Create an audience profile with me!

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I messed up last week by not providing specifics on how to build your own AI-generated audience profiles. This week, I fix that by defining the core components of these profiles and walking you through a real example.

I realized something about last week’s post. I talked about the importance of creating AI-generated audience profiles but then glossed over how to make them. Sorry, everyone 🤦‍♀️, and thank you, @PremalthaBalachandran, for kindly pointing it out. To fix that, I thought we could walk through one way to create an audience profile using AI this week.

A couple of things to note before going on:

1. I don’t use a single AI tool. By default, I use Google Gemini most often, but I also regularly use Claude, and I have used ChatGPT in the past.

2. I am not an expert in prompt engineering, so no laughing at what you see below 😜.

Okay, let’s get into this.

What is an audience profile?

An audience profile is a composite of your “ideal” audience member, originally developed to support marketing campaigns. This profile includes the following core components (See Note 1):

1. Demographics – think age, gender, income level, education, occupation, family size, and geographic location.

2. Psychographics – think lifestyle, social class, personality, values, interests, and attitudes.

3. Behaviors and habits – think observable habits like purchasing history or exercise habits.

4. Needs and pain points – these are the problems, challenges, or goals the audience faces that your science could help solve or provide insight into.

5. Channel and content preferences – think about how your audience consumes information (i.e., what media channels, formats, apps, etc.). 

Who is your first audience?

With those fundamentals in place, it's time to define your first audience profile. As I discussed before, this could be a policymaker, an advocacy organization, a regular citizen, or anyone in between who could benefit from the knowledge you have created. Today I am going to create an audience profile for rural community pharmacy owners (a group that is near and dear to my heart).

My first rural community pharmacy owner profile

Okay, before getting to the actual profile details, I wanted to start with the initial prompt:

“I want to create an audience profile to help develop tailored messaging for the target population. In particular, I want to create an audience profile for rural community pharmacy owners using the following core components of audience profiles:

1. Demographics – think age, gender, income level, education, occupation, family size, and geographic location.

2. Psychographics – think lifestyle, social class, personality, values, interests, and attitudes.

3. Behaviors and habits – think observable habits like purchasing history or exercise habits.

4. Needs and pain points – these are the problems, challenges, or goals the audience faces that your science could help solve or provide insight into.

5. Channel and content preferences – think about how your audience consumes information (i.e., what media channels, formats, apps, etc.).”

Here’s the link to the full response from Claude. Take a read and then come back here for some final thoughts on this first draft.

Okay, so you finished?

Additional thoughts:

1. At a cursory reading, the information provided in the profile basically tracks with my knowledge of rural community pharmacy owners. I would say that the number of younger owners, especially here in Mississippi, is higher, and there are likely more female owners too.

2. I really appreciated the section labeled “Where your science can help,” as it points to specific things for me to highlight from my current research, as well as future research directions.

3.  Claude's response to my prompt about potential geographical differences in the audience profile made me realize the first section had no references. I then realized that, after my prompt asking for references, I totally missed the nuance of the statement below:

a. “Below is a working draft. It's built from general knowledge of independent pharmacy ownership, so treat the specifics as hypotheses to validate with NCPA, state pharmacy association data, or a few interviews.”

All told, not too bad for a first stab at an audience profile. I don’t think it is totally done, and I’ll keep verifying and refining it over time. Come back next week when I build some audience messages using this profile.

(Words: 707)

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Notes:

1. Sourced from Google Gemini – September 29, 2026 (prompt: what are the components of an audience profile?)