How to draw up a portrait of the target audience, and why it is needed. Portrait of the consumer, an example of portraits of potential buyers. How to create a portrait of the target audience? Detailed questions portrait of the target audience

If you ask a business owner, “Who do you sell your product to?”, in most cases, you can 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 the woman Varya from the next entrance.

You buy your favorite Lakomka sausage (the name is fictitious) for lunch because you like its taste, and your earnings allow you to buy an elite sausage variety. And in general, it is considered natural, and you watch your diet. But the same woman Varya, the maximum that she can do is buy a ring of "liverka" once a week, and eat it in half with her beloved 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, you have different purchasing opportunities. If the quality of sausage is important for you, then for a pensioner it is its price. Do you think an advertisement that talks about the taste and quality of a sausage that costs 5th of her pension will work for her? Unlikely.

And the advertising campaign, the messages in which will row the same brush as you and Baba Varya, is doomed to failure. You are not attracted by the cheap, because you know that cheap is not of high quality, and you cannot buy a pensioner with healthy food - 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 customers, understand what they need - then your advertising will hit right on target.

Why is it necessary to create a portrait of the target audience?

1. Having the right audience portrait in hand, you will be able to 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. The correct portrait of the target audience will help you create such advertisements and messages that will hook exactly those you need.

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.

Drawing 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. It takes time and some effort. Because, as a rule, small companies do not bother with this. They create universal advertising campaigns and universal messages "for everyone". As a result, there are either no conversions, or there are few of them.

If you know your client, then you understand what he really needs.

How to create a portrait of the target audience?

Each specialist has his own methods, but there are some general algorithms. Let's take a look at them in this article.

From the very beginning, you should think about who your customers really are. Let's say you have an inexpensive barbershop. Men and women come to you for haircuts, and sometimes they also bring children for haircuts. It is important for them to keep their heads 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 does not decide this yet, and will not respond to your advertisement. Since you are inexpensive, the income of your customers is average and below average.

This is very general.

Before you start drawing up a portrait of the 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 solve?? In the case of a hairdresser, it is to stay beautiful or beautiful for little money. Remember that your goal is not to sell a service, but a solution to a customer's problem. Nobody buys a vacuum cleaner for the sake of a vacuum cleaner. A person buys cleanliness in the house, not an appliance.

2.Who are your customers? Let's return to the paragraph about an inexpensive hairdressing salon. This is the answer to this question.

3.Where to find your customers? Do they live on forums, social networks? If yes, in what groups? Or maybe they live in the houses closest to your barbershop? In the latter case, outdoor advertising will help.

4.What problems does your client have to solve on a regular basis?? And how will you help solve them with your product or service?

In fact, to create a client profile, you need to work through many more questions. For convenience, they can be placed in a table:

Already such basic portraits will help you get a general idea of ​​​​the people you are trying to sell your product to. You will begin to better understand how to present yourself, your company, your product so that the client really understands what he needs and decides to buy.

You can group customers into separate segments based on similar problems, similar desires or fears.

What does customer data give you? How to use it?

It is clear, you say, - for example, knowing the problems or dreams of the target audience, I can address them or “put pressure on the sick” in advertising messages. But what gives me gender, age, geography?

Men and women react differently to advertising. If men rely more on logic and compare different offers, then women are highly emotional, their purchases are more impulsive.

Age data is also important. Different age groups have different values, different ways of interacting with advertising, different decision-making processes. For example, in the business of one of my clients, the main category of clients are women aged 45-55. Guess from which device we have the most visitors to the site? 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 this is not the case, then the hired specialist to whom you entrusted the conduct of the advertising campaign. If he does not do this, already think about whether he will drain your budget by chance.

But remember - the business owner must take part in drawing up a portrait of the target audience. Answer the questions of a specialist, or "give" him someone who will help with this - for example, your sales manager. Someone who, and he knows your customers for sure. The better the contractor understands the specifics of your business and your customers, the better he will be able to set up advertising. And it doesn't matter if it's a context, SMM or SEO.

