As Event Organizers, solopreneurs, and business owners, nothing is more important than our customer base. If you've got a great product, service, or event coming up, you'll need to market it, and marketing is not a one-size-fits-all situation. Different content will appeal to different customer segments, so read on to discover how you can identify your target customer base and begin creating tailored content to ensure your product reaches the right audience.
1. Conduct market research
Knowledge of your product market is key to identifying your audience. Research is a great way to get a sense of demand for your product (or service). You can use online tools such as Wordtracker or Google Keyword Planner to find new keywords in your space. This will help you identify what type of products people are looking for within your field, what questions they're asking around your product, and test whether your product type ranks highly in searches or not. Understand this information well, and you can ensure that your product is getting traction via online search engines - the first stop for most people when they're looking for something.
2. Analyze the competition
Your competitors have similar products, so it follows that they have a similar target audience. While it's not as easy as going up to them and asking for their target customers, you can do the next best thing - research! Their social media accounts and website are all public, and you can identify who they're targeting by analyzing their advertising strategies and post engagements. For example, are they more active on platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok? If so, they might be targeting a younger crowd. If they place ads in the newspaper or radio, they're likely marketing themselves to an older crowd. Checking out the other brands in your space will also help you get a feel for how saturated your market is, who your top competitors are, and whether any marketing strategies are not fully being taken advantage of yet.
3. Use website analytics
You've set up a website and social media pages for your site. That's a fantastic first step - and analyzing your site visits and engagement will be a snap if you use the right tools. Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or third-party applications like Hotjar can help make this process easy. You'll be able to get website insights and not just quantitative data on people visiting your site but also qualitative - things like age, gender, and location. Hotjar even goes a step further and provides analytics and context on why people visiting your site behave the way they do, for example, why they didn't follow through on a purchase.
4. Conduct user surveys regularly
Go straight to the source - and ask your audience! If you're not keen on using a third-party software to collect feedback from users, you can set up surveys yourself using tools like Typeform or SurveyMonkey. You can post the link on your website or disseminate it via your newsletter - if you're looking for more responses in a short time window, consider launching a giveaway or offer to coincide with the CTA. Surveys are also an excellent way to collect feedback from your customers. By asking for feedback directly, you're showing that you value your customers' interests and opinions and are continually seeking new ways to improve your product.
5. Monitor all content and post engagements
Experimenting with your marketing materials - for example, a newsletter, blog entry, or social media post, can also help you zero in on your target audience. Set targets that you want to achieve on specific metrics like open rate percentage, the number of views, number of likes, and comments and monitor these over time. Determine when your audience is most engaged/ receptive to your content and work from there. Are most of your engagement coming from Instagram posts? If so, focus your efforts on advertising on the platform instead of others. What type of blog post gets the most hits? If you notice an uptake in readership if you blog on a particular topic or theme, this is probably a common interest among your audience - so try experimenting with more content on the subject. If you're starting from scratch, you can tweak your posts to cater to different customer personas (see Tip #6 below) and see which get more views - this way, you can find your biggest group and tailor more content for them.
6. Create customer profiles
Customer profiling can help you gain the edge when designing products and the content to market them. You can use data gathered from Tips #3, 4, and 5 to help with this. An example of how you can start is by listing down reasons people would buy your product or use your service and building a persona from there. You could also write up questions to answer when creating a new persona, for example:
- Industry
- Total years of job experience
- Interests outside of work
- Age range
- Income level
- Most significant use case of your product
For more tips on building customer profiles, check out How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business and The Beginner's Guide to Creating Marketing Personas.
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