When we ask businesses who their potential customers are, and they reply that everyone is, we get a little nervous. One of the keys to effective marketing is having a clearly defined target audience. When you understand your audience well, you can offer them what they want. Conversions happen when relevant offers meet target audience.
To appeal to your target audience, you should know who they are, what they want, what they need, what they want to avoid or alleviate (the friction points in their lives), and which of their needs are not being met.
If you’re working in a brick-and-mortar store and can see your customers in action and ask them questions, you can get a feel for what makes them tick. If you own an online business, however, you’ll need to get creative to learn more about your target audience.
To identify your audience, start with your current customer base (even if it’s small), and use the following tactics.
· Conduct a Survey. Consider mailing or emailing your customers a survey. Don’t worry about polling all past patrons. Aim to contact around 100 customers who have purchased products in the recent past. Keep your questions short, simple, and open-form (not multiple choice). Sample questions include:
o Who are you?
o What blogs do you read?
o What factors matter most for making a purchase (i.e., price, convenience, quality, etc.)?
o What do you use our products for?
o Why did you choose our product over competitors?
o Did you have any reservations about buying our products? If so, what were they?
Customers often say things better than the savviest marketing teams can. You may be able to harvest ideas and phrases from your customer surveys for use in your website content.
· Talk to your customers. Pick up the phone and call a loyal customer to ask them questions about their lifestyle and buying preferences. You can even observe them in action. If your customers frequent certain community events or belong to certain organizations, consider going. Ask questions. You can offer free products or product demonstrations. You will learn a lot by seeing people in their element. If your customers congregate in certain places online, visit those sites, follow the blogs that they read, etc.
· Collect data. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking the online behaviors of customers. If you have a blog, find out how your various articles perform. Identify your best-converting traffic sources as well as your top-performing content, keywords, and pages.
Of course, none of this information will matter if you aren’t using your findings to improve your marketing efforts. Make sure to adjust your content and your marketing strategy to appeal to your audience.
For more help in connecting with your target audience, visit our annual Amazon sellers event. You can learn tricks of the trade from giants in the online selling industry, network with other sellers, and connect with leading service providers.
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