How to create an audience profile that attracts your ideal clients

There’s one truth that should infuse everything about your approach to branding, marketing, and communicating.

It’s really simple, but easy to lose sight of: It’s not about you.

Your business will only thrive if it successfully meets a real need in the marketplace.

And your brand will only thrive if it successfully builds trust and connection with the people behind that need.

Why? Because your customer is concerned with themselves: their dreams, their goals, and whatever is frustrating them or getting in the way of those dreams and goals. And when it comes to taking action and handing over their hard-earned cash, they’re looking for someone who gets that… who gets them.

That means that everything about your brand must be finely tuned to meet your audience where they’re at:

Your offering - What problem does your product solve for them? How does it make their life better?
Your mission, vision, and values - What do your customers believe? What values are important to them, and how does that affect their buying decisions?
Your brand voice and copy - What do your customers find relatable? How do they talk, and what kind of language do they use?
Your look and feel - What do your customers find appealing from an aesthetic perspective? What stops them in their tracks and makes them take a second look?

Today I want to share a simple but vital tool to have in your brand arsenal that will help you answer these questions: an ideal client profile, or as I refer to it in my brand blueprint projects, an audience profile. We’ll talk about what it is, what you should include, and the simple structure I use when writing audience profiles for my clients.

What is an ideal client profile, and why do you need it?

An ideal client profile, or an audience profile, is a concise summary of the kind of person you most want to attract to your business: who they are, what they struggle with, where they need your help, and how you make a tangible difference in their life — both practically and emotionally.

An ideal client profile helps you with three things:

It helps you to understand your audience. What do they want, like, and need? What kind of thing will make them laugh or settle in to read more? What are the pain points and stressors in their lives and business that they wish they could find a solution to? What will induce them to buy, or what will hold them back from taking the leap? What will make them feel like they have achieved success, or like they’ve failed?
It gives you clarity about how to communicate effectively. Having a clear picture of your audience in your mind’s eye makes it easier to create content and marketing materials that resonate and generate sales specifically with your dream clients, because you have a better sense of what their pain points are and how you can help them.
It builds a sense of trust and connection. When they feel like you understand them and are speaking directly to them, your audience will be more engaged and connected to you and what you have to offer. It creates a sense of relationship rather than being “talked to”.

There are lots of different words and phrases that you’ll see thrown around for this stage in the process: Ideal client or customer profile, avatar, persona. I like “audience profile” because it reminds me that this is about everyone I’m serving wherever they are in their customer journey.

It also speaks to the common thread that unites all of the people I want to serve. You may find in your businesses that you have specific customers that are a good fit for a specific product or service, and developing more detailed personas that speak to their specific needs is very useful. But at a high level, knowing what all of those customers have in common is essential to creating a cohesive brand message and experience, no matter where they’re finding you or what product or service they’re considering.

How to define your ideal client

I see a lot of customer personas that only focus on demographics and sociographics (age, gender, income etc). And while this is important, it’s just the beginning.

Your goal should be to get crystal clear on your ideal client’s psychographics: the mental, relational and emotional factors that shape how they see the world and how they take action.

As you listen to your audience – whether that’s as part of a brand strategy development process, or just during the day-to-day operations of your business, always try to understand:

The problem - What is the problem they’re facing? What is it costing them? How do they feel about it? What have they already done to try solve it, and why didn’t it work?
The solution - If they could wave a magic wand, what solution would appear? What opportunities would having that solution create for them? How would they feel if they achieved it?
The road to get there - Where do they get their information? What are they looking for in the person who will help them solve that problem? What do they NOT want? What are their biggest turn-offs or negative experiences with your industry?

If you can answer these questions – and if you can talk about the answers using the same words and language your customers do – you’ll be able to craft brand messaging that sounds like them, looks like them, and feels like them.

To help you pull this all together, I’ve created an ideal client worksheet that walks you through the exact 3-step process I follow when developing audience profiles for my client projects. This is an essential part of every brand strategy I write, and this workbook walks you through each step so you can do it yourself. Get your copy here:

My process for creating an audience profile

Step 1: Brainstorm and record

Collecting basic demographic and lifestyle information about your audience is essential to helping you make good marketing decisions. This includes things like:

Age
Gender
Occupation
Educational background
Income level
Family details (single, married, kids, divorced, etc.)
Hobbies

However, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs who struggle with defining their audience because their customers don’t fit tidily into these buckets. If that’s you, look for commonality when it comes to your customers' values, beliefs, habits, pain points, and goals for the future.

Try to understand what’s happening inside their head and their daily experience — what they’re feeling and thinking about and looking for help with. This is where you’ll find the gold nuggets that will allow you to craft deeply meaningful brand messaging that builds genuine connection and trust, as well as inspiring them to take action and buy.

Ask yourself questions like:

If their friends could describe them in three words, which words would they use?
What makes them an ideal customer for you? Why do you love working with them?
What are their goals? What is holding them back from achieving them?
What keeps them up at night? What do they worry about?

Step 2: Create an Empathy Map

It’s important to have messaging that meets your ideal client where they’re at, speaks to what they need, and empowers them to take a next step that feels appropriate to them in that moment.

I use a tool called an Empathy Map to help with this. It’ll help you to get a sense of what’s in their head as it relates to your product or service, so you can have a truly helpful conversation with them that makes them feel seen, heard, supported, and excited to move forward.

You can download your own copy inside the Audience Profile Workbook, but here’s a sneek peek:

Step 3: Write your audience profile

Now that you’ve got a good sense of who your audience is and what they need from you, it’s time to write your audience profile.

Start by summarizing what you’ve collected in the previous pages into these prompts:

We work with ….
They are …. (describe their personalities, the things they care about, what they’re trying to accomplish)
However, they are struggling with / they need …
We help them…
As a result…

Now, turn that into a short summary. Feel free to use the same structure I provided above, or rework it until it feels good to you. I like to aim for 150–175 words here.

To sum it all up…

An ideal client profile, or audience profile, is a concise summary of the kind of person you most want to attract to your business. It’s a valuable tool for understanding what your audience needs and how to communicate with them, and it helps you to builds a sense of trust and connection through your brand messaging.
As you develop your audience profile, try to capture the problem they’re facing, the solution they’re looking for, and the road or process they follow to get there.
Dig past the demographics to understand your audience’s psychographics: the mental, relational and emotional factors that shape how they see the world, what matters to them, and how they take action.

Next steps

Ready to write your own audience profile? Download the Audience Profile Workbook today to follow the process I use in every brand strategy client project!