For those who are not familiar, a target persona is a fictional profile of a person who represents one of your key target audience groups, based on characteristics of your customers. When developing a target audience, we’ve got a few suggestions to make sure your efforts come to more fruitful outcomes.

• Beyond surface demographics: You might be familiar with creating target audience personas based on demographic information like age, gender, and location. This information is definitely helpful for finding avenues to contact your target audience, for example, you might communicate with your younger target audience via TikTok. However, considering psychographic information such as characteristics, interests, attitudes, and aspirations, will aid in successfully communicating your product or service with poignant communication that resonates with your audience. While these factors are good starting points, they may be customized depending on the industry you’re in. For example, a clothing brand might consider style descriptions along with the psychographic information.

• Checking out the competition: You may already have some understanding of these factors if you currently run a business, but checking out competitors’ audiences may be a good place to start for new businesses. Although your target audience shouldn’t be identical to theirs, you can get a good sense for a similar audience, and maybe even get a sense of niche markets that are being neglected. 

• Starting with benefits: If you’re a new business without a set customer base, try listing out each feature of your product or service. From there, consider the benefit of those features, and who each of those benefits stands to serve, which will eventually lead to a clearer picture of your target audience.

• Digging deep: When you’re creating a sample target persona, you might look at a sampling of your target audience’s social media. A lot of the psychographic information might not be readily available. Rather, you’ll have to do the work of deducing your target’s values via their social media posts, who they’re following, and what they seem to be concerned with. 

• Do your research: Once you’re well on your way to finding your target audience, read up on research relevant to your target. Look out for blogs and articles that might inform you of your audience, along with forums where your target audience voices its opinions. Checking out Reddit forums can give you a good sense of what people are talking about with regards to your topics. You might review survey results, or even conduct your own survey to dive in deeper for information you want.