How well do you know your audience? If you’ve experienced the agency life, it’s common to have to juggle multiple clients and projects at the same time – meaning you also need to develop content for a wide range of audiences. Since agencies can get pretty hectic and unpredictable, you definitely can’t afford to have your audience be one of these volatile elements. Even if you are an in-house marketer and work exclusively on one product for one audience type, their preferences and mindsets are always evolving, hence the need for regular updates.
To avoid any potential mishaps, audience profiles are a fine way to keep track of your audience types without mess or fuss. Join Wordsmith and let’s get organised!
What is an audience profile?
Think of it like a series of index cards with facts and predictions about the various audience types of a specific client. According to Tait Ischia, the author of Copywrong to copywriter: a practical guide to copywriting for small businesses, small organisations, sole traders, and lone rangers, traditional marketers have a habit of treating their audiences like a statistic.
How often have you thought of your audience as “25-35 Female”?
We’ve been guilty of it too. The problem with this is that it dehumanises the individual and makes us think of the demographic as a collective – like a hive of bees who all suffer from the same challenges or problems – but aside from this similarity, they are all unique people leading different lives. Furthermore, is it a good idea to assume that someone at age 25 is the same as age 35?
“The ‘25-35’ age and gender style of audience is a function of media and publishing companies that need to segment their audiences into large groups,” explains Ischia. “A magazine or television station will sell advertising space or airtime based on the age and gender of people who engage with their form of ‘media’. This type of segmentation is a way to diagnose the media a company should buy. It won’t help you write with empathy or sympathy for a particular person.”
To avoid treating your audience like a stat, Ischia recommends envisioning the audience as a singular person – ideally, someone you know. The more you know about this person, the more you can fill in for the audience profile, which contains the following three elements:
The physical mode
This section covers the physical traits of your example audience member. Although gender, height and build are the usual entries, Ischia also wants to consider the person’s physical state and environment, including:
o What is the person doing while reading your content?
o Are they sitting, standing or walking?
o Are they performing a chore, at work, commuting or so forth?
o How will these states affect their ability to read?
His reasoning is simple – what the person is doing and where and when they receive your content will affect their willingness to read. For example, a person at work or in the middle of something won’t be very patient versus someone who’s taking it easy on the couch.
“If they’re on the go, keep things short and place clear calls to action in high visible areas,” Ischia explains. On the other hand, for someone who’s not under any immediate stress, they may be open to longer-form content.
The cognitive mode
When we think of cognitive assessments, we think of those IQ tests involving a bunch of clocks, directions, animals and shapes. That’s obviously not the case when building an audience profile!
Here, we need to make assumptions about how well the average audience member knows our subject. Based on this knowledge, what are they capable of doing?
For example, if we are a brand that totes excellent after-sales customer service, do our audiences know where to locate the nearest customer service centre? Do they know what sort of services are and aren’t covered? Aside from the services being listed on our company website, have we ever written a piece to promote said subject? This bit of tracing is very handy when audiences aren’t acting the way we expect them to.
In addition to their knowledge of the subject, Ischia also takes into consideration the audience’s reading level and level of expertise – should complex concepts arise, will they understand immediately or will they need further explanations?
By gauging these expectations, we can determine how complicated we should (or shouldn’t) make our content. In case explanations are needed, try to keep the language simple and plain.
The emotional mode
It’s important to anticipate how your audience is feeling while reading, as this will dictate the style and tone of writing you should use.
“What is their emotional state? Are they stressed and busy or do they have time to learn and understand? How will their emotions affect their patience?” probes Ischia.
Ischia raises an example about writing a help article for making insurance claims – anybody who clicks onto the article is understandably frustrated enough with having to deal with an insurance claim. If you were in the shoes of one of these people, you probably wouldn’t be feeling too patient, so short and succinct copy that delivers on answers would be much preferred.
However, if we were writing a travel advertorial promoting Bali, we might make the assumption that our audience are stressed (especially after how COVID has dashed most people’s travel plans for years). Even though our audiences are in desperate need of a vacation, we imagine they will be reading this at home after work – hence they’ll be more receptive to long and descriptive copy explaining why Bali is the ideal destination to melt their stress away.
What next?
No audience profile is complete without a call-to-action (CTA). Taking into account the three modes, you should be able to tailor an ending that influences your audience into doing or thinking what you want them to. Recall why you are writing and sending content to this audience member – your CTA must be relevant to your reason for writing!
“It’s much easier to measure the success of your strategy if you make it specific,” adds Ischia. “A strategy like ‘build brand awareness’ is too broad to measure. A better strategy might be ‘increase the number of enquiries through our online form’. A strategy like this means you can set a goal and measure the outcome.”
Using the Bali example again, our audience profile for the CTA might be as follows:
· What we want our audience to think:
Bali is the ideal destination to destress and kickstart travelling again
· What we want our audience to do:
Click onto our website and enquire/sign up for our Bali tour packages
· Potential CTA:
Visit EZ-Travel.com now and check out one of our many tour packages to Bali – we offer free consultations too!
Although audience profiles seem like a lot of extra work, they help marketers to get into the heads of their customers and anticipate what (and what not) to write. Audience profiles also have the added benefit of letting us see our audience as a unique individual instead of a statistic, so for any consumer who complains about marketing being cold and robotic, it’s a great way to bring some humanity back into the fold!