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Target audience: examples, definition, portrait. Consumer portrait, example of portraits of potential buyers

Content marketing requires constant quality assessment based on whether it was made for search engines or for living 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 in front of you target audience, you should know his 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 geographical 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

Personas 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?

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 growth, 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. This personal characteristics, needs, motives, internal limitations, features of perception. It is important to find out what the target client does, what problems he solves, how he feels and in what environment he is.

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:

Identify and take into account the general values of the target audience when promoting a product;
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;
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;
Marital 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 learn 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

Also look at your competitors’ social media pages—customers sometimes ask questions from which you can guess about their complaints and wishes. Plus, social networks are a complete set of information about any audience.

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 English language: 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

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 United States.

Google Trends

This tool shows in which months the demand for specific service is growing, 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 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 why each character will want to use your product, what problems it will solve. Assume his expectations (how he sees your product ideally) and decision-making criteria.

Select the prospect groups you're going to target and decide what to offer them in your ads/website.

Example

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. Interested person- parents. They also pay for the training. Therefore, we consider all items from their perspective and indicate their socio-demographic characteristics.

This is a married couple with an average household income and 2-3 children. They care about their future and try to give them a good education.

According to their expectations, we can offer the offer “Improve your English before the exam? Easily! Just a couple of hours a week.”

“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.”

“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.

At this stage, it’s enough for you to simply understand that your audience is very “diverse.” Break it up into several groups; highlight decision factors and objections for each group. Why do people buy from you and why do they NOT buy from you? What they pay special attention to, what they are happy about, what they are afraid of.

Three available methods segmentation for contextual advertising And social networks. With examples and explanations.

High conversions to you!

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 “liverka” 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, study a little 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 your target audience?

Each specialist has his own methods, but there are some common 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:

Portrait of target audience
*Questions*	*Segment 1*	*Segment 2*	*Segment 3*


What country or city does he live in?
Income level
What education
Marital status
Children - yes or no
What does he do?
Who does he work for?
Entrepreneur or self-employed
What hobbies or interests
How to spend your leisure time
What problems can your product or service solve?
How does one make a purchasing decision?
What is more important – price or quality?
What are your client's fears?
What does he dream about

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 point” 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 highly 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 features 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 treasure trove 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 client portrait will help you create accurate advertisements and choose the right ones 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.

Hello dear readers.

Meet the enchanting arrangement of all the dots over the definition of “Target Audience”. I didn’t begin the introduction to the article with banal phrases that every business, project, company should focus on its target audience and always understand who these people are. All this is obvious and worn down to holes. Besides, you are already great with us - you know all this!

In this article we will look at what the target audience is, how to create a portrait of it, and how to identify and segment the target audience.

Why is it important to know your target audience?

A clear and simple example.

Let's imagine that you are selling football shoes. You have the opportunity to hang billboard in the city center. How effective is this advertising placement?

Essentially, you are showing your product - football shoes - to all people, even those who definitely cannot be your buyer. Because not everyone loves football or sports in general, but prefer passive recreation - reading and feature films.

But you show your ads to everyone, which means you paid for non-target people. After all, it is obvious that advertising in the city center costs more than, for example, advertising in a sports school, sports stadium and other places where football players train. In addition, advertising in the places I mentioned is of higher quality and targeted, because there are athletes there, many of whom are potential clients.

Getting into the target audience ensures prosperity and success for business. When you know about all the habits and needs of your client, when you know him by sight, then it will not be difficult for you to develop a high-quality advertising campaign strategy.

And the inability to identify the target audience or a vague, incorrect definition of it dooms the business and entrepreneur to failure. After all, all this leads to a significant reduction in product margins through an inflated advertising budget.

What is a target audience?

I hope you and I understand the concept of “target audience” correctly. If not, let's give a definition:

"Target audience- a group of people united common features, or united for some purpose, who are more likely to buy the product."

