19 Data Points You Should Know About Your Target Audience

Author: Dan The Marketeer
Date: April 9, 2022

I want to talk you through all of the different bits of information you need to consider about your target audience. The more you understand about your audience, the better you can serve them and generate amazing results.

Three Major Advantages to Truly Understanding Your Audience:

  1. You’ll be able to write and design your marketing to fit your audience perfectly. You’ll be able to have hooks that make your audience stop and take notice of your adverts. Then you’ll have a great story that your audience can relate to and makes them more engaged. Lastly, you can then make them an offer, which is perfect and something they can’t refuse, because it’s based around them. More on the hook-story-offer formula in a later post.
  2. You’ll be able to input a lot of the information onto ad platforms, so you can better target them. An example of this is Facebook Ads — they allow you to input certain criteria, which means you only advertise to your perfect audience. Another example of how useful this is, is with using Google Ads. By knowing your audience really well, you can predict the phrases and words they enter in Google, allowing you to advertise to them.
  3. Last, but not least, you’re also able to create valuable content to attract your audience. Freebies are a great way for you to build a database and re-market to people.

19 Data Points You Should Know

So now that we know just how much of a game changer it is to really understand our target audience, what information about them do we need?

Well the simple answer is as much as we possibly can. The more we have, the more we can understand our audience, and the better we can achieve the three points above.

I’ve compounded my years in marketing — running ads and email campaigns across a wide variety of niches and industries — and have created a list of 19 total bits of information that you must have. There may well be more out there, but if you have these 19, you’ll be able to succeed in your marketing, regardless of your niche or industry.

Information About Your Target Audience

So let’s get started!

  1. Age. The rough age bracket your target audience is currently in. This could be for example 21–25, or also be by year of birth such as 1994–1998.
  2. Gender. An easy one to get started with, but it is not always applicable. Many businesses target audiences of not just one gender.
  3. Income. Now we’re onto more complicated target audience options. Income could represent annual earnings or even life earnings. They could also be the income for your target audience’s entire family, or just themselves. You’ll likely want to have a set bracket of income for example £25,000-£34,999.
  4. Occupation. Leading on from income is occupation — the rough job title your target audience has. It’s likely you’ll have more than one of these — for example if you wanted to target people who have marketing jobs. Occupations in that case would include: marketing assistant, marketing administrator, marketing executive, marketing manager etc. It depends on how specific you really want to get.
  5. Education. We’re really getting into the nitty gritty now — there are many levels of education a person can have, but it’s also possible that education isn’t really relevant for you. If they earn a certain bracket, is it important if they did it by going to university or if they built a career from scratch?
  6. Location. This again could work in different ways. It could be a specific town/city, a specific county or country. Beyond countries you probably wouldn’t want to go to continent/worldwide, as it would be too broad. And imagine the work to get your ads translated into 100s of languages!

You will by now start to build a picture in your mind of precisely who your target audience is. With the info you have on them, you could go ahead and already put together some good advertising. But if you want to get the best results, you need to keep on going as we dig into the real detail.

7. Family. Your target audiences family is critical to truly understanding them as a person. You want to think about if they have a partner, have children, parents and other family members. This will help you to ultimately understand what drives them. And once you know that, you can offer to meet their needs.

8. Relationship. Linked to family is the different levels of relationship they may or may not be in. They could be single, widowed, in a relationship, engaged or married. Again, knowing this is critical.

9. Industry. Industry leads on from their occupation. If for example you wanted to promote to people who work in marketing (occupation), but only for certain industries, for example property, then knowing the industry is essential.

10. Interests. Interests is a big one — what things interest your target audience? If they were reading a newspaper, what articles would they skip to? If they’re browsing the internet, what would they search? Interests are a hugely varied piece of the target audience, but again, nailing that will be powerful.

11. Lifestyle. Everything we’ve covered so far all plays a part in the life of your target audience — but what about their lifestyle? How do they like to live? Do they work hard, play hard? Are they successful and flaunt it, or are they modest in their living? Are they into saving for a rainy day or buying the next iPhone or flash car? Do they go abroad three times a year, or prefer weekend trips away to the countrywide with their family?

12. Ambitions. Ambitions and the long term goals of your target audience, again, helps to reinforce your understanding of what drives them. Knowing their ambitions puts you ahead of the game when it comes to helping them achieve those ambitions.

13. Likes/Dislikes. This is similar to interests, but are more broad. For example, do they like tea, coffee or both? Wine or beer? Knowing the opposite is important too, especially when identifying what you can do for them.

14. Habits/Routines. This leads on from lifestyle, as your target audience will have dozens of little habits and routines that contribute to their overall lifestyle. Habits and routines can be tiny things, from getting up at 5am every morning without excuse, to how they live every single day of their life. Knowing this makes them a great target for your ads. This can be so powerful — if their routine is checking their phone on the tube on their morning commute every weekday — your ads can be set there, ready to grab their attention. Powerful stuff!

15. Peers. It’s a near scientific truth that people hang out with people who are like them. Your target audience will have friends and peers who have similar demographics, interests, and literally everything else we’re talking about here. Knowing the type of people they hang out with can help finish your picture of them.

16. Hobbies. Hobbies can be a great way of grabbing your audiences attention, as well as helping you truly understand who they are. As you probably realize, many of these different pieces relate to each other, and this is no different. If their hobby is writing, for example, you suddenly know way more about them — their ambitions, drives, and routines suddenly become a lot clearer.

17. Reasons why. This is a biggy — the reason why they do what they do, the reason they are on this planet and ultimately the reason why they do every single thing they do each and every day. Some of the big examples are things we’ve already covered, like having a family; maybe they want to create financial security for their children. Maybe they want to contribute to the world and help people. Maybe they just want to leave their mark.

18. Beliefs. Beliefs are a real game changer for your ads. If your ads follow their beliefs, they are infinitely more likely to take action with you. Beliefs can be anything — freedom for all, human rights, animal rights, the right to have their data secure, all the way to religious and political beliefs.

19. Idols and influencers. This is an interesting one — it combines a lot of what we’ve covered, such as interests, likes, and peers — but it also allows you to precisely target your audience, for example, using ad sets on Facebook. A lot of idols and influencers are very popular and have their own option as an ‘interest’ on ad sets. If your audience likes Tony Robbins, for example, the chances are they believe in self development, financial freedom, investment and all round happiness and freedom for all.

Conclusion

I strongly recommend having a checklist with these 19 points on it, to ensure you get as much info as possible about your target audience, before you create and publish your next piece of advertising. It can truly be a game changer!

A Gift For You

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Take care,

Dan

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