One of the most common problems for any business owner is narrowing down your target audience.
Our instinct is to cast our net as wide as possible to get all the customers we can.
Here’s the problem. What we offer doesn’t appeal to everyone out there.
You’re far better off finding your perfect target audience and appealing only to them than you are trying to make your products and services seem appealing to everyone.
Fortunately, finding them is a lot easier than you think.
Who Is Your Perfect Target Audience?
This is a question many business owners ask. And many have no easy way to answer this question.
Sometimes this is because they have too many disparate products and services to focus on one audience. That’s okay, you’re allowed to have more than one target audience. Many businesses do.
To this day, my favorite example of this is always My Little Pony. The original target audience was 4-12 year old girls but also appeals to certain 20-something men.
Many business owners can’t answer this question because they’ve never sat down to think about it. They’ve just assumed their product or service is right for everyone and market it accordingly.
Don’t do this.
You’re wasting a lot of money and effort trying to appeal to the wrong people.
Instead, you want to find the “right” people. The ones who want your product or service and will happily pay for it because it solves a problem they have.
When you hone in on the right target audience, you’re going to get more attention, more sales, more loyal customers.
You need to figure out exactly who is interested in your products or services and focus solely on them.
No, you won’t have billions of eyes on your advertising. Instead, you’ll have the ones that matter. The ones who want what you have to offer and will open their wallets to get it.
You’ll spend less money on advertising and get more customers for that money. Which means more profits for your business and more people who love what you do and will trumpet it to the world on your behalf.
“Okay,” I hear you say. “How do I find these people?
Identify Your Ideal Client
A lot of this is knowing your customer demographics, which I wrote about a month or so ago. I recommend revisiting that post.
There is another aspect to it.
That is having a vivid picture of your ideal client in your brain, or even sketched out on “paper.” (I put paper in quotes because many of us do everything digitally these days.)
When I say, vivid picture, I mean have a full story to go with this person.
- What is their name?
- Where do they live?
- What do they do? (Include work, hobbies, and general life stuff.)
- What is their back story?
- What are their external and internal problems?
- What is the specific problem they need to solve and how does your product or service solve it?
- What would their life look like if they purchased your product or service and it solved that problem?
This is commonly referred to as a customer avatar.
Marketing departments in every industry and at companies large and small invest a lot of time in creating these because they are so valuable.
They act as a focal point for everything you do in your marketing. It really helps to have a reference point for your messaging, the types of images you use, the colors, all of it.
I’ve seen customer avatar sheets with entire life biographies and pictures of this imaginary individual.
Trust me. When you have to write to appeal to this person, having this information really helps!
There is an important question that is probably rattling around in the back of your head at the moment.
How do you know whether this customer avatar is accurate?
You talk to the people you believe are your target audience.
Next question: Where do you find these people so you can figure out who fits the description of the customer avatar in your head?
The same place everyone goes to ask questions these days…
Social Media – Your Best Audience Research Tool
If you’re like most people, when you have a question you turn to social media.
This is because people are more likely to trust a recommendation from a friend than they are the results of an online search. Your friends are giving you their person experience. A search engine results page (SERP) is a bunch of advertisers trying to get your attention.
The same is true when you’re looking for your most likely customers. Ask on social media.
I asked a question about a common slang term on Facebook the other day and got a wealth of information, most of it from my friends.
I’ve used this same method to gather information for my own marketing and for clients’ campaigns.
Asking a question on social media works well for a couple of reasons:
- It’s an open platform where people are expecting to interact with you.
- People love giving their opinions about well… pretty much everything.
Quora is an entire social media platform based solely on asking questions. You may not even need to ask your question there. You may just need to search for it and, if you find it, read the responses others have already given.
The cool thing about using social media for audience research is it gives you a good baseline for what your potential customers are thinking. Because if they’re answering your questions it’s a good bet these people are your potential customers.
By asking a question, you’re starting a conversation with someone who may potentially buy from you. You’re building a relationship that can benefit both of you.
Granted, this is a privilege you don’t want to abuse. No one wants their feed to be bombarded with weird questions that lead to marketing pitches all the time. (We already get that from ads.) But, used wisely, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora and other platforms can be used very effectively as market research tools.
Also, when you know how to use them, Facebook, Twitter and Google can give you specific information about the people visiting your website, reading your blog posts and interacting with your business page/profile. You do have to set up some tracking methods to get this information, but it’s worth doing for the information you can get.
Another good way to get more information on your target audience is to…
Talk to Your Ideal Customer
You probably know your ideal customer personally. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t, most of us do.
You have your customer avatar. Think about friends and acquaintances who fit this profile. If you have customers right now, you obviously know them.
Ask a few of them to sit down with you so you can ask them questions.
This gives you the chance to verify the information you believe about your customer avatar and lets you expand on what you know.
Some of the most important questions you can ask are things like:
- What is the biggest frustration you have with (Insert the problem your product or service solves here)?
- How does this problem affect your everyday life?
- What would your life look like if you had a solution to the above problem?
- What solutions have you tried in the past?
- (If they are a current customer) How has using (your product or service) improved your life?
Use this information to flesh out your customer avatar and shape your messaging so you’re attracting the “right” target audience.
Now that you know who they are, you need to…
Appeal to Your Whole Audience
I know what you’re thinking.
“But Tanya, you just said I needed to focus in on my target audience. Why are you telling me to include everyone now?”
What I mean is, everyone within that target audience.
You see, you’re allowed to have more than one avatar.
And you should.
Because your product or service probably solves more than one problem or problem type. It probably appeals to more than one group of people.
Your target audience probably comes in many shapes, sizes and interests, a fact you’ll discover as you research them online and in person.
Yes, you’ll always have your “ideal customers” which you will determine when you create your customer avatars.
However, there will be variants to this messaging you’ll want to include from time to time.
For example, perhaps you run a coffee shop catering specifically to people who like a certain type of coffee grown in Africa. (I don’t drink coffee, so I’m going to stop before I make serious mistakes in describing coffee and coffee lovers.)
However, you also stock a couple of high-quality types of chai tea that you want your customers to know about. (This is my personal demographic.)
You want to make sure your customers, who appreciate your exclusive tastes and top-notch selections, know that you have other, equally exclusive and quality products for sale. If they don’t buy for themselves, perhaps they can give them as gifts.
This is what I mean by being inclusive in your messaging. You narrow down the ideal customer want to target. You look at people who are similar to or have the same problems or desires as that ideal customer (or customers) Then you make sure your message appeals to everyone within that group.
Some of this can be done throughout your marketing, so you’re hitting everyone within your audience.
Some can be done with segmentation and automation. (Check out the blog post I wrote last week about automation. It’s a business owner’s best friend.)
Once you’ve narrowed down your target audience and filled in the gaps, you’ll have a much better idea of the types of people your product or service genuinely appeals to.
Now, because you know who you’re talking to and how your product or service solves their problems, your marketing will be more effective, you’ll get more sales and you’ll develop a loyal customer base.
To get started, I recommend going through my Customer Persona Sheet, which you can find on the customer demographics blog post.
If you have that information already, click on the button below to get the Target Audience Questionnaire, a list of questions to ask your target audience online or in-person and advice on how to ask them.