I have heard too many individuals say “but everyone could be my customer” and while that may be true, you could waste A LOT of money marketing to everyone. Honing in on your ideal customer and thus your target audience is imperative to developing a successful marketing strategy.
Here are a few factors to consider when identifying your target audience:
Demographic
This includes their age, gender, income level, education and marital status. Try and really pinpoint who your customer is by keeping these brackets smaller rather than larger.
Geographic
Simply assessing where your customer is located. For example, are you a corner store serving the surrounding suburb or are you an online store shipping nationally?
Psychographic
These are the internal attitudes or values of this person. How does your customer think? What would offend them and impress them? These could include their opinions on waste, gender roles in society or even their parenting opinions.
Behavioural
What does your customers’ average day look like, do they work full time or are they a stay at home mum? Do they spend their day scrolling through social media or are they in the car listening to the radio?
These are the basic areas you want to be looking at in order to craft your ideal customer. And yes, in some cases you may have more than one ideal target audience. Just ensure that you have clearly defined what makes these two customers’ different and how you are going to adapt your marketing strategy to effectively reach both. The organic targeting feature on Facebook can be great for this!
Have a look at your Google Analytics, Facebook and Instagram to check who is engaging with you online. This will either let you know to tweak your target audience or let you know that your target audience is not following you or maybe just not engaging with your content.
I will never forget the first piece of marketing advice I ever got was that “you are not your target market”. Which essentially means don’t design your website, post a picture or write something that you like, always have your customer’s preferences at the forefront. Armed with a clear depiction of your target audience, you will be able to create content and marketing to have maximum appeal to them. Think more followers, more engagement and more business!
