What is an Audience Profile? How to Build One and My Favorite Examples

When I think back to the marketing of my childhood (print media, billboards, TV commercials), I can't believe the marketing power that we have sitting at our fingertips today.

Instead of broad-stroke campaigns based on geography, brands are now able to target consumers in unique segments and offer genuinely personalized experiences (with minimal money spent).

The success of this comes down to your audience profile. This easy-to-overlook step in consumer research allows you to personalize your campaign's messaging to reach those most likely to convert. You can then limit the amount of spend wasted on underperforming ads.

Below, I’ll share best practices for building an audience profile and go over examples that can light the way. Let's go!

Table of Contents: 

What is an audience profile? Why is audience profiling important? Benefits of Audience Profiling The Audience Profiling Process What information should I include in an audience profile? Audience Profile Examples How to Write an Audience Profile Audience Profiling Best Practices Media Audience Profile

What is an audience profile?

An audience profile details important information related to a hypothetical, but representative, buyer you've decided to target for a specific marketing or advertising campaign.

An audience profile isn’t a broad, general group. Instead, it’s one fictitious person who you want to take action.

Remember, an audience profile isn't the same as a target market and buyer persona.

Your target market includes every single prospective buyer for your product or service. For instance, perhaps you sell software that can be used for different use cases in different industries. In this case, a target market includes the prospects in each industry who could benefit from your product — all with different needs, goals, and challenges. Meanwhile, a buyer persona is the final person who will ultimately purchase your product or service. In many cases, you‘ll want to market to anyone who can influence the final buyer. For instance, your audience profile might be a social media manager, even though the buyer persona is a company’s CMO, because she'll have the final sign-off.

The audience profile is modeled after your business' target audience and is meant to help you create a more personalized, higher-converting campaign.

Why is audience profiling important?

There's a big difference between knowing your audience and assuming you know your audience. When you truly know your audience, you can create effective campaigns that speak to (or solve) their challenges, goals, and pain points. This is a superpower for your marketing efforts.

Through audience profiling, you can:

Optimize your strategies. Your marketing strategies should evolve with your customers‘ changing needs, preferences, and behaviors. Audience profiling ensures that you’re meeting the right audience at the right time through the right channels. Drive more loyalty. By building targeted and relevant campaigns, marketers can create meaningful experiences for their customers. When you do this consistently, your customers will trust that you can meet their expectations, resulting in greater brand loyalty. Gain a competitive advantage. By knowing your customers better than your competitors do, you can tailor your products, services, and marketing strategies to meet customer needs and stand out from the crowd.

Benefits of Audience Profiling

So, what exact benefits await teams that prioritize audience profiling?

Personalization

The ability to create personalized campaigns is the most obvious benefit of audience profiling, but do you understand just how beneficial it is?

Statistic: 94% of marketers say that personalization increases sales.

Sometimes, personalization makes viewers feel like a company just “gets them” and understands their interests. Like this ad from Chase — I could‘ve been shown an ad about getting a home loan, but I’m a full-time digital nomad. Instead, they showed me an ad showcasing travel perks.

I feel like they put time and energy into courting my business; it got my attention in the right way. In the same scroll on Facebook, I was shown ads from Unbound Merino. I‘ve engaged with many of this company’s ads over the years — always browsing the women‘s section wondering if it’s time to give merino wool a try.

But in this ad, I was shown men‘s clothing (which I’ve never browsed before). As a consumer, it doesn't make me think less of the brand, but it is a swing and a miss.

Modern consumers want (and expect) personalized experiences with brands. Through audience profiling, you can build personalized campaigns that deliver relevant content, offers, and recommendations to specific customer segments.

Team Cohesion

We've all sat around at a marketing meeting and felt that everyone was on different pages. Lack of cohesion is the fastest way to squander marketing efforts (and spirits).

Audience profiles are needed to unify the marketing team behind a common goal. Even more importantly, your profiles will unify your marketing and sales team.

Statistic: Only 23% of sales professionals feel that sales and marketing are strongly aligned.

Accurate profiles bring everyone onto the same page, create a common language, and remove confusion. Instead of fumbling around saying, “It just doesn't seem targeted enough for our audience members interested in fitness,” you can say, “We need to focus this more on Athletic Andy.” You'll meet Athletic Andy in a minute!

Shift away from third-party data.

