Defining your target audience and personas is key to your content marketing

Finding and defining your audience is a key factor in the success of your content marketing and your business as a whole. This goes for businesses in all industries, from tourism and leisure to design brands and fashion labels. It will help your content marketeer to strike the right tone and provide the correct information, it will help you to set the right price for your product, and it will help you to decide where to spend your marketing budget.

But once you have found your target audience it is important to go a step further and create your target personas. This will give your content team a more concrete person to address in the material they produce. Once your personas have been set, you will find that your content becomes more consistent and more relatable for your customers.

Target audience and target personas, what is the difference?

The main difference between a target audience and a target persona is specificity. A target audience consists of a broader group, with similar characteristics; such as an age range and other demographics details like location, spoken languages, gender, and interests. A target persona is a fictional person who represents an example of the people in your target audience; instead of a range a persona consists of specific details including pain points, needs and wants.

Your target audience is likely to remain the same for quite some time, but your target personas will change as the world changes. With new technological developments, pain points shift and require different content and possibly different content channels to address them. Reassessing your personas every few years will help you to stay connected with your customers.

For example, in the tourism industry customers need correct information to avoid disappointments, that has always been the case. Managing expectations is an inherent part of content marketing in the industry, one that those who do not directly interact with customers often overlook. But it has become even more important in recent years as social media and generative AI often elevate expectations with either a false narrative or simple misinformation.

How to find your target audience?

This is the same for both start-ups and existing businesses who are re-evaluating, though there is an extra step for existing businesses. For both, you start with analysing the product or service you offer. Ask yourself, what problem does it solve, who is most likely to benefit from it, and what makes it unique in the market (unique selling points).

The next step is competition research. You may want to position your business similarly to your competition but not the exact same or try something completely different. So find out who they are targetting based on their content, just take a proper look at their website, social media and other communication platforms.

Make notes on their tone of voice and their style and link that to demographic data points; this is something that AI cannot do for you, as it is very much based in human empathy. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs will allow you to explore your competitors website traffic and search keywords. All together these data points will tell you where there is a gap in the market that you can fill with your product or service.

Now use the data you have collected to set your target audience. Make sure to include data points such as: age range, gender, nationality, ethnicity, various interests, content channels, and budget. Not all of these may be of interest for your business, so you may want to leave some out and you may want to add some; and some may be more useful as persona points than as audience data points depending on your business. For instance, budget may be of no consequence for a free to visit museum but it will be for a high-end hotel.

If your business has existed for a while and you are re-evaluating your target audience, you should also analyse your existing audience. Take a look at your Google Analytics demographic data as well as your social media analytics and insights. If this data does not line up with your intended target audience, your existing content will need to be adjusted to be in line with the intended audience.

How to shape your target personas?

To create your target personas, you distil your audience data points from ranges into specifics, to shape concrete (if fictional) examples of people who fit into your target audience. In the same way as a fiction writer creates characters, you will create well-rounded personas. You can even give them a face by using a stock photo from Pixabay or another stock website.

Make sure you do not only include demographic information but also list your personas values, pain points, goals, motivations and needs. Write down what their day to day life looks like, where they spend their time both on- and offline, and where you can connect with them. And, of course, include how your product or service is of value to the persona.

How many persona should you create? That depends on your business, but it is important that they differ from each other in significant ways so as not to result in confusing communication material. For example, when creating a content strategy for Tours & Tickets in 2020, we created three personas; one intercontinental persona (from outside Europe), one European, and one local.

If you find it difficult to define your personas for your business, you can do a web search to find if there are any industry leading organisations (such as boards or associations) that may have done part of the work for you, by creating personas for the industry as a whole. For instance, for the Dutch travel industry in 2015 the ANVR (association for travel businesses) released a vision for the future of travel, including 4 personas. And in 2024, the NBTC (Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions) presented their view on the travel personas for the upcoming years, which has 5 personas.

Why AI cannot generate your target audience and personas for you

Generative AI is not actually intelligent, it’s a misnomer, and it certainly has no emotional intelligence. These tools are really just predictive text models (or predictive pixel models in case of visual generation), that choose the next word based on what the average next word is across its training data. Meanwhile, finding your audience and creating your target personas requires both data and empathy.

How do we know that these LLMs (large language models) are not intelligent? I came to that conclusion when it became clear that they cannot count. Just think of the many people who have asked ChatGPT how many r’s there are in the word strawberry and have the model reply that there are two, and if you ask an LLM for a paragraph consisting of three sentences on a specific topic, you are unlikely to get just three sentences.

If a model cannot even count to three, it certainly should not be trusted to generate something as important to your business’ success as your audience and personas. I understand the desire to delegate the task, so that you can focus on actually providing your product or service, but even when you hire a content marketeer to it for you, you should be very involved in the process. You will want to stay informed on the process, as you know your product or service best so you will be able to tell if something has been misjudged.