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So, how do you go about getting that information in order to connect with your interviewer? Let’s pretend you’re a top-notch marketer — the newly-promoted Brand Manager of YOU^TM. You’re in charge, and it’s your job to see that your brand reaches the top.

If YOU^TM were a product, your Audience would be called the “Target Market,” and you would find out all you could about your Target Market through surveys and questionnaires that ask questions about who they really are. You would want to know provable facts about the people in your Target Market, like their age, sex, income, education, etc. How much do they earn? Do most of them live in the city or in the suburbs? In marketing-speak, these provable facts are called “demographics.”

Now, an average marketer might stop there, but provable facts are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to learning about the Target Market. Think about it for a second: If you really want to get to know someone, it wouldn’t be enough only to find out this person’s age, how much they earn, and where they were born and lived, right? Those kinds of “facts” wouldn’t really tell you much about a person. You would only have scratched the surface, and you would need to base all of your beliefs about that person on less than what they’d write on a doctor’s office form.

That’s why top-notch marketers take the time to go deeper. They want to know much more about their Target Market. They want to get into the heads of the people who are buying their brands and understand their behavior. In marketing, this information is called “psychographics,” which sounds pretty heavy, but basically means personal information that tells you what makes a particular person or group of people tick.

How does this apply to personal branding? Well, in general, your Audience is anyone or any company you want to impact with your personal brand. In your job search process, this includes the people who could hire you for the kind of job you want after graduation. Your Audience might simply be the person who interviews you, but you may not know at first who your interviewer or even your potential immediate supervisor will be. So, in the beginning of your job search, your job- seeking personal brand Audience might be the entire company or a group of people within the company, such as the division or department where you’d like to work.

Now, you’re probably thinking: “But how can I know so much about an Audience that I haven’t even met yet? I don’t know anyone at most of the companies where I want to apply for a job. In fact, I don’t even know which companies I’m interested in yet!”

That’s fair. It’s true that when you’re looking for a new job, learning about your Audience may seem challenging at first. Even choosing companies to target can be confusing, especially when you’re looking seriously at the professional job market for the first time. But don’t worry. We’re going to walk through this process together. Learning about your Audience before you land a job is definitely doable, and all it takes is some smart investigating, which can actually be fun if you let it. With a little bit of research, you can find out which companies are the best fit for YOU^TM. In fact, you may be surprised how much you can learn about a company and its people with just a little bit of effort.