Recently updated on November 10th, 2017 at 11:51 pm
When you imagine who your target customer is, do you imagine someone very specific? Or do you feel that anyone with a beating heart is a potential customer? For your marketing to be effective, it’s best to view your customer as someone specific because you need to know what they want, what they needs, and what solutions you offer to their problems.
1.Know Customer Interests so You Know Where to Find Them
Unless you know who you’re looking for, you won’t know where to find them. For example, if you don’t know what their interests are, how would you know what types of publications they might read and therefore, where to place ads? Knowing who your customer is, tells you where to put your advertising money.
2. Are You Talking to Me?
In order to use the right content to best highlight your products and services, you need to understand who you’re talking to. Otherwise, it’s almost guesswork when it comes to the words and images you choose because you don’t know what benefit to emphasize. Here’s a good example of how important it is to know which benefits to emphasize from Business Know-How – Target Marketing:
Senior citizens, teenagers and parents buy cell phones, but they buy the, for different reasons. Teenagers buy them so they can chat with their friends all the time. Parents buy them for their teens in order to keep track of them (the teens, not the cell phones). My 90-year-old grandfather bought one for emergency use only. Each one of those reasons is a different benefit. The ad that appeals to parents knowing where their teenagers are is certainly NOT going to work for teenagers, and neither of those ads will be terribly persuasive to my grandfather.
3. Pay Attention to Online Behavior
Even if you don’t have the ability to do major research on customer demographics, you can still gather a lot of very useful information.
Basic online information – how often do they visit your site and what pages do they view? Paying attention to something as simple as which pages on your website are used most often can give you good clues to what your customers are searching for. And once you know this, you can build those areas out more.
How do customers get to your site? Knowing which avenue customers take to get to your website will help you determine which of your marketing techniques are working and which are not. Clearly, put your spend toward what is working, rather than throwing it every which way.
Above all else, remember that customers are not buying products or services; they are buying good feelings and solutions to their problems. So find out what they care about by knowing who they are or through observing their actions online and you’ll be able to target your marketing content to address their needs.
