HOW CAN I IDENTIFY AND TARGET MY IDEAL CUSTOMER OR AUDIENCE?

Identifying and targeting your ideal customer or audience is a crucial step in developing successful branding and digital marketing strategies.

When you are marketing for business, you should know who your ideal customer or audience is. ELSE, you will have a hard time doing marketing for business.

A customer and audience is the major fulcrum of a multi-channel marketing plan and an important part of every digital marketing campaign. Knowing your customer or audience will allow you to craft an effective multi-channel marketing plan and focus your marketing for business efforts. This will also help you to minimize your marketing campaign from failing.

HOW TO IDENTIFY AND TARGET?

Now that you know what your ideal customer or audience should be, your next move must be to identify and target it.

Here are five simple steps which I believe will be helpful to you to achieve them,

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DETERMINE YOUR GOALS

You know who your ideal customer or audience should be; people who are currently buying from you, it is time to determine what your goals are, that is, determining what specifically you want to achieve will help you to alter your branding and ?digital marketing strategies and devise a new multi-channel marketing plan when it comes to your customers.

Look back at your past interactions with customers or audience. It can reveal a lot. You will be able to spot out both success and mistakes with previous or existing customers. Sort out the past interactions and pull out what information is required; information that will all be incredibly valuable to help determine your goals and narrow down your focus.

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CONDUCT MARKET RESEARCH

Your next move to identify and target customers or audience must be to conduct market research.

This will also help you to identify what’s already out there in your industry and how many competitors you have. ?You will also get to know what gaps there are in the market. All of these will be a wonderful opportunity to find a unique selling proposition (USP) for your products/services and shape your position in the market.

Also, aside from knowing your customer or audience, you will also get to learn what are their preferences and what kind of products/services do they prefer. All of these will help you to devise a proper multi-channel marketing plan to mitigate threats and obstacles that can negatively impact your business; and appropriate digital marketing strategies; and leverage the right social media marketing and digital marketing services including SEO services and paid marketing services.

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LEVERAGE THE POWER OF DATA ANALYTICS

After conducting market research, you will have plenty of data at your fingertips. But you will also need to analyze that data to gain a clear picture of your target audience or customer, their preferences and habits, target demographic information, and psychographic data.

It will be difficult for you to understand trends in customer or audience behavior and even the market with traditional methods. Instead, identifying your customer or audience through Data Analytics will help you to better understand your target market.

By analyzing customer or audience behavior through social media marketing or surveys will help your business to acquire critical insights into who your customers or audience are; what they want; and how best to reach them with your offerings.

There are so many digital analytics tools today. With the assistance of email finder tools, you can use data analytics to identify valuable leads and create segmented campaigns that target specific audiences. This in turn will help to maximize your efforts by tailoring your message based on the individual needs of each customer or audience group.

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SEGMENT YOUR AUDIENCE

After conducting market research and leveraging the power of Data Analytics, next up you need to segment them into different specific categories of customers. Like for instance, if they purchased from your earlier, you can use that information to segment them based on their purchase history. Similarly, if they have downloaded a resource from your website, you could segment them based on the downloaded resource.

The other ways include segmenting them into a category based on your target audience demographics and psychographics, which will be useful if your offerings have a wide appeal.

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BUILD A CUSTOMER PROFILE

By now, you have understood your audience; done your market research; and put in the legwork. With this, you need to build a customer or audience profile.

This process covers everything from basic demographics to what influences your audience’s buying decisions. Besides, you will also get to know

• Who are your current customers’ who have already purchased from you?
• How did your current customers’ discover your business?
• What has the feedback from your existing customers’ been like?

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To get the customers’ feedback, you need to engage in customer interviews. Ask them the right questions and you will get to know the answers to your queries; and what inspired them to choose your brand over competitors.

Having done them during my work of marketing for business and branding for start-up collaboration and other companies, feedback from the horse’s mouth will help you to build a proper customer/audience profile.