Let's not beat around the cookie jar: targeting specific audience segments was easier with cookies and third-party data. But cookies are so 2021, and now companies must find new techniques for audience analysis.

Statistic. 47% of marketers report that their companies are making a plan to approach cookie-free targeting.

A deep understanding of demographic details, qualitative research, and robust tracking of passive data will fill the holes in your strategy.

The Audience Profiling Process

I‘ll share the step-by-step guide for writing your profile in a minute, but first let’s zoom out and look at the big-picture.

Align with sales.

Remember how only 23% of sales professionals feel well-aligned with marketing? Being a part of that 23% is step one. The most common measurement of content marketing's success is total sales. Set your marketing efforts up for success by aligning with sales at step one.

An example of this going wrong: I once consulted with a menstrual cup company to help them develop a plan for their blog. They described their ideal customer as someone who lived in a big city, was trendy, and traveled often. Some of their content ideas were:

Best spas in NYC. Long-haul flight tips. Weekend trip packing must-haves.

The problem? Zero of these are aligned with sales. The only type of content that creates a direct line back to sales is content for people who menstruate. Content like “can you visit a spa at that time of the month” or “travel tips for period days” aligns marketing and sales efforts.

You can see a great example of this on the Diva (previously Diva Cup) blog. Their blog is named “The Conscious Cycle” and is completely focused on menstruation and reproductive health:

Select audience segment.

Which audience segment will you begin with? Some ideas are:

The customer group with the highest potential lifetime value. Your most underserved customer group. A customer segment that's gone cold. Your competitor's customers.

Here‘s an example of this in the wild — I recently signed up for a trial of Semrush. Now I’m seeing ads from Search Atlas outright telling me to cancel my Semrush subscription:

After choosing an audience segment, it‘s time to decide the desired action you’d like them to take.

Choose the desired action.

What action do you want this segment of your audience to take? Your desired audience action can be at the top or bottom of your sales funnel. Some ideas include:

Sign up for a freebie in exchange for joining your email list. Attend an upcoming event. Make a purchase.

With your desired outcome identified, you move on to campaign execution.

Execute the campaign.

What's the best place to reach your audience? Which platform and which content type on that platform? It's not as easy as it used to be! Simplifying pointing to Instagram and rolling out a static-content campaign is a risk.

You can choose from:

Long-form product explainer videos. Short-form customer reviews. Educational carousel content. To-the-point written text. Brand photo shoots.

And, that‘s all on Instagram alone! Between reels, stories, and grid posts, the world is your oyster (I’ll pass you the tissues). I kid because I love marketing and all it‘s capable of, even when it feels like it might crush me beneath its weight. We’ll dive deeper into this in the best practices below.

Review analytics.

After your campaign has been executed, it's time to see how it performed. Some analytics to consider are:

Web analytics like website visitors and time spent on page. Social analytics like shares and follower growth. Sales impact (#1).

Need help making your marketing tasks more manageable? Use the HubSpot Marketing Hub®. We'll help demystify this whole process!

What information should I include in an audience profile?

In order to build accurate audience profiles, you need the following information:

Demographic information. This includes personal attributes like geography, age, education, occupation, and income. Psychographic information. This includes attributes related to personality traits, interests, attitudes or beliefs, and lifestyle. Goals, challenges, or pain points. For this section, determine your audience‘s goals, challenges, or pain points as it relates to your product or service. How can your product or service meet your audience’s needs? What search queries does your audience use to find your product or service? For instance, if you're selling an 8-week mindfulness program, then your fictional character likely has a big challenge with focusing and finding time to ground himself in the present moment. Values. What does your target audience value? This includes bigger-picture values and motivators, such as “nature,” “socializing,” “a sense of belonging,” or "autonomy at work.” Preferred channels. What channel(s) does your audience spend the most time on? This could be social channels, such as YouTube or Instagram, or search engines like Google. The preferred channel depends on the type of campaign you‘re running. If you’re running a paid advertising campaign, for instance, you'll want to determine if your audience spends the most time on Facebook, Google, or somewhere else. Preferred content type(s): Once your audience finds your content, what format would they prefer it in? Ebooks, blog posts, or case studies? Or podcast? Video? Determining the format will help you best serve your audience. Buying behavior: Is your audience impulsive, or do they need weeks — if not months — before making a purchase? Are they open to your product or service anytime during the year or only during a certain season? If you sell beach chairs, for instance, your target audience is likely relatively impulsive during the summer months, when a beach chair is most necessary.

