Choosing the right audience is more crucial than ever. When you create an audience profile, you can more accurately identify your target audience. An audience profile is a powerful marketing tool that can give you a more structured look at your audience’s needs, and help you develop a clearer path to getting there. A great audience profile also reflects the features and content that matter most to your audience and the message that will resonate with them.
Why an Audience Profile Matters
Your target audience is a group of potential members for your organization. Your audience encompasses all those who are most likely to respond positively to your direct mail offers, products, and services. To understand those prospects, you need to build an audience profile, which is a description of their most common characteristics. Trying to gain members without knowing your audience is like driving with your eyes closed. Analyzing your member base and determining commonalities among the many individuals allows you to target your marketing efforts more precisely, which results in a growth in your membership base.
What Is Important to Your Audience
The first step in creating an audience profile is determining what is important to your prospects and members. Member reviews you learn this information because you are using existing data from your current member base. Some other questions you may want to consider are:
- Why did your members choose your organization over your competitor?
- Do your prospects need coaching to understand the value of your organization, or is your message instantly clear?
- Do members care more about your products or its features?
Research Your Prospects Demographics
After you discover a full description of your prospects, you can explore further details, including demographics. A few demographics you may consider include age, location, job and income, and family status. Once you gather this information, you will understand the motivations of your ideal audience much better.
You can build your audience profile based on your research. If you are focusing your audience profile around a location, you can use geo-targeting to narrow down your audience based on zip code or city. There are several other ways you can build your audience profile if you want to target your audience around one or more demographics.
Identify the Needs of Your Audience
You need to identify the needs of your audience next. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospects. Look at your products and service from their point of view. What motivates them to join your organization? Think about what concerns they might have and how your organization can help them feel better about their concerns. Determine how your product can solve a problem your audience is facing. Brainstorm what a prospect may be worried about that may stop them from investing in your mission. Knowing your audience helps you better define your spot in the market.
Where Prospects Can Find You
Lastly, you must think about how your prospects can find your organization and offerings. It doesn’t matter how great your products and service are if your prospects can’t find them and don’t know they exist. You may initiate contact through direct mail, but there are other ways for prospects to stumble upon your organization and maintain contact with you after the first mailer.
Find out how your current members stay in touch with you. Do they primarily check your website or search your social media? What matters is that your audience can stay up to date with your organization in ways they are familiar and comfortable with. This increases your odds of finding the right people, grabbing their attention, and keeping them as active participants in your community.
Building Your Audience Profile with Valtim
Your marketing efforts may fall on deaf ears if you don’t know what your ideal audience looks like. Building an audience profile enables you to create more meaningful content that resonates with prospects. Valtim can help you create broad descriptions of your perfect members, research your prospects’ demographics, and identify the needs and problems of your audience. We offer multi-channel marketing options, too, so you can integrate your direct mail channels with your online voice, which helps your prospects find you in more than one way.
