What Is a Target Audience
For the purposes of conversational applications, the target audience is the group of people that represent the users of the application. The definition of this group primarily consists of demographic and psychographic information and that information can give you a better idea of who your target audience is, and how they think and act. With that knowledge, you can create experiences that cater to that audience.
Common demographics information includes age, gender, location, income, education. Psychographics refer to personality, lifestyle, interests and values.
Target audience descriptions typically include some ranges. Here is an example of a target audience definition:
Gender: female
Age: 25 - 40
Location: suburban United States
Interests: Travel, family vacations
The marketing department typically has information about the target audience.
A target audience and a persona are not the same thing. A target audience describes a group of people, whereas a persona is a research-based profile of a fictitious person. Personas generally have information that is more specific and depicts an individual, e.g. a picture, a name, details about hobbies, etc. Personas are based, at least in part, on target audience data. The goal of a persona is to create this fictitious person that team members can identify with.
There is some debate about the pros and cons of personas versus target audiences, etc.
For our purposes, it doesn’t matter which one you prefer. What matters most is that you have some knowledge of your customer or user, so that you build a product that is relevant to users.
Why Define a Target Audience
A Consistent View of the User
As mentioned above, an understanding of the user of the product helps each person in the team better understand who the product is built for.
User researchers will gather user needs for each use case and context. The understanding of the user will help team members understand the user needs.
Used in Bot Persona Creation and Conversation
A bot persona is a set of human characteristics that determine the way your bot interacts with your users. It’s the fictional character of your bot. It’s important to create a bot persona; users will automatically assign a persona to the bot within 1.5 seconds, unless you define a clear persona yourself and present that to the user. If the persona is not consistent or not consistent with the brand, users have a negative perception and this may lead to a lack of trust in the bot and users may not want to use the bot again.
For instance, a banking conversational application’s bot persona will generally be professional, rather formal which will reflect in tone, speed of talking. A virtual assistant that is geared towards a younger backpacking population and provides travel information will be less formal, use more age appropriate vocabulary, may speak faster, etc…
Understanding the target audience is a critical part in building useful and enjoyable experiences in general. And it is no different when it comes to conversational experiences.