Everything we will create throughout this course, your website, social media accounts, email marketing and ads, will all need to be developed with your target audience in mind. If you want to sell to someone, you first need to know who they are and understand what they want.

TARGET AUDIENCE

To help get you started, download the below PDF and answer the questions about your target audience. As mentioned previously, we have also provided examples for your reference. Refer to Helen's Yoga Studio if you provide a service, and Pablo's Paleo Bars if you sell a product.

Tips for answering these questions:

If you already have existing customers, you may want to send them a survey to help answer these questions. A great free tool for this is Survey Monkey.

If you don't yet have customers, here are some ideas on how you can gather more information about your potential customers to remove some of the guess work:

• Look at your competitors and the types of people that are purchasing their products/services. For example, if you are selling yoga clothes online, you could look at the Facebook page or online reviews of one of your competitors to see the types of people that are purchasing their product.
• Look to other businesses that would complement your product or service. What type of people are purchasing their products? Going back to our previous example, you could look at businesses selling online Yoga routine videos.
• Look at industry reports.
• Talk to potential customers.
• Pay attention to social conversations. What are people saying online? One way to do this is to go to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and type words into the search box that are related to your product or service. What are people saying about it and who are they? What is their age, gender, etc?

Don't worry if you are still guessing for some of the questions, we can fine-tune the answers later using Facebook Audience Insights. For now, just answer as best you can.

* Task 1: Download the PDF below and answer the questions to get a better understanding of your target audience.

Examples for your reference:

Now you have a better understanding of your target audience. Did you find it difficult lumping all of your customers into the one description? You might have found that you have groups of customers that have similar behaviors or insights.

Now we will dig a little deeper and develop detailed personas for your potential customers.

PERSONAS

Personas are fictional representations of your customer groups that will identify their motives, challenges and curiosities that empower them.

For instance, a yoga studio's target audience may be women aged 18 to 55 but within this audience they may have different groups of personas; young women looking to get fit, middle aged women looking to improve their flexibility and new mothers looking to have some personal time and keep active.

Whilst each of these personas are part of the yoga studio's target audience, they are each looking to achieve different goals through yoga.

By creating personas, you are able to create visual representations of your customers that will help you create campaigns that target them most effectively.

** Task 2: Take a look at your target audience and group people together who have similar demographics, behaviors, interests, etc. Then create a persona for each of these groups using the template we've provided below (add a photo if this helps you visualize). The number of personas will depend on your type of business and you can add to these over time but for now try and create 2 or 3 to get you started.

Examples for your reference:

Next, visualize the path each of your personas will take as they discover, learn about, buy and use your product or service. This will identify all the touch points in which your personas may interact with your business. We will be going over each of these touch points throughout this course.

Tip: To get the most out of this course, print out your personas and put them in view of your workstation. Every time you write a piece of content, whether it's on your website or in an email, imagine you are writing it directly to one of your personas.