Understanding your target market is one of the building blocks of creating a marketing strategy. Without knowing who you're speaking to, how will you know what to say?
A good starting point to learning about how to connect with your target audience is to learn all you can about your current customers.
(Don’t have customers just yet? Don’t worry about it. Make educated assumptions and verify them with time.)
So, who are those people whose problem you’re solving?
I’m not talking about the fictional characters that are your buyer’s personas. Yes, you'll want to create those a little later to represent a subset of your customers, but for now, I'm talking about real people.
The best practice is to get information from your clients (or potential clients) by sending out a questioner that will allow you to collect it easily. Personally, I like to talk to clients in person or over the phone. You get more information (and probably of higher quality) than when someone, who is basically doing you a two-minute favor answering a Google form, will give. I know that’s not always possible but whenever it is, try it. What you will learn will blow your mind.
Avoid creating the persona you assume your customers are, as opposed to the one you actually have. Asking broad questions will get you broad answers (and clients sometimes get lazy answering them). Keeping your questions specific will help you better understand your clients and start you'll start noticing trends. Attempt to get the most complete, unbiased view of exactly who your clients are.
Remember you want to use all this data you're collecting to extrapolate client personas. Keep in mind that you might have more than one client persona. If you have a large customer base, you could have two or even more. When building your marketing, plan you’re going to want to address each of these personas. You might want to customize your message to each of them or use different channels to address them (for example, a more traditional monthly email newsletter to the older crowd and updates on Instagram for the younger ones. Of course, you could do both, but if your target audience doesn’t use Insta, why would you spend time and resources there?). Make sure you’re putting in the time to identify the different personas accurately. If you’ve ever taken a statistics class, you know about the importance of appropriate sample sizes.
Here is some of the data you need to collect:
Demographic info: age, gender, geography, etc.
Professional background and level of experience
What are their business or professional goals?
What are their business or professional challenges?
What challenges do you help them solve?
Where do they go for information?
The last one is super important. It’s crucial to find out where your customers and potential customers are hanging out on the Internet because it’s where you should be hanging out, too. That way we can fine-tune the focus of our marketing efforts on those specific areas.
What professional blogs to they read? What online publications do they subscribe to? How do they solve professional problems when they come up? Do they just Google it? Do they go directly to Reddit or Quora? This is a question that sometimes clients get lazy answering. Insist.
“It’s crucial to find out where your customers and potential customers are hanging out on the Internet because it’s where you should be hanging out, too.”
One more thing about your audience: it’s possible that there is a gap between who your clients are and who the clients you’re looking for are. Or, if you don’t have clients yet, who you want as your clients vs. the leads coming into your funnel. It's disappointing when you put so much into your marketing efforts and your not attracting the audience you're seeking.
Now that you've done the research and have a clear picture of who your client is, it's time to map out the client journey.
Read the next post in the series to learn about What You Need To know About Competitors and be sure to let us know what you think in the comments!
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