« Target Audience(in English - target audience, target group) is a set of real and potential consumers of a product or service who are ready to change their preferences in favor of this product or services influenced by marketing measures.”

How to determine your target audience?

When we ask clients in the studio: “Who is your target audience?”, then in 90% of cases we get the answer - “Well... These are those who are interested in our products, with an active lifestyle. They most likely have children, although they may not. Age from 15 to 70 years".

Such a description of the target audience will never allow you to personalize the advertising message, since it does not highlight any features or characteristics potential clients. And targeting this audience is the same as pointing your finger at the sky.

Therefore, the choice of target audience must be approached responsibly - this is not such a simple undertaking as it seems at first glance.

It is better to determine the target audience from the main form - primary target audience - the main target group. This category includes people who personally make purchasing decisions.

In addition to the main group, there is an indirect one - the secondary target audience, which also takes part in the purchase, but is not its “engine”. Best example: children and parents.

Children are the main (main) target group, since they are the ones who initiate the process, parents are indirect, since they perform an indirect function - they pay for the purchase.

After determining the target audience, it needs to be segmented.

Target audience segmentation with examples

To segment target audiences, MEDIOL studio uses the 5W method from Sherrington. The essence of this technique is to answer 5 questions about the target audience:

What? (What?) – product type

In order to fully and accurately answer all the questions, we will go through each of them.

What? (What?) – product type

What kind of product do you have? What's the price? Why are they buying it? What are its properties? How is it built? What is the principle of its operation? What parts does it consist of?

Example: We sell mid-price football boots that are universal, studless and suitable for most surfaces.

Who? (Who?) – type of consumer

Gender and age? What kind of education? What is your income level? What is your social and family status? What profession, place of work, type of activity? What is your nationality or race? Geographical location? What interests, habits, values, beliefs?

Example: Who buys universal boots, mid-price segment, without spikes?

Men from 20 to 50 years old, married with children, middle class, stable income from office work, interested in football, watching football matches, free time sometimes spent with friends or colleagues on football fields. They need a mid-range price solution as there is no point in buying expensive boots.

When? (When?) – purchase situation, time

Is it used at a certain moment or constantly?
Expiration date?
Frequency - how often people buy new product to replace the old one?

Example: boots are used during training and matches; replace them every 1-3 years after wear.

Why? (Why?) – motivation to buy

What problem does your product or service solve? What emotions does it evoke? What is it associated with? Compare the product or service with analogues. Be honest about the advantages and disadvantages. What exactly in your offer attracts customers the most? Why should customers choose it?

Example: The desire to increase the comfort of the game; Expectation upper class games after purchase; Provided free shipping 3 sizes of shoes for the office or home, so you can choose the ones that suit you.

Where? (Where?) – place of purchase

Example: Our audience visits sports grounds, fitness clubs. On the Internet they monitor sports portals, groups on social networks dedicated to football and sports, YouTube channels sports theme.

Thus, the main advantage of segmenting the target audience is the ability to create personalized advertising for potential buyers, based on their requests, desires, behavior and lifestyle.

An example of a complete description of the target audience

We segmented the target audience and highlighted small descriptions, answering Sherrington’s questions using the 5W method. What we got:

Product - football boots of the middle price segment.

Correct description of the target audience:

Men from 20 to 50 years old, married, with children, middle class, with stable income, office work, are interested in football, watch football matches, sometimes spend free time with friends or colleagues on football fields. They need an average price solution, since there is no point in buying expensive boots. Football shoes are changed according to wear and tear at intervals of 1-3 years. They often search for information on the Internet. Among social networks they prefer VKontakte.

However, if you look closely, you can create 2 more portraits of the target audience:

Children from 8 to 16 years old who study in football schools or just playing football in the yard. The purchase is made by parents (indirect target audience) at the beginning of the school year when registering their children for football sections. Children's boots are changed every season, as the child's body is actively growing, and after a season the shoes most likely will not fit.
Young people aged 16 to 25 who play in amateur or semi-professional football teams. This target audience definitely understands boots and knows how one type differs from another. Shoes are changed when worn out, usually before the new season.

