Researching your target audience and developing your target customer profile are critical steps in your path to marketing success. In order to get people to engage with your content and buy your product or service, you first have to understand exactly who it is you’re targeting, so you know how to reach them.

What do they like? What do they consume? What brands and products do they love? What websites do they spend the most time on? What’s their relationship status? What magazines do they subscribe to? These are all things you should be able to answer and use in your targeting.

Think about it, you could have the best ad in the world, for the best product in the world, but if you don’t have the right eye balls on it, none of that matters.

Spending the time up front to research and understand who it is you’re targeting will save you a lot of time and resources in the long run.

In this article, I’m going to outline our exact process for developing target customer profiles for any new niche we’re entering.

Plus, I’m going to give you the cheat sheet we use, that helps to both systemize and expedite the process. This is a 3 step process, and it starts with the target audience customer profile cheat sheet.

Click here to get your free copy of the target audience customer profile cheat sheet.

This cheat sheet contains a list of questions about your target audience. Throughout this process, you will research and discover the answers to these questions. To start, take a look at the cheat sheet, and go through each question to familiarize yourself with the information you’ll be gathering about your target audience. At the end of the exercise, you should have the cheat sheet

thoroughly filled out, with all the questions answered. You can then use everything you’ve discovered about your audience to target them more effectively.

I start out by doing a Google search for keywords and phrases pertaining to my niche.

The goal of this step is to identify websites that only my target audience would know about. I don’t want the sites I find in this step to be too broad. Instead,I’m looking for popular, niche specific websites. I just go through the search results in Google and open the sites that look promising in a new tab in my browser. Once I feel like I have a decent amount opened, I start looking through them to determine if it is a good site my target niche would love and frequent. If it looks like a site that people in my niche would know about, love and visit often, I add it to space found under the “What Websites Do They Visit” question on the cheat sheet.

It is important to remember you do not want to include sites that are too broad. For example, “Michael’s” showed up in my search results for “knitting patterns”. I did not add it to my list because Michael’s is not a store specifically for knitting. Though they have a ton of knitting items, they do not only cater to that niche, so if I used Michael’s in my targeting, I would be including a lot of people who like arts and crafts, but not specifically knitting, which is what I am going after. Once I have at least 10 good, niche specific websites listed on my cheat sheet, I start to expand my search.

In Amazon, I go through entering a few different keywords related to my niche and search through the bestselling books and magazines that come up. Any new ones I discover, I add to my customer profile cheat sheet. I’ll look through some of the book subcategories and also click through the results for some of their recommended search terms to see what comes up. -

The last thing I do is use the Facebook Audience Insights Tool. This tool is super powerful. If you are not yet utilizing this FREE tool, you should start to do so, immediately. It is available to everyone and can be found in your ads manager in the lefthand menu.

The Facebook Audience Insights tool allows you to gain powerful customer insights, such as aggregate information about geography demographics, purchase behavior and more. [to learn more about the FB Audience Insights tool, go here]

At the end of this step, you should have an answer to every question on the cheat sheet, and it should look something like this:

Once you have completed your target audience customer profile cheat sheet, you will have loads of information you can use in your targeting.

When you’re looking for a bigger audience you can use the broader interests, like some of the bigger brand names or products related to your niche. Use those to do some interest targeting that might yield a larger audience size.

You can also get super targeted and go for a smaller, more targeted group by layering your interests with other variables like relationship status, employment or education information, life events, if they’re parents, and a whole lot more.

As you add in a variable like ‘Education’ and then another variable for related interests, you really narrow in on a certain sub-niche that has a possibility to be a goldmine. For example, you could add an education variable for “fields of study” and then enter related interests such as books, magazines, brands, people, events etc. in the “Interests” section, and you’ll have a very narrowed in sub-niche list you could test. The audience for this example would be people who majored in something related to your niche, and like specific interests related to your niche. You potentially have a very passionate list of buyers.

The best thing you can do is use the information in your Target Audience Customer Profile Cheat Sheet to test various audiences. Test, test and test again. Try different combinations using the layering technique and see if you find a winning combination.

[HINT: Test your audiences in separate ad sets or campaigns and track your conversions back to the audiences in your ad. This way, you can see which audience is actually performing best for you based off conversions, whether that be optins, or purchases]

Remember to use the audience cheat sheet and this process, or something similar, whenever you are going into a new niche and need to learn more information about your audience. Yes, it takes a little bit of time and up-front work to get it done, but understanding your target audience and how to reach them will dramatically improve your marketing success.