Imagine how you would describe a good friend to someone who has never met them before. You might start with some basic facts, like their age, where they work and where they live. But before too long, you would naturally start describing more about their personality and their interests – how you met them, what you like to do together and the qualities you admire in them. It’s these details that provide a clear picture of what your friend is really like.

Your business’s target audience profile should include as many details as your description of your friend. It’s still important to start with essential facts about your ideal customer as a first step to learn basic information and differentiate them from the rest of the population. However, if you want to more deeply understand your market and how to reach them, you need to discover their specific interests, opinions and motivations. You need to get inside their head.

Starting with Facts

When defining their ideal audience, marketers often start with demographics. These are fact-based, physical characteristics, like age, gender, income, location, employment status, race/ethnicity and education status. You can easily collect these statistics and find information about each group, which is why they’re often the basis of market segmentation. For example, Zipcar describes their target audience as millennial urban dwellers who don’t own their own car. Even this short description heavily segments Zipcar’s audience and gives us a picture of their age, location and income range.

We like to think that groups who share some or all of these characteristics will behave and think similarly, and sometimes they do. That’s why we have stereotypes, and why we’ve relied on demographics for so long. Still, generalizing groups of people can create issues in how we effectively reach them with marketing. When you think of the typical “gamer,” who comes to mind? Most people would picture a young man, but in reality, women are responsible for 38 percent of all video game sales. If you rely on traditional stereotypes, you might miss out on a key group of potential customers.

At its worst, stereotypes in marketing can become offensive to your target audience. In 2016, GapKids released an advertisement that referred to a young girl as “the social butterfly” and a young boy wearing an Einstein t-shirt as “the little scholar.” People criticized Gap for perpetuating gender stereotypes, and parents called the ad “ignorant” and “sexist.” Perhaps if Gap had looked further into the thoughts and feelings of their audience, they could have avoided this backlash.

Going Beyond Demographics

When we look beyond general demographics, we find there are many different ways to explore your audience’s values and priorities. One of the easiest places to start is looking at their motivations and acknowledging that are many possible reasons that consumers choose to buy a certain brand. Two 30-year-old male homeowners may purchase the exact same brand of paper towels but were compelled to pick that product for very different reasons. One man might think it’s the most absorbent brand, while the other appreciates that it’s made entirely from recycled paper. These two consumers are demographically similar, yet they have completely different priorities and motivations.

One of the most common generalizations marketers make is among generations. A company might target millennials as a whole and think they’re reaching a very similar group of people. There is so much variation among millennials, though – the youngest millennials recently graduated college and are still living with roommates, while the oldest millennials are in their mid-thirties, raising their families and putting down roots. They might be part of the same demographic, but the individual differences within this large group can heavily affect their purchasing decisions.

Instead of ignoring these details, use them to reach your potential customers on a more personal level. Looking into your target audience’s lifestyle, including their habits, attitudes and opinions, can better inform you of how this group might react to your products or services. These qualities are called psychographics. They’re not as easy to classify and collect, but they do provide a very detailed profile of your customers. They portray your customers as individual people, not just broad stereotypes.

Getting in Your Audience’s Head

If you rely only on demographics, you might think you’re basing your marketing on fully factual information. However, it’s important to look beyond population statistics and further analyze audience behavior, too. Demographics tells us that about 80 percent of both Gen Z-ers and Millennials use social media multiple times per day. When we look closer, though, we learn that these two groups use social media quite differently. Gen Z-ers prefer to use only two or three platforms each day, where they connect deeply with their communities and consume mostly videos or images. On the other hand, Millennials regularly use six or more platforms so they can see a diverse range of content.

These psychographic differences among similar groups can help you zero in on key markets and allow you to target them more effectively. If your brand is targeting Gen Z, you might spend more time creating in-depth campaigns that facilitate discussion and deeper connections on only a few key platforms. If you want to reach more millennials, you should consider creating more content across a wider range of channels to build familiarity on all the platforms your audience uses. The most important factor in this strategy isn’t your audience’s age, but rather their habits and motivations.

To find out the psychographics of your audience, you might try organizing focus groups or developing surveys. These can be helpful, but you can also gain a lot of insight into what does or does not motivate your audience simply by looking at your advertising and web analytics. To start, compare the responses you’ve received to a number of different ads. If an ad highlighting the time-saving benefits of your nutrition program performs well, you can infer your audience is busy and values efficiency. If another ad focusing on the long-term benefits of a healthy diet earns fewer click-throughs, you might learn your audience is more concerned with short-term results. Still want the in-depth results of a focus group? First try interviewing a few representative members of your target audience. You could start by interviewing a couple key existing clients about their preferences, values and overall opinions of your business. Even a small sample size can help you make better-informed marketing decisions.

With this information, you’ve started to fill in the details of your target market and can make more informed marketing decisions in the future. People tend to make buying decisions based on their emotions, so if you understand your audience’s unique opinions and interests, it’s much easier to reach those emotions. When you were describing your good friend, the more details you included about their personality traits and qualities, the more likely you were to create a favorable impression of them. Similarly, the more personal and meaningful connections you make with your audience, the more likely they are to enjoy your brand and make a purchase. It’s a win for everyone.