Defining Target Audience

 Defining my target audience.

I created a survey centered around mental health in aid of working on the smile campaign. I will use these survey results to help me create my advert. I have received numerous responses which I will review and use to define my target audience. I will also use these results to create an audience profile.

An audience profile is often described as a fictitious character that is created or modelled after members of your target audience. Audience profiles can be created by taking data you have gathered from a form or survey that quite a lot of people have filled out to fully understand your target audience.

When I created the survey I took into account the different types of people who would struggle with mental health. There is no certain group of people who struggle with mental health as everyone at some point in their lives struggle with it, no matter their age, gender or employment status.

My survey was devised of 10 questions that will help me to determine my target audience. I believe these questions are relevant to my work as this project is centered around mental health and smiling to reduce stress.

My first two questions were about age and gender. The majority of my audience are aged 16-18, with 20% of my audience being 15-16 and 20% being 18-21. 3.3% of my audience are 21-30 with another 3.3% being over 30.

Looking at the results, there are more females in my audience than males, with there being 43.3% people who identify as female in my audience. There are 40% of people who identify as male in my audience, with 13.3% of people identifying as non-binary and 3.3% who identify as genderfluid.

My third question was centered around if people were employed or not. Since most of my audience are in college I expected not many people to be employed, but surprisingly 33.3% of people in my audience are employed- with 66.7% of my audience being unemployed.

My next question was about if anyone in my audience had a diagnosed mental health condition. 66.7% of people do not have a diagnosed mental health condition- whereas only 33.3% of my audience having a diagnosed condition.

These results are surprising as in my next question I asked if they considered themselves to have a mental health condition. 60% of my audience do consider themselves to have a condition, whether they are diagnosed or not. 16.7% of my audience think that maybe they could have a mental health condition, diagnosed or not. Whereas 23.3% of my audience do not consider themselves to have a mental health condition. This is surprising because it means that 77.7% of my audience consider themselves to have a condition, but only 33.3% of people are diagnosed.

When I asked if my audience had any health coping mechanisms, I received a plethora of different responses. 22.9% of people said that they did not have healthy coping mechanisms. I will take this into account in my advert and perhaps offer some mechanisms they can use to aid them in bettering their mental health. There was really no set answer that was given, but some of the ideas I received included reading, gaming and listening to music. In my advert I will put across the idea of smiling as a coping mechanism, as for some people smiling can reduce stress.

In my next question, my audience was asked how their mood was most days. 64.5% of people would describe their mood as alright most days, whereas 22.6% would describe it as good. 13% of people would either describe their mood as bad or very bad.

Next I asked if people slept well, as how long and well you sleep can have a huge impact on your mental health. 71% of my audience said that they do not sleep well, 16.1% of people said that they do sleep well and 12.9% of people said maybe- which could mean they don't really know if they sleep well or not.

My last two questions were centered around stress. I asked my audience about how often they become stressed. 53.3% of people become stressed often, with 23.3% of my audience only sometimes get stressed. 20% of my audience always get stressed, whereas 3.2% of people never get stressed.

My last question was about what people get stressed about the most. Most of the responses were about college, with 80% of the audience stressing about that the most. After that, 66.7% of people said that their family stressed them out the most, followed by money with 56.7% of people stressing about that.

Social Grades, Demographics and Psychographics

Due to the responses I received in my survey, I would say that the main social grade in my audience would be either D or E. This is because most of my audience are students at college with part time jobs, which fits in with the social grade of D- semi or unskilled manual worker. My audience would also fit into the social grade of E because some of my audience do not work.

I would say that the majority of my audience would fit into the the aspirers psychographic, as aspirers are typically younger people who seek status- or they would fit into the explorers category. This is because they are also typically younger people and seek discovery.

The demographic of my audience would almost certainly be younger people who are students. Reviewing my results, most of my audience are female, but I may not take this into account, as there are also a lot of males in my audience- and I do not want to focus on one gender, as it is not only females who struggle with mental health.

Audience Profile