How to Define and Target Your Ideal Audience

Create your brand’s audience persona with my free template

Do you know who your target audience is?

Like, really know?

I’m not talking about the super broad category that maybe you used in your bio (“I help small businesses”).

But when you niche way down, do you know who your dream person is?

When we craft our brand recipe, write copy, create graphics or design our website, we want to talk to an individual.

That one person who encapsulates all of the main characteristics of your ideal audience.

You see, you want your dream client or customer to really see themselves in your marketing. You want to speak to their passion or pain points.

That’s how you will attract them.

And you can’t do that effectively when you are talking to a large segment of the population.

Because that large segment of the population is not your clients or your buyers. They aren't the ones that are going to sing your praises from the rooftops.

When you talk to a large group of people, you start generalizing and broadening your message. It gets diluted and ends up attracting no one.

So we want to target our message to attract our ideal audience. And the best way to do that is to start with an audience persona.

Define your ideal audience by creating an audience persona

I love creating an audience persona. It puts a name to the audience and personalizes them.

Personas are essentially a story you create about that one person in your audience. That story helps you craft your marketing. Every time you “talk” to your audience, you focus on that person. It’s your dream person. You write about their goals. You use their motivation to create content. You describe their pain points and how you help people overcome them.

It’s easy to create an audience persona with the right template! Lucky for you, I created one in Canva that will make this a breeze. Download it for free:

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The template starts with two examples with slightly different looks to choose from. The third page is designed for you to create in Canva. Switch out the colors for your own brand colors to personalize it for you. If you are a pen to paper type, the fourth one is a simple black and white version you can print and fill out.

Here are the elements to customize for your person.

1. Name: It’s great to put a name and face to your persona. Do you have someone already in your orbit that exhibits all of the traits of your ideal audience? Put their name down. Otherwise, just make one up as I did. Give them a little tag line to distinguish what audience type they fit into.

2. Face: If you do have a photo of a person, you can upload that to Canva. Otherwise, click on Elements on the left sidebar and then search. I found my girl by searching “woman”.

3. Demographics: Again, you’ll be making these up, but in the story, you’ve come up for your person, what are their demographics?

4. About: Write a few sentences about this person.

5. Goals: What are their business or personal goals?

6. Motivation: What’s motivating them in business and in life?

7. Pain Points: What pain points do they have that you could help solve?

8. How to Connect: Where are the places your person hangs out? How will they find you, or you find them? How will you be able to make that connection with them?

Create your audience personas and then get to know your person. Put them somewhere you’ll look at or refer to often.

6 ways to target your ideal audience

Now that you know who your "person" is, it's time to go out there and find them... or make it easy for them to find you!

You want to market to your ideal audience and adjust your content so when they come across your brand, they pay attention. Here are 6 ways to target your ideal audience:

1. Optimize your social media profiles. Put your ideal audience right in your bio. Let them know what they can expect from your account and why they should follow you!

2. Use hashtags. Hashtags are a great way to get discovered, for free! Use relevant hashtags on your social media posts to attract your audience. Additionally, search other's posts using those hashtags. When you find accounts that fit your ideal audience, engage with them in the comments and in DM.

3. Search and engage. Particularly great for Linkedin and Instagram, search keywords that relate to your audience persona to find profiles that are a match.

4. Go where they are hanging out. Look for Facebook groups or Clubhouse rooms that would attract your ideal audience. Participate in those, answer questions, and start building connections.

5. Prioritize SEO on your site. Make it easy for your ideal audience to find your website when searching on google! Focus your SEO on keywords that your audience would be searching for.

6. Create lookalike audiences with ads. If you have a mailing list of over 100 people that have similar characteristics to your ideal audience, you can create a lookalike audience on Facebook that will find similar matches for your ad campaign.

Give it a try. I promise that when you really niche down your audience and speak directly to them with your content, you’ll have great success!