The end goal of every business is to generate sales so you can keep doing what you love. One of the key things to understand is who your customers are and the most important part of achieving this goal is knowing exactly who you’re selling to and why. If you’re just starting out, this might seem like a daunting task, but it’s essential to help you grow. Here’s why you need to know your customer and our top tips on how you can do just that!
Why?
To make effective marketing campaigns, you need to know who your target audience is. As people, everything about us effects how we will respond to certain campaigns and messages. Your target customer will gather their opinion from everything you do, including the language and messages you use as well as the visual elements and places that you use to promote your product. A young person, for instance, will be far more receptive to a campaign that involves Snapchat than someone close to retirement.
What?
When it comes to getting to know your audience, there are some important things you need to find out. Here are our top 4:
Age
We’re sure we don’t need to tell you that the products and services bought by an 18-year-old will be vastly different to those bought by an 80-year-old. Age is fundamental in determining if your services or products are relevant to a particular age group.
Gender
While the concept of gender is changing in many ways, it’s still largely the same in the world of business. When it comes to marketing, there are still two main demographics; male and female. The way they respond to campaigns will differ whether they include language or visual elements.
Profession
What does your target market do day-to-day? Their job will likely affect how much money they have, which, in turn, will affect the price points of your products and services.
Hobbies and interests
This is key, but what your customer does in their spare time is equally as important as what they do for a living. There’s no point marketing a new tennis racket to people who don’t play tennis, or a new sound system to people who don’t list music as one of their passions.
How?
How can you know your customers?
In a word: research.
It might seem obvious, but doing research is the only way you’re going to get to know your audience. You can create surveys and questionnaires and collate the data to find out the profile of your typical customer.
To go one step further, you can create buyer personas from the collected data. A buyer persona can tell you how a customer might be thinking and feeling as they consider your product. A buyer persona goes much further than a 2D profile of your customer base – it includes demographics, behaviours, buying patterns, motivations, and even their goals. They can be built from data and the more detailed you can make your buyer persona the better!