Every business has a target audience (TA). Typically, this is a demographic sample and approximate parameters financial condition and geography of residence.

Sometimes, in the eyes of business, the target audience represents people aged 18-50 with above-average and below-average incomes. This is bad. Your product is selling poorly and there are practically no clicks to the site, because the portrait is too blurry and you are shooting at sparrows with a cannon.

How to create and clarify a portrait of the target audience. IN advertising offices“VKontakte” and Facebook can quite accurately select the interests and preferences of your target audience. On Facebook, these opportunities are wider (which is why I like it more).

But simply choosing interests is not enough for good advertising. Let me give you an example.

Example one. Sale of car seat covers

Let's say we sell car seat covers in Russia. The target audience seems to us like this: men 20-40 years old with cars. VKontakte targeting will look like this:

Is it accurate enough? Who will we get? There is a big risk in advertising a product to men who are simply interested in cars. There are many of them: people who like to look at expensive cars in public places and dream about them. Why do they need covers? Past.

Therefore, we clarify the target audience:

We hire not only those who are interested in cars
those who are in communities where there is not much to do without a car.
add “Goods and Services” to the interest category (this category includes users who have joined groups related to goods and services, which means they are buying something).

By narrowing the audience to 1,200 people, we received a more accurate sample and reduced the recommended cost per click by 6 rubles, 1,000 impressions by 2 rubles. (It is, of course, better to set CPM for such an audience).

And now. Let's move on to the advanced settings right away (we won't screen the wrong settings again).

Our target user lives in Russia, he is from 20 to 40 years old, he is interested in cars and definitely something from the second list of interests (see screenshot). The audience was not wide - only 38,000 people. But you don’t need more, this is quite enough for the first tests. We cut off obviously non-target users.

Example two. Marketing seminar for 30,000 rubles.

Let's look at another example, more complicated. How to create a portrait of the target audience if we are doing an expensive marketing seminar?

We assume that our target audience is modern white-collar workers interested in marketing, with an above-average income. And we create something like this on Facebook:

Is everything set correctly? Let's think about it. Each individual parameter certainly suits us: users of modern expensive devices who are interested in marketing and education.

But if we look at the portrait as a whole, we get the average office worker, who may not be interested in the seminar. I suggest another option:

What has changed? We more clearly formed the professional criterion (in the first window - the positions of the audience) and intersected it with interests (the second window).

Of course, all this is debatable and comes down to split tests and analysis of results. But, as a rule, a narrow target audience with clearly selected interests will cost you less.

Third example, last one. Buying bouquets

We deliver bouquets all over the world, but mainly in Russia and the CIS. We represent our audience as men 25-35 years old living in the territory of the designated states.

From the previous examples it is clear that we made the target too broad. And the only hope for us is to set up CPC and wait for clicks. Let's make some corrections:

Far from hometown", "away from family" and "in a long-distance relationship" do not in any way affect the interests of our audience, but greatly add accuracy to our target.

We complete the settings with detailed targeting of interests and economic activity (using the interests of business topics and the behavioral criterion “Travel”, we assume that our target audience has the money to buy a bouquet).

As a result, we narrowed the audience several times and increased the likelihood that Facebook will show ads to those who really need flower delivery.

Let's summarize

You can create a portrait of your target audience in three steps:

We think about the target audience. Let's find out her needs and interests. We learn, using different interests, to highlight the characteristics of the audience - the amount of money, behavior, devices used, etc.
We segment the target audience. We do not run the same ad for all potential clients.
We test everything. We put forward a hypothesis and test it on small budgets.

Of course, precise targeting requires more serious age segmentation, it depends on each specific ad, and a clear result can only be obtained through split tests. But drawing up the correct portrait of the target audience is the first and important step towards a successful campaign.

Let's discuss the article in the comments. You can also ask me questions on my page at