Marketing is all about understanding your target audience; where they are, what they are doing and what they are saying. In this blog, we go through the best ways to locate your potential customers.
So, you have the best product ever, a fantastic service that you know everyone will want – but how do you get yourself in front of the people that matter? Even well-established companies consider this and spend big to enable it. Even if you don’t have the money to initially perform these levels of marketing. We can show you the ways forward to start making inroads.
Who are your customers?
This is an obvious question, but you will need to know who your customers are. Before you begin your marketing efforts you will need to identify who you are looking to reach. There are many tools available to marketers to answer this question. However, the best way to start is to create a fictional customer and begin to add what makes them tick. You will need to add what they like, their demographics, what is going on in their life and if they have any pain points. This is a fundamental task as it will show you how to treat them as a person, and coupled with your tone of voice document you can continue onto the next step.
Where are your customers?
Once you know who your customer is, and what they are wanting in terms of your product. You will need to locate them. In the past, if you had a shop, the best position might be on a busy high street corner so everyone can see the business. Nowadays there are so many different marketing channels it can be overwhelming! From social media platforms to printed promotional items on to digital channels, nowadays it is difficult to know where to turn. Especially if your budget is lower.
Our advice is to find where the majority are and advertise through that channel. This is tricky, but one way would be to create a survey to ask these questions directly. Within each social media platform, you can research and plug in your audience interests. For example, Facebook has an audience builder that allows you to potentially see the number of people an advert would reach. This process can be followed for all of the major platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter etc. You will be able to see audience numbers right away and make a decision as to which platform you will use to run adverts on.
What are they saying?
There are some fantastic ways to discover what your customers are saying. There are social media listening tools that are often included in social media scheduling software such as SEMrush and Hootsuite check those out as they will give you fantastic insights into customer conversations. Knowing how to understand your target audience if your customers are more forum or blog based, there are also tools for identifying those too. Products like Awario and Keyhole are worth checking out. If you perform social listening you can gain important insights into how your customers are using your products, what they are saying about them and more importantly if they are recommending them.
Armed with this information you can suit your message to these customers and make your marketing efforts much more impactful.
Conclusions
Knowing how to understand your target audience is crucial to all marketing efforts. You will need to know everything you possibly can about your customers to formulate an effective marketing strategy. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of putting money behind a plan that isn’t as effective as it could be, and will end up burning through resources you can ill afford to spare. In addition, you may well have to start again and set your business back, which will cause even more harm in the long run.
At Relative Marketing, we are specialists in marketing strategy and one of the first items on the agenda when you choose us is to review your customers and audience lists. If you don’t have those, don’t panic! We can help, just contact us and see what we can do for you.
