How To Create an Audience Profile for Your Finance Business

September 22, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

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Content marketing in finance can get complicated fast. With advice everywhere you look and more services than you can count, finance businesses tend to get a lot of different customers. While some are just looking for personal finance tips, others will be looking for a specific service. With all this going on, narrowing down an audience profile for a finance business can seem impossible.

And it’s not hard to see why. A 20-year-old looking for their first credit card and a 70-year-old checking their investments may still visit the same website, but they each have different needs. With the range of services that exist in the world of finance, it’s important to get financial audience profiling right. After all, we don’t want to advertise products to the wrong audience. Today, we’re covering how to create an audience profile for your finance business with these topics:

What Is an Audience Profile for a Finance Business?
How To Create a Financial Audience Profile
Benefits of an Audience Profile for Your Finance Business

What Is an Audience Profile for a Finance Business?

An audience profile typically consists of several groups that make up your audience. Not every single one of your customers is going to be identical – your audience profile should reflect this. It should pinpoint different groups in your audience, breaking down individuals based on shared characteristics. Typically, an audience profile will include the following information:

- - Demographics: Age, gender, education level, geographical location
  - Goals: What each user wants to achieve
  - Communication Stream: How audiences interact and connect with others and your business
  - Buyer Type: Whether customers are “impulse buyers” or take more time to decide on their options

While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it has most of what you’ll be looking for. Demographic data is fairly obvious, but learning to find and use psychological traits and behaviors can be more of a challenge.

Within a financial audience profile, there are a few extra elements that are fantastic to know. You’ll want to know the income level of your audience, as well as more information about how they spend their money. These finance-related factors will allow you to tailor your advertising and marketing to these specific groups. Finance is, thankfully, no longer just for the stereotypical graying man in their late 60s. Modern finance is much more inclusive, with all ages, genders, and income groups having more of a say.

Especially with the move to mobile apps like RobinHood, it’s now easier than ever to get involved in finance. While this is fantastic, it also means that financial audience profiling is more necessary than ever. With a larger audience, you need to be able to target smaller groups so as not to create redundant marketing information.

How To Create a Financial Audience Profile

Image via iStock by Remitski

Now we understand the benefits of establishing and using a financial audience profile, we need to cover how to actually get to a position where we can do that. Due to the availability of data across several streams, this is actually easier than it may appear. The process covers each step from planning and deployment to measuring and optimization. Get with your marketing team and follow these steps to build and use a financial audience profile:

1. Gather Demographic Data

Considering the complexity of the online experience, with users interacting with your company across a range of different social streams, there is plenty of data to find. To build a general financial audience profile, you’ll need a mix of psychographic and demographic data. Demographic data is highly accessible. If users have to sign up for your platform, you’ll probably already have this data on hand. But you can also find this info from other sources, including:

Twitter and Facebook

These two social media platforms account for the vast majority of social interaction online. While Facebook is fading in popularity, it is still a great place to find information. Alongside Facebook’s actual demographic data, which you can pay to access, you can find personal information that people put up on their accounts for free. Equally, Twitter profiles normally have a person’s name, rough location, and other demographics that you can use. By web scraping this information from your customers’ profiles, you’ll have the vast majority of demographic data that you need.

Insights about a person’s job and income are vital, especially for financial audiences. LinkedIn is an excellent place to get this information, as that social platform is entirely based on careers. You can use this data to create a simple financial audience profile, using the demographics you find from researching public profiles on the platform.

Email Newsletter

If you offer an ebook or any other service that you send by email, there is likely a place on your site where you can sign up for an email newsletter. When asking people to fill out this form, you can give them the chance to volunteer other first-party data. For example, you could ask them to put their name, location, and email address. Going beyond this, you could even ask for their job role, or about their specific goals when signing up for your financial newsletter.

Surveys and Polls

When signing up for a financial service, many people are simply looking for help. If you frame questions about the user with the intent to help that person, they may voluntarily give you their data. From there, you can structure each question survey to give you all of the information you need.

2. Collect Psychographic Data

Data that reflects goals or consumer habits isn’t always as easy to access. While you can ask users for their preferences, some questions they might simply not know the answer to. Smaller things, like when a user typically engages with social media or when they shop with your store throughout the day, are often unknown by the consumer themselves.

That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) software comes in. By tracking customer usage of your website, you’ll be able to find this data naturally. Every time someone interacts with your website, they create a pool of data that you can analyze. From the number of seconds someone spends on a certain product page to the number of times they’ve visited a service page, everything is recorded.

There is a range of tools that you can use to track your customers. You can move between paid and free options, depending on which suits your financial business. If you’re just getting started with data and customer tracking, we recommend that you start with a free tool and then move to a paid one once you understand the ins and outs. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Optimize and three free website tracking tools that you can get started with here.

3. Create Segments

Once you’ve gathered demographic and behavioral data about your customers, you’ll have a complete financial audience profile. You’ll know exactly who does business with your company, including information about who they are, where they live, and even information on how they shop. From there, you can get started with segmenting your users down. Each segment should reflect a specific customer identity. You can decide which metrics are the most important to your business depending on how much segmentation you want to do.

Some companies split their audience up by goals, while others stick to more basic ideas like age, region, or even gender. We’d suggest going with the former approach, as demographics don’t really tell us much about what a customer wants. Two 25-year-olds living in London might fit into a similar demographic, but could be in totally different stages of their careers.

Especially when discussing finances, it’s always better to segment your audience based on their income, job level, and other financial factors. Although demographically different, people at similar earning thresholds are likely to want similar financial advice. There is no hard and fast rule to how segmented your users need to be. This really depends on how many marketing resources you have available. If you had all the money and time in the world, then focusing on segmenting individual customers down to the very person would be a fantastic marketing strategy.