Ready to get started creating your own audience profiles? Let's take a look at three examples you can use for inspiration before you create your own.

Audience Profile Examples

How does all of this come together to build your target audience profile? Let's look at three examples together.

1. B2B Audience Profile Example: Marketing Maria

Let's start with the example of a marketer. Instead of broadly targeting all marketers, we're going to target Marketing Maria.

Demographic information: 26 - 34 years old, mostly female, living in the Boston area. Works in marketing in the retail industry. Psychographic information: Interested in trends and industry news. Has a flexible work arrangement. Goals, challenges, or pain points: Increasing social media engagement and maximizing team resources. Wants to expand social presence and improve sales. Lacks the tools for effective social listening. Struggles to convince leadership of social media’s value. Values: Enjoys the community that social media brings. Preferred channels: Instagram and YouTube. Preferred content type(s): Videos and case studies.

2. B2C Audience Profile Example: Athletic Andy

Marketing Maria‘s needs were specific to her career. But what about a profile that’s specific to a hobby or lifestyle? Let's take a look at Athletic Andy:

Demographic information: 34 - 45 years old, old located in Seattle. Psychographic information: Interested in getting outside daily. Rarely drinks, eats a specific diet, and tracks fitness activity. Objectively healthy. Goals, challenges, or pain points: Finding high-quality clothing that’s durable and eco-friendly. Wants to reduce carbon footprint. Struggles to find activewear that’s multi-purpose and professional. Values: Cares about the environment and building community. Preferred channels: Facebook and organic search. Preferred content type(s): Blog posts and social media videos.

3. My Audience Profile Example: Nervous Natalie.

Marketing Maria and Athletic Andy are theoretical examples, but they're so detailed that Maria could be about the Tailwind App, and Andy could be about Cotopaxi.

Want to see an audience-targeting example for a real brand? Following the same steps, I'm going to make a profile for my website Walk the Camino Portugués. This is a niche site dedicated to the pilgrimage trail that leads from Portugal to Camino de Santiago, Spain.

I'm not currently using paid advertising for this site, but I do want to create targeted organic content campaigns that speak directly to Nervous Natalie.

Demographic information: 40 - 65 years old, living in the U.S. with little international travel experience. Psychographic information: Has spent years of their adult life dedicated to other people’s needs (children, aging parents, a consuming job), and wants to do something just for themselves. Wants to try a pilgrimage to have a reflective and introspective adventure instead of a vacation. Goals, challenges, or pain points: Not yet comfortable traveling abroad and pursuing an athletic activity. Is inspired by the success stories online but finds the entire planning process scary. Feels nervous or even embarrassed by their lack of experience. Values: Values hard work and is willing to put in the time to train. Cares about the community on the trail and wants to find it for themselves. Preferred channels: Facebook, Pinterest, and organic search. Preferred content type(s): Written content with imagery to help them vicariously “live” the experience once before they attempt it for real.

With these key aspects of Nervous Natalie understood, I can create content that targets her directly. I'm writing blog posts that address her specific needs, in addition to starting a Facebook group to foster real community (one of her values).

Next, let's dive into how you can write an audience profile.

How to Write an Audience Profile

1. Determine the goal(s) of your upcoming campaign.

Before writing your audience profile, you want to know who you're targeting with your marketing campaign.

You‘ll make a different audience profile depending on your goals. If you’re hoping to increase sales for your product via a social media advertising campaign, then your audience profile will look similar to your buyer persona.

If, instead, you're hoping to increase views to your YouTube channel, then your audience profile will look like a fictional character based on your YouTube analytics.

Here's an ad example from activewear brand Popflex. Taylor Swift wore this skirt in her “I can do with a broken heart” music video. This ad is trying to drive sales while also making consumers aware of the huge spotlight put on the product.

2. Dive deep into analytics.

Once you've determined your campaign goal, use data and analytics to create a prototype of your persona.

Start with Google Analytics to explore demographic information related to your website visitors. Take note of age, gender, location, and types of device — additionally, figure out from which channels your audience arrives. Is it typically organic search, a social channel, email, or paid advertising?

You can also use CRM data to further explore what customers convert at the highest rate. For instance, you might use your CRM to determine which industries convert the most. Or perhaps, you see which pages have the highest conversion rate to refine your audience profile depending on existing customers' behavior.

