Understanding your target market

If we had a dollar for every time someone told us their target audience is ‘everyone’, I’m sure we could buy a small island. The truth is, you can’t afford to market to everyone, even if your product or service is designed to be used by a wide range of people.

Understanding your target market means you can narrow your focus and get a better return on your marketing investment. It helps you decide which marketing tactics will reach and resonate with the people that are more likely to buy. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re excluding other people from buying your product, it just means you’re working smarter with the time and resources available to you.

Defining your ideal customer

To reach your ideal customer, it’s important to get specific. Stating your audience is ‘business owners’ or ‘mums’ is still too general. Pour yourself a cup of tea and consider the following questions:

•  Who is currently buying your product or services?
• What characteristics do they all have in common?
• Who are your high-value clients? For most businesses, 80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of clients.
• Who are your competitors and who do they seem to be targeting?
• Who would benefit most from using your product or service?
• What are likely to be the demographics of people that will pay more and benefit most from your product? Think about:
• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Income
• Education
• Marital or family status
• Occupation
•   What are likely to be the psychographics of this ideal customer? These include:
• Personality
• Attitudes
• Values
• Interests and hobbies
• Lifestyle
•  What is your ideal customer’s buying behaviour? Consider the following:
• Where, when and why they will use your product or service?
• Which media channels do they use to source information and conduct research?
• What keywords are they using to search for your (or your competitors) product or service on Google?
• Where, when and how are they likely to purchase your product or service?
• How do they like to communicate? E.g. By email, phone, social media, commenting online or at events.

Using insights to drive sales

When you start digging deep, you may find that you have a few different target audiences. That’s fine, it just means you’ll need to target each of them separately in your SEO strategy, as they’ll each respond to different content and messaging.

You can even give your target audience a name to remind yourself that you’re marketing to real humans. When Mailchimp conducted buyer persona research, they created posters for their four target markets and hung them on the wall, to help their team understand and empathise with the people using their products.

 Once you have a clearly defined audience, you can craft an SEO strategy that will reach and connect with them in a meaningful way. You’ll know what will push their buttons and whether the tone you’re using is appropriate. You’ll be targeting a smaller portion of the market, but getting better results.

How do you find this information? You can conduct a survey among your customers, search for existing research online, or read articles and blogs by people targeting a similar audience. It’s likely you already have much of this information already. By placing it all in the one document, you can understand how to reach customers online and increase sales.

Need help targeting your ideal customer? Contact us  to find out how we can help.