I've heard of doing audience segmentation analysis before -- how old is your audience, what social media do they follow, what magazines do they read... basically trying to figure out how to advertise to them. I was never able to do that. Creating THREE idealized members of my audience really helped crystalize both the differences and the similarities. They all feel there's something better, if they could only figure out what. But they're coming at it from 3 entirely different perspectives. And need something different from my writing. Almost all of the people that routinely respond to my articles fall into a cloud around one of the personas.