How To Discover Your Brand’s Built-in Audience

Next up in the Building a Brand Foundation series, we’re talking about how to find your audience and connect with their values.

When you build a brand values-up, you can add on everything else with confidence.

Once you have your brand values down, you have a set of beliefs to gut-check against everything to ensure your brand is completely in line with its foundation. It’s also where we begin building your audience.

A branding myth is that your audience is just a set of demographics. But there’s so much more to finding the people who will connect with your brand!

Here’s exactly how to build out your audience in a way that’s completely in alignment with your values.

Discover your audience’s values and keep your message in alignment.

When you take a look at your own values, your audience should share these exact same beliefs. If you’re an honest company with a foundation of integrity, your audience should either be honest themselves or look up to you because you have those values. 

In this example, your brand is a shining light your audience strives to be just like. That honesty is something this audience wants more of in their lives. 

As you build out your audience, keep gut-checking those values because your message won’t resonate if the foundation isn’t completely in alignment. When your audience looks for a company like yours, it’s the underlying brand message that's really resonating with them. 

Your audience may come back to your brand because you did excellent work or offered a great product. But more often than not, the real reason they want to return is because of your values.

Build out the specifics around your audience.

As you start to get into the process of really defining your audience, there's two things to look at: demographics and psychographics.

Demographics are your census-style stats. Think age, sex, gender, relationship status, where they live, or what their income is. 

There's also psychographics, which are what we call driving factors. 

Let’s say your core audience is young mothers in their 20s and 30s having their first child. Their psychographic is something that you’re driving towards. These mothers may be seeking out support as first-time parents because they may not have a big support system. 

Here, start to gut-check against your values. If your audience is community-oriented, and you’re a community-minded brand, there’s a clear connection between the brand and the audience. Look out for these driving factors alongside the demographics so you don’t miss vital details about your audience.

Create an audience profile.

Make your audience feel real by listing out the demographics, psychographics, and values of the person you want to work with. Create a name for the person that’s in-line with their age, race, gender, or other defining characteristics.

Let’s say our person is Mary Johnson, a 30-year-old woman in Los Angeles. She’s married with one child, a 6-month-old boy named Patrick. She’s struggling to find her mom community. Even though she loves being involved in her community, she’s not finding other moms she relates with, even at work. 

When you start to go in-depth on your profile like this, you’re putting yourself in their shoes. You can reflect these things in your copywriting by appealing to the fact that she’s stressed at work, feels like no one understands what it’s like to be a new mom, and lost trying to seek out new friends.

Don’t stop seeking out the details. There might be some characteristics that aren’t immediately obvious in your audience profile. Because of Mary’s age, she’s likely on social media every day looking for tips and tricks. To reach her in your marketing, you might partner with some local community organizations as you get the word out about your services. As you continue building your profile, you can better understand where your audience spends their time so you can better target your marketing.

If you have a larger company or just a lot of different services and products, you can do more than one audience profile. Typically, I don’t recommend doing more than three profiles. If you’re a newer business, start with one or two and branch out as you grow your business.

When you’re building an audience, look back at your values. From there, flesh out your demographics & psychographics to build out an audience profile that really gets in the head of your audience. That’s how you’ll find your marketing secret sauce!