How well do you really know your customers? Are they price-sensitive and more likely to choose the least expensive option? Are your customers trend-conscious and always on the alert for new, fashionable options? Or are your customers more likely to be early adopters who are open to choosing new, unproven options? The more you know about your customers, the better you can reach them and meet their individual needs.

You can use target audience profiles (TAPs) to appraise your customers' characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors. A TAP helps you evaluate both demographics (who your customers are) and psychographics (what motivates them). To get the best picture of your customers, you need to create more than one TAP. For example, children are "influencers"—they probably don't buy breakfast cereal, but they certainly influence cereal-buying decisions. Parents, on the other hand, are "decision makers" and merit their own TAP.

Where can you get data for your TAPs? You can learn a lot about your customers by just listening to them—either informally or in focus groups and by using surveys. You can get other information from secondary market research sources, such as government statistics.

The following links provide information and tools to help you understand target audience profiling and to help you get started collecting valuable customer information for your business.

• Discover the importance of target audience profiling (Article)
  Learn how understanding your customers' profiles can help you reach your target market effectively and efficiently.
• TAP for business-to-consumer marketing (Template)
  Use this template to create a TAP of your customer in Word.
• TAP for business-to-consumer marketing (Template)
  Use this template to create a TAP of your customer in InfoPath.
• TAP for business-to-business marketing (Template)
  Use this template to create a TAP of your business contacts in Word.
• TAP for business-to-business marketing (Template)
  Use this template to create a TAP of your business contacts in InfoPath.