Our lips aren’t sealed: A quick guide to creating target audience profiles

Can you hear them? They talk about us. Good—that’s exactly what we want, right? But who are "them" actually? Understanding who you want to talk about your credit union, interact with your credit union, and ultimately, do business with your credit union is a critical component of a marketing and sales strategy that often goes missed.

In this article, we are going to discuss target audience profiles, which provide detailed information on the “types” of people you want to do business with you. We’ll examine why target audience profiles are important and provide a high-level framework for creating these profiles.

Maybe you already have target audience profiles created. This article will be a helpful resource to revisit what you have in place and ensure your current parameters will provide the best outcome for your credit union.

Your target audience profiles, also known as ideal client profiles, are groups of people with similar traits who you want to do business with you. They are a key component of successful marketing and sales strategies because they guide your messaging, campaigns, outreach, and retention activities. They help you understand who these people are, what makes them tick, and how to communicate with them. With this information in hand, you can create specific strategies that are meaningful to different types of people.

Think of your best friend for a moment. Imagine that you are both looking to purchase new cars for yourselves. What vehicle qualities you desire, how you want to interact with sales, how you want to finance the vehicle, and your knowledge of vehicle maintenance are likely vastly different. You and your friend are examples of two different target audience profiles. Let’s learn more.

For those credit unions who do have target audience profiles in place, the biggest mistake we see is that they are focused on demographics—age, race, income, and family. While demographics can provide some insight into your potential and current member needs, they are surface level at best. A target audience profile that contains “white woman in her 40’s with two children” doesn’t really tell us how to market to her. Purchasing a stock photo of a white woman in her 40s with children, slapping it on a postcard, and writing a sentence about how your credit union is the best choice for her family is not ideal. By doing this, you’d be making sweeping generalizations about what’s important to her and what motivates her. Here’s what to do instead.

If anything illustrates the importance of looking beyond demographics when creating target audience profiles, it’s the comparison between Ozzy Osbourne and Prince Charles. On paper, they are identical—and we know that couldn’t be further from the truth. At 38^th & Kip, we use about a half dozen factors when creating target audience profiles, which leverage human psychology rather than demographics. Over the last decade, we’ve found these factors to reveal what truly makes consumers tick and provide the highest probability of creating campaigns that resonate. Let’s explore a few of them.

When creating ideal client profiles, we always start with motivation. Motivators are independent of demographics, focusing rather on desire and outcome. Understanding why an individual wants to do business with you and how they believe their lives will change for the better is critical.

Pain points and motivators go hand-in-hand. Together, they form a robust picture of who your audience is on a deep level. You have a significant advantage over the competition if you understand and can speak to your target audiences’ pain points—in their language.

Did you know that financial literacy in the US sits at just 48%, based on The World Economic Forum’s 2024 Financial Literacy Index? That’s right, you can expect the average member to understand just 50% of basic financial information, and much less so for underbanked and underserved individuals. Which begs the question . . . are you talking to your audiences in a way they understand?

Assigning a level of financial literacy to each of your target audience profiles will help you create campaigns and messaging that speaks their financial language.

How do these consumers want you to interact with them? Many credit unions are pushing to increase Millennial and Gen Z membership. A follow-up phone call from a MSR probably won’t be the best action to take with profiles that are heavy on these generations. Consider your underbanked audience profiles: they often lack consistent cell numbers and wi-fi. Profiles that travel often won’t have reliable access to mail.

Considering how each target audience profile consumes information and prefers to communicate with their FI is often overlooked, but nailing this factor is key to building trust.

We hope you have found this quick guide to creating target audience profiles helpful to your sales and marketing efforts. Understanding the psychology behind the groups of consumers who you want to do business with your credit union will set you up for success for years to come. And remember . . . what motivates Ozzy Osbourne is very different from what motivates Prince Charles.