How to create a portrait of the target audience using social networks

If you do not trust anyone and want to do everything yourself (or you, my reader, a novice advertising specialist), then for you there is a simple algorithm for studying the target audience through pages on social networks.

Social networks are a storehouse of useful information about a person. Without suspecting anything bad, we post everything about ourselves here. And if you know where to look, you can learn a lot right from the user profile.

Choose a few people from your client base - ten will do. And get started:

2. Write down the position, place of work, age, place of residence, marital status, children in the table.

3.Choose 3-5 groups they belong to.

4. See what sites they visit, where they repost from.

5. Analyze the profile and messages on the wall - what problems a person worries about, what he dreams about, what he most often encounters.

It remains to enter all this into the table above - and the portrait of the client is ready.

The client profile will help you craft accurate ads, choose the right promotional tools, and even create blog and social media content. If you attach a portrait of the target audience to the terms of reference for a copywriter or designer, they will only thank you. Because it is much easier to write text or draw a design when you know exactly who and how exactly should react to it.

The portrait of the target audience is a composite, general image of your typical client. It makes it clear how to meet the needs of a potential buyer. Includes data such as:

• age;
• location;
• marital status;
• occupation;
• income level;
• typical problems;
• desires and dreams.

This is the most necessary minimum, which you need to know about your consumers.

Often business owners do not understand who they are selling their services to. The sell-to-everything approach works against you because you end up selling to no one. Generalized advertisements, attempts to make one offer for everyone, usually miss the consumer.

For example, you must be familiar with the women's clothing brand Zara. These are clothes primarily for modern women, relatively inexpensive and of high quality. Another brand is Bershka. These are already clothes for youth, which an adult woman will never wear.

By the way, Zara and Bershka are both owned by the same corporation(together with other brands such as Stradivarius) - Inditex. But for each category of their customers, they created a separate clothing brand. No one is trying to sell youth tops to ladies over 40.

If you want to make your business successful, you need to know who you are selling to, what problems it will solve, and how. Moreover, it is not enough to know that your clients are successful men in their 30s. The better you know your customer, the more successful your advertising campaigns will be.

The portrait of the target audience will help you

• think over a competent offer, an offer that your client cannot refuse;
• choose the best promotion channels. A simple example: if your target audience is young girls, then it makes sense to try promote on Instagram ;
• think over the presentation format, site design, style of texts, so that it really works - in other words, you can speak with the audience in their language;
• work out key triggers, hooks that can hook your client.

Let's figure it out.

How to write a client profile

Each product can have several categories of consumers. Therefore, you will have to make not one portrait, but two or three, or even more. In other words, you need segment your audience.

Let's take shoes as an example. There is a shoe store for women. Sneakers are preferred by teenage girls. A business woman will buy pumps with heels, she is not so interested in sneakers. But a young mother will prefer ballet flats, as they are comfortable, you can’t walk a lot with a baby in heels. Older women like comfortable shoes with a small stable heel.

As you can see, there is only one product - women's shoes, but the clients are completely different. The generalized description "a woman who lives in our city" will not work here.

In the store itself, which has different shoes “for everyone”, sneakers do not stand with shoes on the same shelf. Everything is sorted into departments so that each buyer can easily find what he needs.

Therefore, you need to draw up several portraits of the target audience. Yes, it will take you a lot of time, but it will save you a lot of money later on.

Drawing up a portrait of a consumer based on information in a profile in social networks

Of course, the easiest way to create a portrait of the target client is through social networks. Consider the example of the social network VKontakte.

People write about all this simply on their page, in information about themselves.

Here, a person with an upper-middle income, a young man, married, two children, a company manager. Higher education. All this information is scanned in two minutes.

