Unconventional Target Audience Profiling
It’s time to break out of the trap of publishing stale, heartless, boring content. As a blogger, I have hit rough patches and have struggled to produce great content until one day I found the solution to my problem – I found a way to quickly find out what makes my readers tick. I was able to put together simple steps to understand exactly who they were.
It’s time to get personal. People like to engage with other people. No surprise there, but I’ve noticed it gets forgotten more often than you’d think, even for content marketers. If you’ve been producing content for a long time like I have, it’s easy to become stale. I must confess, I’ve fallen into this trap many times and still do though less frequently. The secret to my breakthrough, was to better define who I was writing for. I didn’t do this by completing complex surveys. I didn’t study my audience demographics. I didn’t need any facts and figures about my audience. I wanted to know who they were on a personal level. I wanted to know what motivated and inspired them. I wanted to know what their values were. I wanted to understand their strengths and weaknesses so I could better serve them. I didn’t need demographics, I needed psychographics. I spoke to a few people in the field and they warned me how expensive and time consuming psychometric analysis would be… but I was desperate so I searched for a better way.
The answer was simple! I love doing online personality profile tests for a bit of fun and it dawned on me – What if I could do this for my audience? I searched Google and found some free online profiling tools and gave them a test drive. There were Myer Briggs and DiSC tools among others and the good news was they were free. I decided to do this for my target audience by selecting a handful of people from my audience.
Here’s the simple steps I took and now recommend (extracted from my book, The Simple Manifesto):
Here are 8 simple steps:
- If you are in business already, hand pick the best half dozen or so customers you have now. These are the people you love working with, and/or are the most profitable. If you haven’t yet begun, either select a few people you know who are the type of people you would like to work with, or imagine the type of person you want to target and answer how you believe they would. Make some educated guesses and assumptions to get started, and correct course later.
- Google “free personality tests”. There are many to choose from however its best to select a popular one with great personality profile descriptions. Select one that’s not to too complicated and only has ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. It must be quick and easy. Give it a test drive to check you’re happy with it. Work out how to print the questionnaire answers or take a screen shot prior to submitting it for the results.
- Approach your list of great customers explaining to them that they are one of the top few customers you love working with, and that you are doing a little research so you can attract more customers just like them. Stroke their ego a little, it never hurts.
- Request a 15-20 minute phone interview to run through a quick questionnaire which will help you create a profile of your ideal customer. Tell them it will be a bit of fun, and you can also give them their personality profile results if they like. Reassure them there will be nothing too personal.
- Some will agree to do it immediately while others will schedule a time. You could consider sending them a bottle of wine thanking them in advance if you wish. Some may feel uncomfortable, so reassure them that it’s fine not to participate. It’s not worth upsetting the relationship.
- Prior to commencing the questionnaire explain it’s a set of questions with no right or wrong answers, and that you only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Tell them in advance that their first instinctive answer is the best. Complete the questions and print or take a screenshot before submitting the data. Once that’s done, tell them the result if they wish, and offer to send them the results via email.
- Once you have completed the questionnaire for everyone on your list, collate all the answers working out how the majority responded to each question. If you have a draw on any, favour the response from the best customer on your list. It’s probably not going to make a major difference anyway.
- Fill in the questionnaire with the most popular answers, and out will pop the profile of your ideal customers. Google the results and you’ll find lots of information on this type of person. Pay particular attention to how you can work with or relate to this type of person.
Out will pop a Personality Profile for your ideal target audience. Take this profile and read all the information you can about who they are and what makes them tick. You’ll find strengths and weaknesses that you can better understand and address in your content. You can call this your Avatar. It may also help you to give your Avatar a gender, determined by the most common gender of your target audience and you can even give it a name if that will help you. Think of your Avatar as a real person and write as if you are writing to this one individual. Make the most of their strengths and provide support for their weaknesses. You’ll find your writing becomes a lot more personal and interesting for your target audience. Of course, not everyone within your audience will be a perfect match for your Avatar and that’s perfectly fine too. Even when we run personality profiles on ourselves, they are seldom a perfect-match however they give us insights that are often very useful.
I used a Myer Briggs profiling tool (also known as the Jung Typology Test) and the final result was ENFP. When I Google this profile type for more information I found a wealth of information here. I simply founds some descriptions I found useful, copied and pasted it into a document and edited it to make it more meaningful for my business and define my Avatar. It’s important to use a popular, well regarded profiling system like Myer Briggs or DiSC so you can find plenty of resources and information to help you create your own Avatar.
How to Relate to Your Audience
Once you have a clearly defined Avatar, you’ll be able to write just for them but you’ll also need to consider your own personality as a business and how you would relate to this type of person. As I said before, people want to relate with real peoples so an effective way to personalise your business is to make sure you include photos of yourself and your team if you have one. Video’s are great too. Don’t be bland, consider your Avatar and consider how you would relate to them in the real world. Show your personality through your imagery.
You may not like the idea of having your face centre stage on your website or blog however, your audience will start to feel they know who you are, the next steps are for them to like and trust you and that’s done through your content produced specifically for people just like them. We all like to know whom we’re dealing with, so it makes good business sense to use our photos – even if one or two mates tease you about it. Here in Australia, we have something called the “Tall Poppy Syndrome” which basically means people resent, attack and cut-down successful people. It can be done in jest and can be a bit of fun when it’s your mates, but don’t let it stop you being everything you can be online as a marketer and self-promoter – That’s the job of content marketing.
I suggest you include a few lines of background information with each team member’s photo considering their own personality but also how that interacts and engages with your Avatar. Some say, you should always be yourself and that’s true however, you already adapt your personality depending on whom you are speaking with in the real world so I suggest you do that in the online world too.
Of course you should be linking to your businesses social media accounts. If it’s appropriate to your business, you should also insert a link to your team’s social media profiles. While personal Facebook and Twitter accounts may not be appropriate, LinkedIn profiles may be since they are generally for professional use. Always make sure your teams LinkedIn profile photos are a great quality, ideally matching the photos on your website or blog to keep your message consistent.
You should also consider using photos on your printed marketing collateral even if it’s not really content marketing. If you are a content marketer, you are often the brand ambassador for your company by default so keep the message consistent throughout all your material.
Hope this helps you humanise your audience. As content marketers, let’s start writing for real live humans. Humans with real strengths and weaknesses we can help in a more meaningful way. For me, that’s what content marketing is all about.
