A Step to Step Guide to Audience Profiling

Segmenting and profiling customers Audience profiling is the process of defining exactly who your target customer is by unifying and analyzing consumer buying behaviors across multiple platforms and touchpoints.

By segmenting and profiling customers into groups that all share similar behaviors, marketing campaigns can then be built around each segment to optimize the success of the campaign and improve the targeting of personalized offers and content.

Audience profiling involves four main principles:

Segmentation
Messaging
Engagement
Measurement

The audience profiling process

Audience profiling plays a crucial role in today’s business world. Knowing precisely who your customers are and tailoring your marketing communications at them through a high level of personalization means that you can drive sales and generate a better ROI. It is also essential for businesses to use if they are to understand where to spend time and money for the greatest ROI. By knowing precisely who your audience is, you can identify who to focus which marketing activities on.

Audience profiling is essential for companies who wish to identify and target their audience segments who have the most buying power and are willing to spend the most. There four different principles which are involved in the audience profiling process.

Segmentation

As a primary way to power targeted marketing campaigns, segmentation involves splitting customers into demographic segments based on factors such as age, income, gender and location.

With the help of data platforms such as BlueVenn to analyze consumer behaviour on a large scale, it is possible to create custom audience profiles within seconds. This also takes into account specific customer features such as lifestyle, attitude, perceptions and interests.

Messaging

Audience profiling enables you to refine the content of your message and quantify the concepts that are preventing repeat sales. When a company is aware of what the public perception of them is, they know specifically what to focus on and which perceptions need to be shifted in order for consumers to reconnect with the brand again.

A perfect example of this was the #LidlSurprises campaign. After audience profiling found that the public’s perception of their products was low quality, the brand actively launch a campaign to turn the brand’s negative image into a positive one.

Engagement

Engaging your audience using audience profiling focuses on finding the best mode of messaging that is going to impact your audience the hardest. It is important to look at how the audience engages with different marketing channels – e.g. targeting a younger demographic via social media because this is likely to be the most effective way of communicating with them.

Measurement

By being able to measure and quantify the impact of your marketing campaigns, you are able to continuously optimize and amend your future efforts in order to connect with your customers in the most effective way possible.

Without having the insight that points to successes and failures, it is difficult to determine which parts of your marketing are working and which are not - and you don’t want to be aiming in the dark. However, audience profiling gives you the quantifiable data and results you need to really know which direction you should be going in.

Audience profiling is here to stay

Audience profiling is one of the few truly reliable ways of gaining actionable insights that your marketing team can use to define, segment and target various demographic and consumer groups. It is now a widely used and accepted way for businesses to understand who their audience is and how best to reach them for maximum impact.

Without performing effective audience profiling you will not understand the needs of your audience. Simply relying on customer data is now just one part of the process – this data now needs to be segmented and analyzed.