What is Audience Profiling?

Gone are the days when brands used to guesswork their marketing strategy. Audience profiling is here with us and it keeps getting better day by day.

By categorising your audience using different parameters, you can be able to build better campaigns with an excellent return on investments.  Let’s discuss what audience profile entails, its importance and ways in which you can integrate it into your sales funnel. Read on.

Audience Profiling Process

Knowing who your customers are, helps you create products and services that are suitable for their needs. For a better return on investment, you will have to know where to invest your time and money. Your marketing activities can only bear fruits when you know who you are targeting. That being said, let’s look at the four components of audience profiling:

1. Segmentation

Segmentation simply means categorising customers by their demographics.  Your customers are better grouped on the basis of age, location, gender and income so as to give you an idea of how to drive your marketing campaigns.

Considering Different types of segmentation helps you make personalisation easier and gain knowledge on which language, channels or devices you should use during your outreach. Data collected may seem narrow but with an inner eye, you will be able to create a picture of your consumer.

• There are several tools in the market that can help you examine customer behaviour by creating a custom audience profile which will help you gather information of your prospects on their interests, needs, lifestyle and attitudes.

Mapping your prospect’s journey is another important part of audience profiling. One thing you have to understand is that your target audience goes through several stages of active learning by comparing products or services before purchasing. To be able to keep your customers loyal,   multiply the number of touchpoints on your websites, social media to influence their buying decision continuously.

2. Messaging

Messaging simply explains how you communicate with your audience. Is your brand message tailored towards generating leads from different audience profiles?

With audience profiling, you are able to know what message your brand sends to your customers and prospects in terms of the quality or services you offer.  With this information, you shall be able to create strategies that will attract your prospects and keep your customers loyal hence increase in conversions.

• Messaging should be centred towards addressing the gaps in your target market.

3. Engagement

This component of audience profiling deals with knowing when, where and how to reach your target audience. This knowledge helps you engage your audience using the right channels at the right time. By looking at consumer behaviour across platforms you will be able to know how to best engage them and increase conversions.

Personalization is an important part of engagement; your customers need to feel special and valued. Creating and sharing valuable content is one way to appreciating your customers on a regular basis. Your customers are looking to be part of your business; they are no longer satisfied being viewers, they have control of how and when they are exposed to marketing. This fact explains the popularity of ad blockers in the market today. This makes it clear that ancient marketing trick is not likely to work on today’s audience.

The use of tools to track how your customers are interacting with your content enables you to personalize your products and services. Additionally, it is key to understanding what brands your customers love purchasing from and why.  You need this information when creating a marketing strategy so that you can optimise consumer engagement.

It is important that you take advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which uses existing data to decide which ads to show to your customers. This software helps you know what kind of ads your audience is likely to fully engage with and their time of optimal engagement.

If you listen keenly to what your prospects are telling you through different platforms; you can be in a good position of helping them solve their problems at a personal level rather than depending on assumptions.  It doesn’t matter how much useful audience data you have; if your product is not solving your audience needs then you can forget about a good return on investments.

4. Measurement

How do you measure your campaign effectiveness? Measurement essentially deals with an evaluation of your marketing strategy. It helps you adjust your campaigning efforts according to the current needs and interests of your target audience.

It may be challenging to measure your business success especially on social media but the truth is; at the end of the day, it all reflects on your conversions.

Why Audience Profiling is Important

Audience profiling simply helps brands target the segments in their audience with higher buying power. With this information, they are able to shift their focus in that direction for a better return on investment.

Audience profiling is the only effective methods of getting down to understanding your target audience. As a brand, you can no longer depend on past data to deliver your services or products to your target market. Understand that your customers change behaviours and perceptions every single day.

Traditional methods of marketing are likely to be submerged by the fact that there is a rise in the number of people using ad blockers on their browsers. Audience profiling simply gives you that chance to fully interact with your prospects so that you are able to offer what they need.

Conclusion

To be able to have full control of your marketing strategy, segmenting and fragmenting your consumers is paramount. You are unlikely to understand the needs and desires of your audience without proper audience profiling.  Customer Behavioural data can no longer be used to determine the marketing process. There are other important factors such as engagement and messaging that can no longer be ignored.

To be sure that your documented data is accurate; you will need a more detailed tracking system that offers campaign evaluation and target audience validation. Personalising the branding experience is now an easy exercise, there is no excuse not to.

Want to know more about Audience Profiling?

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