Understanding and Appealing to Your Audience

Welcome back. In the previous edition of Creative Compass, we began with reverse engineering what success looks like for your creative org as well as how to utilize the most out of your creative budget.

For this edition, we’re digging into my favorite two pillars: Audience Segments and Creative Value Propositions.

I know a brand founder who went deep into the rabbit hole of his customers. He understands their pain points, why they won’t buy something, what their key priorities are when making a purchase decision, and more.

This gave him the insights needed to grow a TikTok page to over 10M views within the first 6 months and drive over $100K in pre-orders.

When you have a deep understanding of your audience, and you have the right tactics in place, you can make some magic happen.

In the world of creative strategy, knowing your audience is not just important—it's everything. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a clear understanding of how to identify your key audience segments and craft compelling value propositions that resonate with each of them.

Audience Segments: Who Are You Really Talking To?

Identifying and categorizing your audience segments is the first step in creating a targeted and effective creative strategy. Let's break this down:

Creating Customer Personas

Not all marketers agree with crafting personas, but I find it helpful to give ourselves a loose list of personas. This means we’re creating our product for someone in mind, but we’re not beholden to it should the data tell us to pursue greener pastures.

If you built your brand to appeal to millennials, but you’re seeing a wide customer base of older folks, you need to pivot and create more of an appeal to older folks.

This is the case with a couple of my clients today. We have great branding that, upon first glance, looks very millennial and Gen Z friendly, but when we dig into the purchaser insights we see the curve shifting towards the Gen X and Boomer segments.

What do we do from here? I’ll cover that in-depth during Lesson 5: Measuring and Optimizing Creative Performance.

For now, let’s continue to understand our audience.

Let’s create a fake persona for this exercise.

Meet Angela.

We’ll use this persona as our core example in the following section, Creative Value Propositions.

Understanding your audience is one of the most important aspects of Creative Strategy. Some may even argue that it’s the top priority. Regardless, it’s definitely my favorite. If you’re a high empathy person, you probably feel the same way.

When you’re able to craft strategy with a person in mind, it’s like having a compass. A Creative Compass 😉 . Okay let’s move on.

Creative Value Propositions: Speaking Their Language

Once you’ve identified your Audience Segments, you have to come up with reasons why they’ll buy from you. This requires a deep understanding of the following traits:

1. Their life stage

2. Aspirations

3. Network / community / friend group

Using Angela as an example, what questions do knowing the above traits answer?

• What are her core priorities right now?

• What are her future goals?

• Who does she want to impress or keep up with?

I know a few Angela’s, so we can list out a few other traits that may be helpful:

1. Head of Business Development at Fashion-Tech Company

2. Always out and about; Queen of Nightlife

3. Reads newsletters like Feed Me, Magasin, and After School

4. Runs a book club with her friends

5. Obsessed with health and wellness and does meticulous research

What do we know about her? We know she’s on top of things, she’s well-balanced, she’s busy but seems fulfilled, and she has a rigid BS meter.

From here, we can start to think about ways to appeal to her. Marketing is like dating—you can’t spray and pray the same pickup line, especially when your product (you) is different from everyone else. Or let’s at least hope so.

Your product and brand need to build trust with her and protect that trust as much as possible. There aren’t many Angela’s in the world, so you need to build and maintain that relationship. And all great relationships start with a fantastic first impression.

Let’s apply these insights to a few different brands in different categories:

1. Health Supplements

2. Home Goods

3. Luxury Accessories

Each of the above categories need to appeal to her in different ways.

For example, the health supplement brand may appeal to her busy schedule and her need to feel her best as much as possible. A home goods brand may appeal to a certain phase in her life, aiming to reach her around the time she moves. And if I were a luxury accessories brand, I would optimize for her looks when she’s out and about. The true socialites are often the most fashionable and on-trend.

So how do we make this exercise into a playbook that you can apply to your brand or clients?

My favorite marketing framework is Jobs to be Done (JTBD).

JTBD was created by Tony Ulwick, and popularized by his Professor Clayton Christensen. It’s the most effective way to think about marketing, because it breaks down the buyer’s journey (or timeline) into several phases:

The Phases of Jobs to be Done:

1. First Thought

   1. Passive Looking

2. Event #1

   1. Active Looking

3. Event #2

   1. Deciding

4. Buying

   1. Consuming

5. Experienced

   1. Satisfaction (or Disappointment)

This timeline view allows you to place each customer segment into their own unique journey. There are a lot of ways to use this timeline.

For example, your product may be in a newer category that consumers haven’t been thinking of, so a lot of your customer base needs to have that ‘First Thought’ initiated.

If you’re in an existing category, your approach to this framework changes. The trigger for a First Thought exists in your buyer insights (including the remaining events and phases.

I promise to dedicate a full newsletter issue to my approach to JTBD, including tangible actions you can take to gain these insights. But we need to round out this issue first.

Crafting Value Propositions is a crucial exercise when it comes to a brand’s growth. It’s how you go-to-market. You don’t just spray and pray. You need real strategy.

In my years as a growth marketer, I’ve learned a few tangible ways we can deploy gut checks to validate which value propositions we should run with.

There’s both art and science to this—I often start with art (intuition), and then I validate with science.

If you want to know how I do this, hit the Comment button below.

Conclusion

Wrapping up this edition of Creative Compass, we’ve only scratched the surface of how deeply you can understand your audience and tactics to crafting effective value propositions. Remember, truly understanding your audience takes hard, unscalable work. It’s the foundation of any creative strategy.

Whether you're creating customer personas like our friend Angela or applying the Jobs to be Done framework, the key is to keep digging, keep analyzing, and keep refining your approach.

Your creative compass is only as good as the data you feed it, so don't shy away from the nitty-gritty work of audience research. As we move forward, we'll continue to explore more tools and tactics to sharpen your creative edge.

Stay tuned for our deep dive into the Jobs to be Done framework in a future issue. Until then, keep creating, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep listening to your audience.

They're the true north of your creative journey.

A Message From The Writer

Hey, I’m Leann. I’ve spent the last 5 years in the trenches of growth marketing and creative strategy.

I work with brands to craft campaigns that don’t just resonate—they convert.

I currently run TRIFECTA, a creative growth studio. We elevate consumer brands by combining the power of media, experiential marketing, and performance strategies. Our team is a collective of top-tier talent, from content creators and growth marketers to community builders, all working together to craft marketing that connects and converts.

I’m currently piloting a unique program where in just 3-6 months, I’ll embed directly into your marketing team and transform your performance creative department into a well-oiled machine. By the end of our time together, your team will be set up for long-term success, complete with a handpicked crew of creative talent—video editors, creators, and designers—plus an in-house creative strategist to keep everything running smoothly.

Ready to scale? Let’s make it happen.