Every business starts with an idea, but its positioning, promotion, branding, and operational features all begin with defining the target audience. Every detail depends on this — from website design to marketing strategy. A well-defined customer profile is half the battle; the rest is just fine-tuning.
Why Define Your Target Audience
Everyone always talks about how important it is to define your target audience, and the more detailed the customer profile is, the better. But in practice, not everyone actually does it. Why?
Many believe that narrowing the focus will shrink their audience. As a result, they describe broad, vague traits aimed at everyone — and end up resonating with no one. The result is just as fuzzy.
In reality, narrowing your audience doesn’t decrease profits — it increases them. The more accurate the targeting, the better the conversion. Think of it like shooting: if you fire buckshot from a distance, you might hit a lot of things, but rarely hit the bullseye — and the impact is weak. If you use a single bullet, you’ll hit one precise target — straight through the center. When the customer profile is too general, marketers are forced to rely on abstract language and try to appeal to everyone.
Narrowing your audience doesn’t reduce your profits — precision delivers the best results.
What a Clear Customer Profile Gives You:
Why Does This Matter to You?
Defining the target audience isn’t just about ads and brand positioning, as many believe. It’s a foundational approach — an attention to detail. The audience's characteristics directly influence the website design, the tone and direction of product or service descriptions.
No matter what your field is, you need to understand both your client and their audience. Whether you're designing websites, writing copy, building apps, or promoting products — doing any of this blindly is a mistake that can cost you your career.
Statistics don’t lie. User decision-making can be predicted if we know who we’re targeting. The clearer the customer profile and the deeper the segmentation — the better the outcome.
Understanding your client’s pain points and those of their audience allows you to create highly accurate design work. In the online workshop “Creating Great Design and Getting Orders on Freelance” you can see how this works in practice.
How to Define Your Target Audience
The classic 5W framework by Mark Sherrington is one of the simplest methods and a great place to start. It involves answering five basic questions:
For a more detailed target audience definition, you need to go deeper once the 5Ws are covered. Add the following points:
For example, let’s say a company sells a handpan — a relatively unknown musical instrument, mainly familiar to a small group of percussionists. Many people have seen magical videos of the handpan and want one, but the name itself won’t tell them anything. So, in ads, you can’t just mention the name — you have to explain what it is, what makes it special, how to choose one, the price range, and where it’s used. On the other hand, if you sell familiar goods, going too deep into explanation can actually hurt promotion.
Segmentation
When analyzing your audience in detail, it’s smart to divide it into segments. This is especially important for companies with large or diverse audiences. For example, youth fashion aimed at women aged 15–30. Even with a specific niche, you can’t treat this age range as a single group — a 15-year-old and a 30-year-old differ in income, lifestyle, priorities, and communication channels. Each group needs its own offer, banner, landing page, promotion, or email.
The more detailed your segmentation, the better the results. Targeting rock fans is one thing. Targeting Rammstein fans? That’s another level. Segmentation is the key to success and high conversion.
There are no exceptions. Info products, services, international networks, or freelance — they all follow the same rules. You should always conduct audience research at the very beginning. But if you skipped this step when launching your project — it’s not too late. You still have a chance to correct course and pull the project out of crisis.
Accurate audience definition and segmentation is essential in all areas of freelance. This topic is explored in the online coaching course “Freelancer: The Big Game”. The program also includes many other practical insights to help designers, developers, and coders scale their freelance income. Join us!
.png)