For example, this person works in the field of stone processing. Listens to heavy music. Interested in tattoos (perhaps he himself has one or more). He loves hunting and fishing (he is in groups dedicated to this, plus he has a lot of photos from fishing, in the forest with a gun). He likes interesting and unique things (subscribed to pages with unique souvenirs and t-shirts).

Match group information with what you see on the page.

1. In the course of profile analysis, enter all data in a table(the set of questions may vary from niche to niche). Separate segments of your target audience will emerge by themselves.

This is how the analysis of the target audience of the women's shoe store, which was mentioned above, might look like.

Even if you don't have a customer base yet, you can sit down and think for yourself by answering these simple questions. To determine your target audience, go through the groups and forums where your potential consumers live - there you will find many descriptions of typical problems and pains of customers. This will help to more accurately compose avatars.

An example of portraits of the target audience of a Starbucks coffee shop

Let's look at an example of audience segmentation. Take the world-famous Starbucks coffee shops. They offer their customers good roasted coffee (you can take it with you or drink it in a cafe), sandwiches and cakes, tea. These cafes are distinguished by the price (higher than the average market), the quality of products, and a special, cozy atmosphere. Coffee houses have comfortable sofas for friendly gatherings, and free Wi-Fi.

The target audience of these coffee houses are young people. But to be more specific, then:

• students: here you can quickly drink coffee, have a snack, and in the meantime go online and prepare for class.
• young women who come to friendly get-togethers with girlfriends on weekends or after work. The cozy atmosphere of the cafe is conducive to warm conversations, and Starbucks also has delicious cakes, and there is a separate line of diet drinks.
• businessmen, freelancers, IT specialists - where else, if not here, can you meet with a client or partner? Yes, and work "out of the house", there is free Wi-Fi. Take your laptop with you, and you can sit and be creative.

As you can see, for each segment of their target audience, these coffee houses offer special products and additional services. This is the secret of their success. And high prices do not interfere at all 😄

Without a clear portrait of a potential client, it is impossible to competently compile a commercial offer for the sale of a product or service, and it is even more difficult to correctly address it. The portrait of a potential buyer is the target audience who is most likely to be interested in your offer. It is compiled using the maximum amount of information about consumer demand for the product.

Separation of business segments

It is worth starting the topic with the fact that there are two lines of business - b2b and b2c. The first option is business-to-business, and the second is for buyers. In the first case, as a rule, there is no question of drawing up a portrait of the target audience, since the audience is known to everyone, it remains only to concentrate efforts on attracting customers. But the second case is what will be discussed further. For b2c, it is always important to correctly define the audience, regardless of whether it is a business online or offline.

In addition, it is important to know that the target audience for a particular activity may not be one. Experienced specialists always single out a main group and several secondary ones for work.

Elements of a portrait of a potential client

Before proceeding to the instructions for drawing up a portrait of the consumer, it is necessary to understand the intricacies of the concept itself. A portrait of a potential client is a complex collective image of a person who is interested in your offer. When creating this image, you visually "draw" in the head of the target buyer, to whom all marketing activities of your organization will be oriented. The portrait of the target audience can have a huge number of different characteristics, because the more of them, the more truthful the image will turn out.

Basic positions for describing the target audience

Any marketer who is faced with the task of describing the target audience for the first time asks himself a few questions:

1. How to determine who is the target audience of the organization?
2. In what period of strategy development should target audience be chosen?
3. Where to get data for compiling a social portrait of the consumer?
4. What are the characteristics for creating a buyer persona?
5. How detailed should the description be?

Of course, these are not all questions, but certainly the most basic ones. Next, we will analyze each of the points in more detail. So let's get started.

The target audience

It can be wide - for example, all consumers of milk products, or narrow (only those who buy fat-free cottage cheese at a low cost). The wider this circle, the more fuzzy the description will be, since in this case it is difficult to determine the pronounced characteristics of the audience.

