Every cultural project or creative business is target audience (TA) oriented. These are your clients. They are ready to visit your event or pay for the service on offer. It is for these very people that you create your product.  

Sex, age, education, geographical location, material status, scope of interests and many more factors are forming the portrait of your target audience. 

To correctly identify your target audience is one of the key assignments to successfully implement a project. With a detailed client portrait, you will be able to successfully develop a project and use the right channels of communication and messages.

For example, to talk about niche electric music festival most efficiently it would be to go through the websites and groups in social media where fans of such music usually come together and socialise. Visitors of your event are highly unlikely to watch TV that is why tele-advertising would be simply useless. Whereas about the street New Year shows for families in the downtown you could definitely talk on TV either through advertising or a news item.

Try to put on paper the description of your target audience. Is this a man or a woman? What is the age group? Does he/she have family? What is the education level of your 'client'? What does he/she do in his/her spare time? where does he/she goes? which events does he/she attend? What is his/her income? What does he/she usually spend his/her income on? What are his/her needs? What are this person's fears and dreams? What style of text would be more attractive for your client?

For example: Aleksandr will come to the concert by Deep Purple and naturally to the festival where this band is going to play. He is already 50, but deep inside he is still that young Sasha who couldn't live a day without their music. He is married. He spends his weekends fishing while his wife is enjoying gardening at their summerhouse. When driving Aleksandr usually listens to Radio Rocks and quite eagerly sings to it. 

The more details you will put down about your target audience, the better result you will get. You should literally imagine the portrait of this person you are doing your project for.

And here is one more little advice: draw a picture of your client next to its description or find a picture that would perfectly illustrate the target audience that is 100% yours.

It's important to note that quite often a project or creative business can have several types of key audience. For example, the fashion clothes brand has its main category of clients as young women of 21-35 years old. But two more categories are not less important for them, these are representatives of clothing stores and fashion media journalists.

If your project has several types of key audience, you should then describe each of them separately. Develop a plan for each of the clients:

– What are you offering to your client?

– What problem are you solving for your client?

– At what conditions and at what price are you offering your product or service?

– What communication channels do you use to reach your client?

– What texts and visual images do you use to talk about your project?

A common mistake would be to create a project or a service based only on your personal preconceptions and hypotheses. There is a misconception among managers and project creators that they know the best how to develop it. And in such cases they simply ignore a detailed client portrait.

You could be close with your project's target audience, but additional checks and audience analysis will never do any harm. 

It is of utter importance not only see the portrait of your client, but to communicate with your audience on a regular basis. It is the clients who will guide you as to how your project could be further developed, what is the best in it and what might be missing.

For that develop a plan on how exactly you are to communicate with your target audience. These could be questionnaires, feedback forms, questions in social networks or personal meetings.

Well-thought through relations with target audience can help your project winning over not only loyal clients but also true and reliable helpers in its advancement.