Creating audience profiles for your campaign

Communicators are no strangers to analysis paralysis and FOMO.?

This is especially evident when we are trying to plan our campaigns, and have to decide on audience profiles and segments to target.?

Instead of trying to make one audience fit everything, I suggest thinking about your campaigns as characters in your brand’s overall story, and how characters can have their own arcs to go through individually or together with other characters.?

Additionally, I share 3 key practices that you can use to avoid being paralysed with indecision or concerned about missing out on specific audience segments.?

Happy to help if you are about to start campaign planning, and need some support, simply drop us a DM.?

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When campaign planning, many communicators find themselves navigating complexity when it comes to creating and setting up audience or customer profiles.?

This process, which should ideally be a straightforward task of identifying key characteristics and behaviours of a target audience segment, often becomes a convoluted exercise fraught with overthinking and over-tinkering.?

The root of this issue lies in the fear of missing out on a key or critical profile. Communicators often worry that if they overlook even a single potential audience segment, their entire campaign could be at risk. This fear can lead to what is known as analysis paralysis, a state of over-analysing a situation to the point where no action is taken.?

When suffering analysis paralysis, communicators find themselves stuck in a cycle of endless research and data analysis, constantly seeking out more information in the hopes of identifying every possible audience profile.?

This approach can be counterproductive. Instead of facilitating a more effective campaign, the excessive focus on audience profiling can divert valuable time and resources away from other crucial aspects of campaign planning.?

Moreover, the concern that the campaign will fail because of missing one audience profile can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. By spending too much time on audience profiling, communicators may neglect other important elements of the campaign, such as message development or channel selection, thereby increasing the likelihood of the campaign's failure.?

The pitfall of One-Audience-Fits-All campaigns

A major problem arises when communicators attempt to fit all the different audiences their organisation is targeting into one campaign’s target audience set.?

This one-audience-fits-all approach can lead to a dilution of the campaign’s message, making it less impactful and less relevant to each individual audience segment.?

The issue stems from the inherent diversity of audiences. Each audience segment has its own unique characteristics, preferences, and behaviours. Trying to create a campaign that appeals to all these different audiences simultaneously can result in a message that is too broad or too generic to resonate with any audience segment.?

Instead of trying to make your campaign matter to all your different audiences, consider a different approach. Tailor your campaign to specific audience segments. This allows you to create more targeted and relevant messages that are more likely to engage and resonate with each audience segment.?

By focusing on specific audience segments, you can also gain a deeper understanding of these audiences. This can lead to more effective campaigns that not only reach your target audiences but also engage them in meaningful ways.

Campaigns as characters: A novel and different approach to campaign planning

When we tell or listen to a story, each character has a unique journey, a development arc that they go through. They grow, learn, and change as the story unfolds.?

Similarly, think about your campaigns as characters in a story. Each campaign has its own unique journey, its own development arc, and its own outcome.?

Just like characters in a story, campaigns sometimes interact and engage one another. For instance, a campaign targeting young adults might intersect with a campaign targeting fitness enthusiasts, as there could be an overlap between the two audiences. These interactions can create synergies, enhancing the effectiveness of both campaigns.?

At other times, campaigns need to be independent, focusing on their specific audience without any overlap with other campaigns. This could be the case when the target audiences are distinct, with little to no overlap in their characteristics or preferences.?

Regardless of whether they interact with other campaigns or stand alone, each campaign learns something and develops as it progresses. Through the successes and failures, the feedback and results, the campaign evolves, becoming more effective and impactful.?

This narrative approach to campaign planning can provide a fresh perspective, helping you to see your campaigns not just as marketing tools, but as dynamic entities with their own journeys and development arcs.?

Sidebar: The psychology behind audience profiling

Audience profiling is a critical component of any successful marketing strategy. It involves analysing and segmenting audiences based on shared behaviors to communicate with them more effectively.?

The typical components of audience profiling are demographics (age, gender, income), psychographics (lifestyle, social class, personality characteristics), behaviours (buying habits, product usage, purchase triggers), and consumption preferences (preferred media channels, peak usage times, reasons for consumption).?

But why do we create and target audience profiles and not the audience themselves? The fact is profiles are guideposts, not the actual audience you are seeking to engage. They serve as a roadmap, guiding your campaign along its path.?

Continue reading the article through this link to find out how to blend treating your campaigns as stories, with their own development arc, alongside developing target audience segments without giving in to analysis paralysis and FOMO. ?

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