Finally, use channel-specific metrics to fill in the missing pieces. If you're planning on running a Google ads campaign, you might dive into past high-performing ads and who clicked on those ads.

Alternatively, if you're running a Facebook campaign, you can use Facebook's lookalike audience feature to reach people who are similar to your best existing customers. The lookalike audience feature could be the exact reason that I saw the below Outsite ad on my feed.

One of my closest friends is an Outsite customer, and we check many of the same boxes: we’re both self-employed female digital nomads in our 30s.

We also just spoke about Outsite via Facebook Messenger ... but NO, that's not how ads work (despite the conspiracy theories). Incredible profiling is the reason that some companies manage to get your needs and interests just right.

3. Use qualitative metrics to determine your audience's biggest challenges.

To fill out the challenges/goals/pain points section of your audience profile, take a look at customer reviews or even a focus group (more on this in a minute). You can then determine the biggest challenges your prospects and customers face.

You can also use keyword research to find high-intent keywords related to your products or services, which might help you determine your audience's biggest challenges.

For instance, let‘s say you’re creating a new advertising campaign related to a social media listening and scheduling tool.

You might first leverage Ahrefs or another keyword explorer tool to determine questions people ask related to a given search query. In this example, I searched “social media tools” to find similar questions related to the search keyword:

I also searched “social media tools” on Google and looked at the People Also Ask feature to dive deeper into questions, pain points, and challenges related to social media tools:

Combined with your qualitative, customer-focused research, you'll be able to uncover the biggest challenges of your audience, and how you should tailor your campaign to target those pain points.

4. Collect psychographic data using Google Trends or influencers in the industry.

If you work for a B2C company, consider consuming content from top influencers in a given industry to determine psychographic data for your audience profile.

For instance, if you're selling fitness gear, take a look at the social profiles and blog posts of top fitness influencers. What do they care about? What do they value? What activities do they do on a given day? These characteristics can help you round out your audience profile.

If you're working for a B2B company, you might read industry case studies, check out reports, or join webinars to determine the interests, values, and behaviors of your target persona within a given industry.

Audience Profiling Best Practices

There‘s been a lot of talk and ideas here today — let’s wrap up this party with a list of rapid-fire best practices for your profiling process.

Get specific.

It's the most obvious best practice, but it needs to be said: your profile should be as specific as possible. This is essentially a character that represents your audience, and you need to know them as well as you know a character in a book or television show.

Be specific and add as much dimension and humanization to them as possible. Refer to them by name (Maria, Andy, Natalie, etc.) in your marketing and sales meetings.

Spotlight the causes they care about.

Statistic: 82% of shoppers say that they prefer to shop from a company with values that align with their own.

In order to show your audience that you have aligning interests, you need to know which causes they care about.

Athletic Andy cares about the environment, and Marketing Maria cares about community. If your brand shares those values, then displaying that in your campaign is incredibly powerful.

Here's an example of a campaign that I fell head over heels for as a consumer: Nuud deodorant. They have a lot of gold stars when it comes to company ethics, and I saw their ads for months before trying the product. I finally saw it described as “guilt-free deodorant,” and I was hooked.

It‘s a weird transition from traditional deodorant to a concentrated paste, but they’ve won over their customers by understanding the ethics that we care about (one that you should totally try; you'll never go back).

Articulate the positive and negative.

Most of the attributes given to our example profiles above were positive, but your campaign needs to find some negativity as well.

As an example, let‘s look back to Athletic Andy. He’s a conscious consumer who cares about the environment, which is positive — but I also know for a fact that Andy hates greenwashing.

Greenwashing is a type of misleading marketing where companies try to portray themselves as being more environmentally friendly than they really are. In a targeted campaign, you could speak to this negative emotion that Andy has by explicitly saying, “No greenwashing here — look for yourself.”

Drill down to the underlying fear.

Donald Miller, founder of StoryBrand, has said on his podcasts that fear in marketing is a lot like salt in baking — it shouldn't be the predominant flavor, but every recipe should have a little.

In order to speak to your audience‘s fears, you need to understand them. If I look at Nervous Natalie, I know that she’s afraid of being inexperienced. As a reaction to this, she's researching heavily to feel empowered and prepared.

