Marketing your business to everyone just doesn’t make sense, no matter how diverse your products or services are. To successfully target your market, you’ll want to identify the people who would really have an interest in what you have to offer. Defining your target market is the key to attracting the right customers to your business. When you do this right, it sets you apart from other brands.
In order to be successful you’ll need to define your true target market. But that isn’t as easy as it sounds! Although defining your target audiences takes research and time, it will provide you with a wealth of information that will truly strengthen your marketing campaigns. When you research and create your target audience, you are essentially creating a fictitious ideal customer that you will design all of your messaging and content around. This will be called your “Buyer Persona” and your brand can have several different personas depending on what you have to offer.
Here’s how to figure it out:
The first step to building your persona is to consider the basic demographics such as:
Then, depending on your niche, you can break it down even further to include: ages of children, marital status, education, ethnicity, and so on.
Once you’ve figured out the demographics of your ideal buyers, you will want to look into their psychographics. This refers to why they buy. Finding their interests, what pulls at them, and the reasons they tick are essentially what’s going to enable you to convince your target audience to buy what you have to offer.
Now you can start building your persona with the information you have gathered, being as specific as possible. The more you know your customer, the more interested in your product they will be. Think of your buyer persona as a caricature of who your ideal client is, exaggerating the qualities that make them your perfect target.
Below is an example of a persona for an IT company:
Name: Techie Tom
Age: 25-35
Occupation: IT Manager
Interests: Keeping up with the latest technology, Sci-Fi, movies, gaming, Wi-Fi, and network security
Pain Points: Not having a large enough budget, not being able to convince non-technical people of the need for certain things, teaching tech to less savvy colleagues
Values: Quality, speeds, capabilities and functions of products, being able to communicate with knowledgeable staff, fast delivery of items, decent prices
As you can see above, this fictitious persona is beginning to really take shape. Keeping this buyer persona in mind will help when you are designing email blasts, social media messaging, and other mass communication. By developing “Techie Tom,” this IT company can now act as if they are speaking directly to Tom when they design their marketing campaign. Chances are, when the real-life “Tom” reads these marketing messages, they will feel as if they are being spoken directly to.
To stay ahead of the competition and truly expand, you’ll need to reevaluate your target audiences from time to time as well. For example, you may have thought your target audience was mostly women, but then you might miss out on a whole audience of men that are shopping for their wives or girlfriends. Or, as time goes on, you realize that your customers are using your product in a way that you hadn’t considered before. Being in touch with your target audience and refining it consistently will get your business in front of the right people at the right time.
We get a lot of questions about finding your target market and it’s something that’s very important for our content managers to know as we begin marketing for your business. Once you know your target, you can discover a lot about them. This includes where they are most likely to be on social media, what times they tend to use social, and what kind of messaging will speak to them best. If you’re ready for your business to start reaching the right customers, talk to a social media expert at 98 Buck Social today!