How Can I Understand My Target Audience Better?

No matter the type of business you want to build, it’s critical that you understand your customers. Your products and services are important and useful, but there’s no way you can serve everyone, nor should you be trying to.

Define the Service Your Product Provides

Be very specific in promoting your primary service. If your business offers accounting support to small businesses and can help defend against an IRS audit, you’ve got a strong pain point to use in your marketing materials. According to iPage, exploiting these pain points is the key to successful marketing. We live in a world that promotes a DIY, individualistic mentality. However, there are some projects that should not be done by anyone other than a professional. There are projects that will cost a great deal more in time and money when a professional has to fix them. Looking at your current billing data and a few detailed conversations with the professionals you work with can help you build a comparison to encourage your target audience to hire you first.

Collect and Analyze Data

Study your happiest customers. What problem got solved when they hired your organization? Who made the decision to contact your business in the first place and why? If you’re marketing a new restaurant, discuss the ideal client with the business owner so you can review the demographics of the region and build a targeted marketing campaign to get the business name in front of the right people. As MX puts it, data analytics is a good way to gain insight and understanding regarding your clientele.

Stay Focused

Business owners are always looking for ways to expand their business and grow into new revenue streams. However, it’s critical that marketing builds on the best of what the business does before promoting expansions into new markets. Let’s review a restaurant marketing plan as an example. If lunch is the primary meal offered by the business but they want to expand to dinner and possibly offer alcohol, study the most popular menu options that sell most often at lunch and build meal combination deals to promote during the dinner hour. Or, promote appetizers for happy hour based on the most popular lunch offerings. 

Shooting off in a new direction can be exciting, but it’s seldom a way to successfully expand any business. The study of demographics starts with the current customer base. If a business has a successful history of addressing pain points, its happy customers will be some of its best marketers.

Understanding your target audience is the difference between failure and wild success with Facebook advertising. Let us make it easier.