sex
• family status
• level of education
• job…

…and many other insights about the audience on your Facebook page, which you can use to complement the avatar in your Buyer Persona profile.

In addition to the data provided by Business Manager, Facebook provides you with another useful data collection tool, namely:

Page Audience Insights

This section also gives you useful audience profile information.

To access the section, the first thing you need to do is open your Facebook page.

Then, go to the “Insights” section at the top of the page:

In this section you will receive data about:

• the effectiveness of your posts (likes, shares, comments, etc.)
• page visibility
• follower growth
• actions performed on the page
• insights about published Stories, and other data

In addition to all this information, in the panel on the left you will find the “People” section (“Persoane”, if you have your account set to English).

From here you can extract a lot of information, such as:

• age
• sex
• geolocation (country and city people are from)
• language they speak

Also, at the top of the “People” section of Facebook Page Insights, you’ll see that you have data about:

• Page fans
• Urmaritori
• People who have had contact with the page (Reach)
• People who have reacted in some way with the page (Engagement)

In addition to all the data you can extract from the insights you have on your Facebook page, you can also gather data from:

Instagram Insights

The Instagram Insights section gives you important information about who follows your account on this social network.

Keep in mind that to access the Insights section, you must have a business account and run access from the Instagram app on a mobile device.

Instagram gives you 3 types of insights:

• Activity data
• Data related to how the posted content is performing, both from feed posts and Stories
• Audience data.

To access the Insights section of Instagram:

• enter your business page via the app
• access the menu on the top-right
• go to the “Insights” section (“Statistics”, if your account is set to English)

Of course, the other platforms mentioned at the beginning of the article also have such dedicated sections, with data about the audiences that are active on those networks.

We’ll move on, however, and talk about how you can gather data for Buyer Persona from sources other than these specialized tools.

The first source we’ll talk about in this context is:

Your team

Yes, the people in your own firm can give you the best clues about your ideal client’s avatar.

In some cases, information from people in departments such as sales, marketing or customer service can help you decisively in locating your audience.

Current customers

Equally important is the data obtained from current customers.

After all, they are an extremely valuable data resource, because they:

• have already interacted with your company
• already bought from you
• details the data needed to figure out which drive to buy
• you can provide information about the path to purchase

Potential customers

Though they haven’t converted yet, you can still get important data from them.

Information about potential customers can be obtained from the measurement and tracking tools you have at your disposal.

Analyze the browsing behavior of the leads you have obtained so far, in relation to the visibility and contact platforms your company has.

For example, you can analyze users who have landed on your website, added a product to their cart, or landed on your contact page, but did not convert.

This way, you can gain insights into why they didn’t complete the process and optimize those structures.

Interviews

Use questionnaires, interviews, market research, surveys, to find out what people think about your product or service.

You will get valuable feedback about your strengths and know where to intervene to strengthen the weaknesses of your offering.

Educated comments

Finally, if you don’t have the time or resources to resort to these practices, you can opt to create an ideal customer profile based on personal observations.

This process, however, requires objectivity and analytical thinking.

And, as I said before, always keep in mind that a Buyer Persona should not be shaped the way you want it to be, but should objectively reflect the characteristics of the ideal customer.

4 steps to take to set an ideal customer profile

I remind you that you can download our free template, in which you will find these four steps.

DOWNLOAD BUYER PERSON TEMPLATE

Once you download it, you will notice that the Power Point document is structured into four headings:

• heading 1: who?
• item 2: what?
• item 3: why?
• item 4: how?

Well, the 4 headings will help you understand:

1. WHO is the ideal client
2. What goals they have, WHAT challenges they face, and WHAT you can do for them
3. WHY he faces these challenges, WHY you own the solution, and WHY he might refuse your offer
4. How would you describe your product or service, and HOW would you promote it to your avatar in an effective way

In our template you will find these headings, already filled with relevant examples.

The document is fully editable, so you have all the support you need to create your ideal customer profile quickly and easily.

If you want to build your Buyer Persona profile in an interactive way, we recommend the Make My Persona tool, developed by HubSpot.

CONCLUSION

Achieving a Buyer Persona profile is equally a complex process, but also a vital step in audience location.

The amount of data used to create the avatar determines the success in defining the audience profile as clearly as possible.

Once you’ve successfully completed these steps, locating the audience becomes an easy task.

You will know how to position your product or service, how to build your content and promotion strategy, how to set your ads, how to choose the most relevant platforms, and when to present your offer.