Targeting your ideal customers is a crucial step in brand development, as it helps you create a clear and compelling value proposition, differentiate yourself from competitors, and communicate effectively with your audience. But how do you identify and reach your ideal customers? Here are some tips to help you with your brand positioning strategy.
The first step is to understand your market and the problems, needs, and desires of your potential customers. You can do this by conducting market research, analyzing industry trends, and studying your competitors. You can also use tools like surveys, interviews, and focus groups to gather feedback from your existing or potential customers. This will help you gain insights into their demographics, psychographics, motivations, challenges, and preferences.
Additionally I would suggest to use social listening, so you could understand their behavior in social networks vs. interviews. Must of the times they could act differently and could be very interesting to find out the difference
Be prepared to defend your position internally. Some marketers prioritize what they want to say over what users want to hear.
The next step is to segment your audience into smaller and more homogeneous groups based on their characteristics and behaviors. This will help you tailor your brand message and offer to each segment and increase your relevance and appeal. You can use criteria such as geographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and benefit segmentation to divide your market. For example, you can segment your audience by location, age, gender, income, lifestyle, values, attitudes, interests, needs, goals, pain points, purchase patterns, loyalty, and satisfaction.
Targeting your ideal customers is essential for any successful marketing campaign. And one of the best ways to target your ideal customers is to segment your audience. You now know that you can segment by geography, demographics or psychographics. Here's why you would use each: 1. Demographic segmentation: if you're a local business, you would segment by location. 2. Psychographic segmentation: if you're a digital marketing agency, you might segment your audience by their interests in SEO and content marketing. 3. Behavioral segmentation: if you're a digital marketing agency, you might segment your audience based on the pages they've visited on your website or the blog posts they've read. Go forth and segment!
The third step is to choose your target market or the specific segment or segments that you want to focus on and serve. You can do this by evaluating the attractiveness and profitability of each segment and selecting the ones that match your brand vision, mission, values, and goals. You should also consider your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) and how you can create a competitive advantage in your chosen market. You should aim for a target market that is large enough, accessible, responsive, and profitable.
Choosing your target market is the most important decisions you'll make as a business owner. So here are 5 things to consider: 1?? Your product or service. Once you have a good understanding of your product or service and the people who need it, you can start to narrow down your target market. 2?? Your business goals. Your business goals will help you to determine which target market is right for you. 3?? Your competition. Understanding your competition will help you to position yourself as the best choice. 4?? Your resources. Make sure that you have the necessary resources to reach your target market. 5?? Your passion. Choosing a target market that you're passionate about will make it easier to stay motivated.
The fourth step is to create your customer personas or fictional representations of your ideal customers based on the data and insights you gathered from the previous steps. Customer personas help you humanize your target market and understand them on a deeper level. You can create your customer personas by giving them names, photos, backgrounds, personalities, needs, goals, pain points, preferences, and behaviors. You can also include their sources of information, decision-making criteria, and buying journey.
Purchase committee members are about 15% tech guys. The rest are in roles focused on growth, revenue, and innovation, Procurement teams, and board members. All of them routinely torpedo proposals they don't understand.
The fifth step is to craft your brand positioning statement or a concise and compelling statement that summarizes how you want your target market to perceive your brand. Your brand positioning statement should include four elements: your target market, your category, your point of difference, and your reason to believe. For example, a brand positioning statement could be: "For busy professionals who need a convenient and healthy snack, Snackify is the online subscription service that delivers personalized boxes of nutritious and delicious snacks every month, unlike other snack services that offer generic and unhealthy options."
The final step is to communicate your brand value to your target market through various channels and touchpoints. You should use consistent and engaging brand elements such as your name, logo, slogan, colors, fonts, images, tone of voice, and stories to convey your brand identity and personality. You should also use relevant and effective marketing strategies and tactics such as your website, social media, email, content, advertising, events, and referrals to reach, attract, and retain your ideal customers.