It is necessary to create a portrait of the target consumer based on the prototype of the brightest representatives, trying to outline the common characteristics that will distinguish your company's customers from the rest of the market audience. When forming the image of your buyer, it is necessary to describe not only regular consumers, but also those who have not yet purchased the goods.

At what stage of the strategy should target audience be chosen?

Starting to draw up a portrait of the consumer should be after the analysis and segmentation of the market, that is, at the stage of developing a positioning strategy. In practice, situations often occur when it is necessary to identify the target audience without a marketing strategy, this is especially true for specialists who are just starting to work in a new organization. In this case, you can do the following:

1. Identify the main competitors of the company.
2. Make a comparative analysis of your company's product and what competitors offer.
3. Send a mystery shopper to a competitor.
4. Describe the value of the product.
5. Understand who is currently a consumer of the product and is loyal to it.
6. Describe your ideal buyer.
7. Create an image of the target client based on the data received.

Where to get information

In order to form an image of a potential consumer, it is necessary to answer some questions:

1. Who buys the product and who doesn't?
2. Why is it bought or not bought?
3. By what criteria are they chosen, how are they bought and applied?
4. How do consumers feel about other products of the organization?
5. Application experience.

The following sources will help you find answers to all these questions:

All the characteristics on the basis of which the image of the buyer is formed can be divided into several groups.

Geography

Here you will need to set the geographic area where the advertising message will be broadcast. Here it is necessary to determine in which part of the country / region / region potential customers live and are located. It makes no sense to advertise throughout the country when your product or service is only available in large cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Socio-demographic indicator

It can be divided into three components:

1. Gender of the client. Representatives of the female and male are guided by different principles, respectively, and they make different decisions. Therefore, in order to draw up a portrait of a consumer in marketing, it is necessary first of all to determine for whom the product is intended. Quite often it happens that it suits both, respectively, the target audience is men and women.
2. The age of the buyers. This is a rather extensive block, since each promotional offer has its own age category. It is impossible to give an unequivocal answer to this question, it will be necessary to establish some kind of framework, for example, the age of the consumer is young people from 25 to 35 years old. Marketing specialists have long divided human life into several stages (school time, students, the beginning of a career path, the rise of a career and its growth, the end of a career, retirement). It is these stages that should be guided by when compiling a portrait of the target audience, since each service or product has its own age category, to which they will be sold better.
3. Education. This criterion helps to understand how professionally developed the buyer is. A lot of targeted advertising campaigns make their division according to it, it can be split into those who have one or more educations and an average income level. Most often, this example of a consumer portrait is used by organizations that offer goods and services for wealthy people.

Financial situation

One of the most important criteria when thinking through the image of the buyer is to determine the income level of your target buyers. Here it is important to understand what kind of check you are counting on, and what principles customers are guided by.

If potential buyers of goods have a low income, then it is not advisable to set a high price for the goods. And also it is worth understanding that people with low incomes pay great attention to the price, more precisely, it is the cost that is the key point for them when choosing an offer.

Information channels

This is one of the most important questions in the formation of a portrait of a potential consumer. Here you need to establish from what specific sources your future customers receive information and answers to their questions. These can be completely different distribution channels:

1. Search engines on the Internet.
2. Social media.
3. Newspapers.
4. Magazines and more.

If you are going to engage in attracting customers to a store on an online resource, then you should pay attention to specialized sites where people with the same intentions gather and discuss issues that concern them. These sites can later be used for your advertising campaigns.

How detailed is it necessary to describe the target audience

When forming the image of a potential buyer, it is necessary to describe the brightest representative. In the process, try to use all the groups of parameters mentioned above. Only in this case the description will be truly portrait. After studying this information, a distinct image should form in a person’s head. Ideally, a collage of several photographs should be added to the description to complement the portrait. It is better to prepare two options: a short one, based on 4-5 criteria, which allows you to superficially separate the target audience from the entire market, and a complete one with the most detailed characteristics, its habits, features, character, and so on.

