5 Top Tips on how to determine your target audience
When we engage with our clients we want to understand their business, and part of our discovery phase is to find out who their target audience is.
Knowing your target is THE most important thing when it comes to marketing your company. You can have the best designed website, the most creative logo, the catchiest radio jingle but if the right person isn’t making contact with your brand then they aren’t going to buy from you. For such a valuable insight it is one that is often overlooked or not given enough time and this is purely because people aren’t sure where to start with how to profile their perfect client.
The following are five top tips on how to set up an avatar of your customers.
Tip One: Who are your current clients?
Before we look to other resources let’s start with what we already know, your existing and past clients.
Take a cross section of your customer data base and profile them, you may have to make some assumptions based on what you know about them but you should be able to fill in the following details:
The following blog on generations may help with profiling as generations don’t just have age in common they have similar experiences, are subject to the same technologies and political situations which in turn leads them to be given a certain set of stereotypical attributes.
Tip Two: What do your clients like?
To find out more about your target audience look them up on social media. Here you will find a wealth of information, for example, what their interests are?
How detailed can you make their profile?
What information can you glean that will help position your company to gain their attention? This level of information will depend on what your business does as not all will be relevant.
Knowing this level of detail can help to feed into your communications plan. For example, knowing if they commute by train or drive to work may help you consider using outdoor advertising, bus backs, ad space on trains or tubes etc.
Tip Three: How can I use LinkedIn?
If you find you don’t have much information about your current customers from other sources, use LinkedIn to start your research. Connecting with your customer base on this platform really is a must; it is a great way to communicate with them and raise your company brand profile.
If you don’t have any clients yet then starting with LinkedIn can give you a foundation on which to build your profile.
It has a good search facility where you can search by location, company, job title, Industry etc, as well as keywords. From the search results, you can then draw a picture about the type of people that you could be looking to target.
Tip Four: What other resources can I use?
Website analytics:
If you are an existing business with a website then looking at your website data will help to give you an idea of the type of customer that is landing on your site.
Google analytics gives you a wealth of data about demographics, location, technology and devices. These can all help add to or back up your profiling from other sources.
Social media analytics:
With analytics on any of the social platforms you can dive into the data to gain deeper insights.
In addition to this look up statistics for social media demographics as this will help you identify the channels best for you and times to post.
Email analytics:
If you send out regular emails via an email platform you may get some good insights from the data that they provide. The data can tell you who opens the emails and clicks any links, are these customers or potential customers or competitors? Do your hits on your website convert to sales?
Any data can help shape your messages and add to the profile of your customers.
Top Five: Test and review
Now that you know how to access all your analytics on your social channels, test some messaging and see what works. Using your profiling skills, tailor your brand messages and see what is most effective. Remember to think about channel and timings of posts.
Build up your own picture of what is working then feedback into your campaign to help reach even more potential customers.
Why is it important to profile your audience?
You may think this is all unnecessary and a lot of work but it will help you keep focused on who you are marketing to. To help make sure your brand messages are targeted correctly.
Brand messages will have a better rate of success if they resonate with your audience as they are more likely to convert to customers.
For example, if we were to take the persona of a member of your target audience, let’s call them ‘Maureen’, and consider how we get your brand in front of her and keep her engaged with it. From your research you know that Maureen has dogs and likes keep fit and listens to the radio, so mixing in messages about dogs, and health and wellbeing might make her more inclined to follow you on social channels. We know she commutes to work by car early in the morning so a slot on morning radio might be more likely to reach her than one at drive time. Advertising on ad shells and billboards on major routes into the city could be considered too to target her while in her car.
Building these personas is to give you a wider consideration of how to reach your target audience, where those touchpoints with your brand are likely to be.
When running communications campaigns or writing a marketing strategy or reviewing your current market positioning look back over your customer profiles and see if you can improve your messaging to increase your brand reach.