One of Nervous Natalie‘s biggest concerns is finding the best way to walk her Camino de Santiago. Rather than telling her what time of the year I think is best, I’ve gathered the data to empower her to make a decision for herself.

I chose the metrics that are most important (precipration, temperature, number of pilgrims, and daylight hours). I then organized them in a guide called the Best Time To Walk The Portuguese Camino? [Data + Tips].

I could’ve just told Nervous Natalie that I think spring is the ideal time to walk, but then she wouldn’t have empowered her to feel like she can overcome her fears.

Use their lingo.

A single story can be told to ten groups of people using ten completely different sets of vocabulary. Marketers need to pick the right vocab — tailoring the copy to obvious factors like location and generation, as well as sneaky factors like individual platforms.

Case and point: When I open up TikTok, I feel like people are speaking a different language. Creators on the platform speak and act in a way that's different from Instagram or Facebook reels.

Before investing your time, you need to do some audience analysis to make sure you're speaking the same language as them. This leads directly to the next best practice: testing.

Consider a focus group.

The worst-case scenario for your profile is that it gets your audience wrong. The only solution? Asking.

A focus group is ideal, but if an entire focus group is too big of a task for your campaign, then run it by a few individuals. If you‘re like me, you’ll be surprised by the feedback you get.

I wrote an article for my new niche site on senior pilgrims walking the Portuguese Camino. My mom matches the profile, so I asked her to read it. I didn't anticipate her feedback! She negatively reacted to the term “older pilgrim,” clearly favoring the term “senior” or “retiree.” I thought “older” was a polite term, but thank goodness I asked. A focus group survey would tell me how widespread this is.

Choose platforms carefully.

Imagine seeing free cheese samples randomly sitting out next to a bus stop. Would you take one? I hope not. But if you saw the exact same free cheese samples in the grocery store, you'd be making a beeline (same).

When marketing efforts feel out of place, we trust them less. While you might have a brilliant idea for your audience on TikTok, you can‘t automatically apply it to LinkedIn, even if it’s the SAME audience. Choose your platform and message very carefully to establish trust.

Allow your persona to evolve.

What do Marketing Maria, Athletic Andy, and Nervous Natalie all have in common? The real people behind the personas are changing every day, and your profile needs to change with them.

Consumer interests, platforms, and trends are all evolving constantly. In fact, most marketers agree that the industry is changing more rapidly than ever before. This means that our profiles can never be chiseled into pixels.

You can track analytics right within the HubSpot Marketing Hub. With these insights, you can continue to refine your campaigns and tweak your audience profile to fit shifting interests.

Media Audience Profile

Media planning and buying can't happen without an audience profile.

For instance, media buying — buying campaign or advertising space on various channels — can't happen without media planning.

Media planning, at its core, is "determining how, when, where, and why your business shares media content with your audience. The process includes deciding what media will be shared on what channels to boost reach, engagements, conversions, ROI, and more."

Ultimately, both media planning and media buying need pre-defined audiences to be successful. If you haven‘t taken the time to create an audience profile before purchasing ad space, you risk wasting money and resources on audiences who ultimately won’t convert anyway.

Pro tip: Use our free paid media tracker to keep everything organized.

An audience profile can affect where you place your advertisements. Once you've created an audience profile, for instance, you might find your audience persona spends most of her time on LinkedIn. LinkedIn advertising solutions, then, can help you best reach your target audience.

An audience profile also influences the design of your ad. You‘ll want to design ad copy around your audience’s interests, pain points, and preferences — something you can only do once you've created an audience profile.

For instance, The Economist might've created an audience profile and determined their audience likes education. However, readers don’t like getting bogged down with too much negativity, particularly from news outlets. As a result, a simple tagline, “Brighter days ahead,” helps attract and convert the right audience through their ads.

Ultimately, your audience profile is a vital foundation for ensuring you're effectively attracting and converting those best-suited for your brand.

However, an audience profile can vary depending on each individual campaign — so feel free to keep this post bookmarked for the next time you need to alter your audience profile for a new advertising or marketing campaign.

Getting Started

Surprised to learn how much goes into a simple audience profile? It‘s overwhelming at first, but the power behind a simple profile is immeasurable.

I think it’s incredible that profiles are free to create but have such an impact. I cherish Nervous Natalie, and I hope you'll cherish your persona, too. Now, let’s go create the content that they crave!

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.