But this isn’t realistic. Instead, try and create groups with enough cohesion that a marketing material targeted at them would hit them all. That’s why focusing on specific solutions and goals is a much better approach. This strategy helps you balance the cost of segmentation specificity vs. the potential ROI reward.

4. Design Messages

Once you’ve established different customer segments, it’s time to use these financial audience profiles to then cater to that group. According to SlideShare, 80% of customers are more likely to buy if marketing materials are tailored to them. Personalized marketing is vital, with segmentation meaning you can hit the mark every single time. If you’ve segmented your audience based on the specific financial advice they could be seeking, then it will be much easier for you. Simply create separate marketing materials for each of these groups.

This works because there’s no point in advertising retirement financial advice to 20-year-olds. Focusing on matching the customer with the solution leads to much more engagement. Regardless of what social channel you use to interact with them, this is a fantastic way of boosting the amount of interaction your campaigns receive.

It might seem nonsensical to produce more marketing materials for each group, but this strategy has a higher ROI potential than generalist marketing. People don’t want tired marketing materials, they want specifically crafted materials. Without an endless budget, customer segmentation is how we can achieve this. And while everyone is different, we’re not that different. Use your financial audience profiles to get to the core of what distinct groups want, and then give it to them.

5. Plan Engagement

Alongside segmented audiences, an audience profile for your finance business can help teams plan engagement strategies. Even within the same audience segment, there might be a difference in how people like to receive their marketing. While some people spend hours a day on social media, others have never opened an Instagram account.

With this in mind, audience profiling in finance can help you plan engagement opportunities. Using insights from your website, you can see when certain groups interact with your content. Using this information can give you a better idea of when audiences are engaging online. If you can catch each audience profile exactly when they’re likely to be checking their email or scrolling through social media, you boost the chance of them actually seeing your marketing.

Along with this, you can use audience insights to plan which social channels to use. In marketing, we’re now spoiled with choices. Take note of which platform your customers use most, whether it’s email, social media, or even video streaming. Accommodating to the correct time for engagement and social streams can improve the success of your marketing campaigns.

6. Measure Results

Finally, measure the progress of your campaigns. Measuring results helps you refine your campaign over time. While one customer segment may respond well to a specific type of messaging, another may reject that style outright. The only way to know for sure is to launch test after test after test. The ongoing process of learning how each customer segment interacts with your marketing content can be a valuable experience.

Over time, you’ll be able to shape your content marketing skills, while also boosting engagement and conversion within each customer segment. Successful content marketing starts with fantastic customer segmentation. Without clear insight into who composes your audience profile, you’ll be left in the dark. Measuring and improving is the final step of the process, and can continually help you to better your campaigns for the long run.

Benefits of an Audience Profile for Your Finance Business

Creating an audience profile for your finance business is the first step toward better marketing and more impactful sales strategies. Financial audience profiling gives you insight into exactly who your business works with. From what your customers like to do to how they interact with your products, you’ll have all the information you need to accommodate them.

Audience profiling in finance is mainly about moving through customer data and finding core groups of people. Once you’ve established who makes up each financial audience profile, you can then access a range of benefits:

Improve Personalized Marketing

Data-driven marketing has been one of the leading strategies that have arisen over the past few years. Audience profiling in finance is the heart of this strategy, where you create personalized content for each group your business interacts with. Because information is so accessible, social media, websites, and third-party sources can all contribute to your data repositories.

With the sheer scope of information currently available about customers, audience profiles can be more specific than ever before. From there, you’re in a perfect position to launch highly-targeted marketing. In fact, 70% of brands that focus on advanced personalization see an ROI of 200% or more, according to KO Marketing.

By increasing the level of personalization that you use in your marketing materials, you can directly accommodate certain audience profiles. The more insight into different financial audience profiles you have, the more specific you can make your messaging. There’s a reason that personalization has become such a core idea in marketing—it truly is one of the strongest techniques you can incorporate.

Monitor Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior shifts and changes over time. Some businesses rely on these changes, with seasonal industries seeing almost no sales in some months while being unable to keep up with business during other months. Any seasonal sports industry or specific holiday-based business comes to mind here.

Additionally, an audience profile for your finance business allows you to monitor your customer behaviors more closely. Knowing what customers your business is interacting with lets you connect with that sector better. According to a study by Statista, 82% of Americans have a social media profile. With the huge prevalence of this user group, businesses are in a prime position to use social media to track their customers. The most popular way of doing this is through social listening. This is where a brand will track certain keywords or mentions over time, charting the relative popularity.

Social listening allows businesses to monitor consumer behavior. If companies perform competitive benchmarking on social media, they can track which competitor products are most popular. By doing this, they can see what financial customers are looking for and actively using. With this, finance businesses can shift their priorities to creating a similar product or improving their current offering.

Monitoring and adapting to customer behavior in real-time is a fantastic method of continually wowing your clients. Want to know more about how search intent directs content creation and audience segmentation? Watch the CopyPress Search Intent webinar every Tuesday at 1 P.M Eastern.

Support Product Development

Most of the time, audience profiling will point to a couple of key areas where you can suggest available solutions to customers that need them. That said, this research can also reveal where your company is falling short. If a large number of your audience members are looking for a specific solution that you don’t yet offer, you know exactly where to push development toward.

Instead of recommending products to unrelated audience segments, spend time on development. With data insights, you’re able to create the solutions your audience needs. An audience profile for your finance business can also help you launch new products, as you’ll understand how to create better solutions and increase customer satisfaction.

A financial audience profile can revolutionize how you go about marketing online. From shaping your email campaigns to sending specific marketing materials to certain groups, building audience profiles is essential for success.

Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress