HOW TO DEFINE YOUR PERFECT TARGET MARKET

Don’t throw away all of your hard earned money by investing into marketing campaigns that don’t know exactly who they’re supposed to be targeting. We see this in the marketplace time and time again… You have an excellent product or service that you think everyone would want, you start an online campaign and now you wait. You’ve gotten thousands of views and clicks, but for some reason you’re not making conversions… Well we’re here to tell you one of the reasons why.

Do you know your ideal customer?

This is a fairly common question that every business owner thinks that they have the answer to, yet more often than not, they don’t. If you’ve been working in your specific industry for a lengthy amount of time then you might have a general idea of who will commit to conversions and who won’t, but in today’s competitive online market, you need to target your market with pin point accuracy. Before you even get started understanding your customer, it might be worthwhile to plan ahead with our 11 Essential Landing Page Checklist, and our Landing Page Intro Guide.

In online marketing it is vital to be very specific about who it is that you want to sell your products to and that your products or services meet your customers specific needs. If, for example, your online E-commerce store is selling Barware and Bar glasses, and you think that teenagers as a generality will be interested in your wares, and you run campaigns with this limited amount of knowledge and no proper research, then you might be surprised to find your online campaigns will not meet your expectations and will have very little (if any) reward. Who do you target? What are their pain points, interests and needs? Are there any questions that you really need to be addressing before you start any campaign? Assuming that teenagers will enjoy the product that you offer may be very true, but here is where you need to start becoming more specific and start honing in on who your specific target market is.

Yes, it is more effort but getting to know these customer key traits will enable you to host a successful digital marketing campaign and will hold you in good stead with all of your marketing efforts in the future.

Some benefits to knowing who your customer Avatar is:

• Keep razor sharp focus on exactly who your buying customer is.
• Understand where to place and structure your Call to Actions. For more on this, check our Call to Actions guide.
• Be enabled to create content with focus on your “Customer story”.
• Know exactly which marketing channels will be most effective.
• Increase leads by emotionally engaging the right client on your website and social media.
• Connect with your client and solve their problems.
• Enables you to speak to your client story and not about your company.
• Allows you to craft the perfect Landing Page Headline that you know your clients will love.

Create your unique Customer Avatars

Armed with the right tools, experience and some trial and error, getting an in-depth understanding of your ideal target market can be a lot easier than you might expect. The best way to get a real grip on who will buy your products and services is to research and then create a fictional Client or Avatar who you think is your ideal customer. This may sound silly to some of you, but hear us out! This is a tried and tested method to help businesses such as yourselves to really narrow your targeting down to those who actually matter, and to turn those failing campaigns into money making machines.

On our Customer Avatar sheet, you’ll be covering almost all aspects of this fictional characters life. What are their goals and values? What is their objection to a purchase? What are their aspirations, challenges and pain points? Where do they consume their information? These are only some of the questions that you’ll need to answer, and the more specific you can be, the more effective this exercise is. The reason that we want you to engage in this thought experiment is that you know solutions or problems your product or service needs to solve, and that you address this Avatars needs in a way that will make your solution most appealing. If you can’t sell your product or service to your ideal customer, then how are you ever going to sell it at all?

The logic behind this Worksheet really starts to shine once you apply it to actual target marketing metrics. Facebook provides us with a beautiful example of this. Facebook allows you to target a market based off the specific interests that they have registered with Facebook, the specific groups that they have joined and, as an added benefit, they’re split up into gender and age. After successfully completing our Avatar Worksheet, you should be able to target a very specific market that caters only to your ideal customers for that particular product or service, as well as the customers who are similar to your ideal Avatar.

A-B Testing

So, you’ve completed the worksheet and you’re thinking about starting a campaign with all of this relevant information…. Wait! Before you start heading off into the thick of things, we would suggest that you create a number of these Customer Avatars and run a number of campaigns to see which Avatar is producing the best results. This is the quickest way to find what’s working, and what isn’t. Not only do you get a deeper insight into what your target market is receptive to, it allows you to store a number of these avatars so that you can target them later with differing offers that you feel may resonate with a specific Avatar over another. The more you experiment, the deeper your understanding of your market becomes. The end goal is to have a multitude of well crafted and tested Avatars to rely on so that you can effectively target varying segments of your industry. Check out our blog on what makes Digital Marketing Campaigns Successful for more info.

The type of Avatar that you use is also extremely important when one considers on what platform to place their advertising campaign. If you’re going to be targeting a certain magazine then you can’t use the same avatar as the one that might have been successful on your Facebook campaign. You’ll need to look at the niche interests that the magazine holds, and build an ideal Avatar from that information. This applies to all fields of platforms placement from Facebook, Instagram, radio, television and pretty much anything you can think of.