If you want to be able to genuinely achieve your objectives via PR, you need to understand who your target audience is. In this lesson, we're going to cover how to research and profile your target audience. When it comes to PR, we tend to use a simplified version of the buyer persona system common in other marketing disciplines. In this lesson, I'm going to cover some of the key questions you need to ask when planning your target audience profile. And we'll also go through how you can go about getting answers to those questions. So why is this important?

Having an audience profile in place will help you understand your customers better, which will help you plan a strategy that will really impact your target audience in the desired manner. You might already know who your customers or target customers are, but do you know what their specific needs interests and pain points are? Knowing this will enable you to target your campaigns at the right people or towards certain segments? Have your audience start with demographics, it might be helpful to start by defining your target audience in terms of basic demographics, such as age, sex, marital status, and level of education. Only include this information if it's going to help you in your planning. For example, Kylie Jenner's makeup Empire typically targets a certain demographic, Gen Z, which is people born after around 1995, mostly female with some disposable income, which suggests a certain income level.

In this instance, demographics are relevant for an e commerce platform like Shopify. Knowing the age and marital status of the target audience isn't going to be as useful, then look at interests, it's always useful to know what interests your target audience, as it will help you to come up with PR campaigns that will really capture their attention. For example, if a travel agent discovers that its customers tend to be interested in the environment, that might drive to focus on PR campaigns, that emphasis sighs its environmental values, or appeal to relevant media such as National Geographic. It's equally important to understand what doesn't interest them. Find out what bothers them. Yeah, you want to understand their pain points.

What specific problem or challenge is bothering your target audience. This needs to be a problem that relates to your business. Of course. For example, if you're a calorie counting app like My Fitness Pal, then one thing that might be bothering your target audience is that being out of shape is affecting their health. That means your messaging might be around making a positive and healthy change, understand their aspirations, it's equally important to get an understanding of where they want to be. If you're promoting a calorie counting app, you might assume that all people want to lose weight because they want to look good.

That might be the case, but it's always worth digging deeper to find out what they really want. People might want to lose weight to feel fitter and healthier, to have more energy to play with their children or to fit into clothes. Make them feel great. Once again, it's worth finding the soft because it can have a major impact on every aspect of campaign and strategy planning. Ask who has their attention? It's really useful to find out who influences your target audience.

Are there particular journalists, companies, celebrities or thought leaders that they follow and whose opinions they respect. This information can help with campaign design, targeting and distribution. For example, when looking to promote a neighborhood cake shop, you might find that the target audience is heavily influenced by the high school PTA, the town mayor and the local paper, then you can include these in your PR strategy, map the channels. Finally, the most important element of audience profiling is to find out how they discover new products and services like yours. Do they search on Google? In which case you might want to focus your PR efforts on supporting Seo?

Which media do they read, watch and listen to and how often which social networks do they use and which events do they attend? So how do you profile audience, it's all very well saying that this information is necessary. But how do you go about getting it? Well, there are a number of approaches. And you'll need to use a combination of these if you want to gather real and meaningful insights about your audience. It's not easy.

I'm afraid. It'll take a lot of hard work, but I really recommend that you're thorough about it, because that will give you the best opportunity to develop really meaningful and impactful campaigns. Talk to your existing customers, those people who've already purchased and use your product or service, run surveys, focus groups or interviews. Ask potential customers head out to relevant networking groups, commission surveys of your target demographic, ask and relevant forums, LinkedIn, Facebook or WhatsApp groups. Go to the media, particularly the online media. This will give you a good overview of what's important to your target audience now, and it's really useful to read through comments on online articles or YouTube videos.

These provided Passionate insight into what really matters to people. Conduct social listening, which involves using tools to monitor the online conversation about subject. And do this to understand where your audience can be found, what they care about, and what trends are important to them. Keep in mind that you might have to do this exercise multiple times for each different target audience. However, if you invest the time into building this out, your strategy will be really informed, targeted, and have a high chance of success. In fact, if you don't make a major effort to understand your target audience, you risk a failed campaign.

Quick recap. to plan a successful PR strategy you need to know some basic info about the audience you're targeting. This could include demographics, what their interests are, their pain points and aspirations, who influences them, which channels they use. In the next section, we'll look at some additional factors that will inform your PR strategy