The procedure for expanding a business and developing a brand requires your business to acquire real consumer insights instead of making assumptions about consumer requirements. The process of establishing effective marketing begins with knowing your target market because attempting to market to everyone leads to losing all potential customers. Your product development and messaging efforts must create offerings which directly appeal to your ideal customer base.
The 9 tips which follow present an accessible method to discover your audience’s characteristics.
Create a Customer Avatar
Create a character based on your ideal customer who you should describe as a specific individual rather than a general person. Create a character by giving him a name and an age and a job and a hobby. At 2:00 AM Sarah would experience her most important nighttime concern. The method of using one visual character allows you to design email content and product designs which meet their specific business requirements.
Look at Your Current Customers
Your best information source exists right before you. The demographic characteristics of your existing customers who purchase your products should be examined. What characteristics do they share? What percentage of them belongs to each category of stay-at-home parents who work corporate jobs and who study? Your understanding of current customers who find value in your work will help you identify potential new customers.
Use Social Media Listening
You need to practice active listening before you can begin sharing your postings. You should analyze both your post comments and the comments on your competitors’ posts. Which questions do users want to ask? What problems do they need to express through their complaints? People online share their “pain points” which show essential information about their real needs.
Check Your Website Analytics
The tools for website traffic analysis show all visitor activities through their tracking without requiring any direct visitor interaction. The system shows which blog posts received the highest readership in addition to displaying visitor locations and their device usage patterns. Your audience prefers educational content over entertaining material because they show high interest in your most popular post which is a “How-to” guide.
Conduct Simple Surveys
The best method to learn about someone is to directly ask them questions. The email list should receive a three-question survey which you should send out to all subscribers. Your request needs to identify their main current problem which your team can assist with through the selected method. When you offer a discount to those who will spend time with you it will lead to a higher response rate.
Study Your Competitors
A competitor who has maintained long-term success has already established their audience target. You should evaluate their speaking style to see whether they speak in formal terms or use humorous language. You should analyze the places where they execute their advertising campaigns. The process presents you with a “shortcut” method to achieve understanding about the demographic and preference characteristics of the target market in your field.
Monitor Popular Trends
Your audience exists within a social context but needs to handle multiple outside factors. Their social environment gets affected by news events and pop culture trends and changing economic conditions. Your brand achieves relevance by following trending topics within their social sphere and demonstrating to them that you understand their present experiences.
Identify Pain Points vs. Desires
The two driving forces of human behavior emerge from the need to escape pain and the desire to achieve specific objectives. Do your audience members want to save money due to their financial stress which causes them pain or do they wish to purchase luxury items which make them feel successful? Your knowledge about current marketing strengths allows you to improve your entire marketing strategy according to your specific needs.
Test and Pivot
Your audience exists as an entity which transforms continuously throughout your company’s development. Every few months, look at your data to see if your “average customer” has shifted. The ability to acknowledge your audience’s mistakes and switch to a different target group creates success differences which determine business achievement.
