What you need to know about your target audience to attract, engage and convert them

When setting up your business how much time did you put into knowing who your dream target audience was? 

If you follow me on Social Media you will know that I am a big believer in knowing your audience for achieving success throughout a few elements of your business. Creating content that reaches them, engages them and inspires them is one fundamental part of building up user persona’s, because without them how do you know?

How do you know who you are talking to? How do you know if they will be interested in what you say? How will you know what to create that is relevant and gives them answers to their problems?

More often then not, when I start to work with a fashion brand and ask them who their target audience is, I get a lot of generic answers, such as ‘She is 25-44, married and lives in London’.

Don’t get me wrong, age, demographics and location are still parts of who your audience is, but that is simply not enough information to make a difference.

So if you want to know what parts I use to create in-depth and impactful persona’s check out these 6 essential elements:

1. Objectives and goals– What does your audience want to achieve? Does she want to spend time less time getting ready by having a better wardrobe selection? Does she want to more confident through her outfit choices? The more specific you can be with your information the more relevant your content will be. There will always be an objective in your audiences life you can help achieve, no matter how big or small.

2. Main problems– Again, the more specific you can be about their pain points the easier it will be to generate your content ideas. By knowing their frustrations and the things they need help with, you can be the person who does that for them. Making you their go to source.

3. Content preferences– You need to figure out your personas’ content preferences: for example what channels do they prefer? How do they use social media? What tone and style and voice engage them? What formats do they prefer text? Audio? Visual? Long form? Short form? Where do they get their media from? Knowing how they already consume content will help you determine how you can capture their attention.

4. Key words and phrases they may use– Your prospective customers are probably not searching on words related to your products. However, they will be searching for things that are related to your product. Discover what phrases they use most. What are they most inclined to type into google or Pinterest? This is a key way to identify topic ideas and how to title your content!

5. Habits and motivations– What does she like doing? What inspires her, gets her motivated in the morning? What does she do in her spare time and what hobbies does she have? One of the key and most successful content marketing for fashion brands is creating a lifestyle for their audiences. Your content does not need to be product related all the time. Instead, allure your audience in by creating content that sells the lifestyle your brand wants to portray. By knowing her habits and motivations you can do this more easily.

6. Day in the life of scenario– A day in the life is based on all these components. This component enables you to step into the persona’s shoes and really understand what happens in her day. It doesn’t need to be a novel but spending a little time getting into your audiences mindset will help you relate to her more, and therefore create more meaningful content.

If you can create user persona’s based on these essential parts you will be helping your brand make decisions that support your business goals through content that really matters.

And remember every piece of information you put in a persona informs something that you can use!