The picture will be complete and detailed if, during the creation process, you try to describe the development vector of the target audience in the existing format and in the way it should be perfect. Such a description will help to understand the key changes that need to be made in the development and promotion of the product.

Step-by-step instructions for drawing up the image of a potential buyer

Having found the answers to all the above questions and armed with the necessary amount of information, you can begin to build a portrait of a potential client step by step. This plan is suitable even for those who do not yet have an established client base. In this case, the analysis can use the data of acquaintances who are most likely to be interested in your offer. And already when you have the first real buyers (at the first stage it is enough to analyze the first 10 people), you will need to repeat the procedure. So let's get started:

1. Consideration of a profile in a social network. From such popular resources as Vkontakte or Facebook it is very easy to get some information - gender, age and place of residence of a potential client. This is very necessary data that should be entered on a computer in a special plate.
2. Analysis of pages and groups in which clients are members and subscribers. This information should also be entered in the previously created table. Why is this required? After the portrait is drawn up, the pages and groups in social networks can be used as information platforms. This means advertising your product on saved pages.
3. Three of my favorite sites. Having information about which resources customers most often use, you will be able to place your offer on them in the same way. It always works very effectively.
4. Field of activity. This point can also most often be found out from the questionnaire, and the availability of such information allows you to understand the capabilities and needs of the consumer.
5. A record of questions and problems that the client encounters. This will help “tie” your proposal to their decision.
6. Making a portrait of the client based on the information received. All data are summarized in a separate questionnaire-table for each client. As a result, you will have a ready-made image of a potential buyer in your hands.

Working examples of a consumer portrait

This is how well-composed images of target audience look like:

1. An audience for a family psychologist in private practice. An example of a consumer portrait in this case looks like this:

• Female people aged 22 to 44 from major cities.
• They are interested in psychology and follow the news of groups in social networks on similar topics.
• They have at least 3 interests.
• They are actively involved in sports.
• They are fond of philosophy, spiritual values ​​and personal growth.
• High or medium income.

2. An example of a consumer portrait for an online youth clothing store from designers.

• Female and male people aged 20 to 35 from metropolitan areas and medium-sized cities.
• Interested in fashion and its trends.
• All have stable employment or study at higher educational institutions, with active life beliefs.
• They are fond of several sports, participate in competitions, are members of the relevant groups on social networks.

Content marketing requires constant evaluation of quality in terms of whether it was made for search engines or for real people. If you write content based solely on technical criteria

: , etc. - such an approach can no longer be called relevant and "human". When creating the next article, you must have a portrait of the target audience in front of you, you must know their 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 the consumer portrait.

In our online space, you can find out the demographics of your users using web analytics - but this will not be enough. All we get are cold numbers and metrics like gender, age, social class, and geographic 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 meant the need to project the human face on those cold statistics that are used by those who create content or a product. . Thus, personality has been introduced as a metric to help marketers evaluate and exploit the human side of available statistics.

Individuals have their own problems, tasks 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 is best for the front page. Editors and journalists have long been guided by the principle of "more tin - more views." Individuals have idiosyncrasies, fears, desires and needs. Demographics are age, gender, or university course.

So, it doesn't matter if you are a blogger or an SMM specialist. You need to try on the portrait of the target audience on statistical data.

An example of a portrait of the target audience

Personalities 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 on their own and enter into a dialogue with other users.

What questions should be asked?

In order to develop a potential user's own identity, you should ask yourself a few questions.

• What are the most difficult 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 can already draw up at least some characteristic of the personality of your customers.

Creating a personal characteristic is both an art and a science. Your task is to create such material that will touch both the heart and the mind at the same time. Content should not only answer questions, but at the same time be in the interests of a potential client. It could be a video, a blog post, or a presentation, or all three. If you can get those who create your content to put themselves in the shoes of buyers, then we can say that you are already halfway to success.

What should you do?