A successful marketing strategy starts by defining your target audience as well as their needs. Who buys from you and why? This is an important question to ask during the discovery phase of your marketing campaign and will help you to focus your marketing efforts in order to realize better results. Defining your ideal customer can change everything from your product or service offering, to your pricing and value proposition. You can start the process of defining your ideal customer by asking these questions.
Where Are They?
Consider both the physical and digital spaces where your target audience can be found. Make sure you’re as specific as possible. For instance, they may be on LinkedIn , but what groups do they belong to? They may read blogs, but which ones? Knowing where your audience can be found will inform where you advertise and the best way to reach them.
Where Do They Get Their Information From?
When your target audience is in its research phase, where are they looking? Google? Social media? You’ll want to appear as a credible source for them right where they’re searching.
What Are Their Goals?
Keep in mind what stage your customers may be in to better inform your marketing campaign. Help them to picture what life could be like with your product or service. If you know their priorities, you can better position your product or service as a tool to help them reach their goals.
What Are The Obstacles to Their Goals?
Try to put yourself in their shoes so you can address your audience’s pain points and challenges. These obstacles will impact the products and services you offer, as well as the emotions you speak to in your campaign. And be sure to share testimonials if you have them. Seeing how you’ve solved other customers’ problems may make your target audience more likely to buy from you.
How Do They Prefer to Communicate?
Refer back to the first question above and consider where your customers are: LinkedIn, Facebook, Snapchat, email, direct mail? Don’t make things harder than they need to be -- communicate with your customers where they already are!
What Makes Them Happy?
People connect to brands that make them feel good. While these points will help you to reach your target audience and communicate with them effectively, be sure to add that extra touch by going above and beyond with customer service. Whether it’s a hand-written note or offering a special deal via email marketing, keeping your audience happy can help you grow a loyal customer base.
Asking these questions will help you gain a better understanding of where your customers are and how you can best communicate with them. Be sure to consolidate the answers to these questions by writing a customer profile that you can use to inform your future marketing campaign(s).
For example: “Kate belongs to a Northeast Ohio Animal Rescue group on Facebook. This is extremely important to her. The biggest frustration she experiences throughout her day is that she doesn’t have a video editor on staff but wants to post videos to her company’s social media accounts. If she needs to research something, she picks up her iPhone and uses Google. Her long-term goal is to be a vet tech at her local animal clinic and also volunteer her time at animal shelters. She was browsing her favorite North Shore Animal League blog yesterday when she was served an ad for a video editing service.”
You can also get more detailed by creating a “day in the life” schedule for your customer persona, including their preferences, responsibilities, routines, and dreams. This can help you better understand your ideal customer’s emotions, wants, and needs. It can also answer questions like: “What’s the best day and time to email them?” Most of all, this will add a human element to your marketing, which is necessary to help you determine how you’ll reach them.
Are you ready to define your ideal customer? The experts at WiredViews can help. Fill out our simple form, and we’ll help you connect the dots to bring in more of the right customers and keep them coming back!
