The 6-Step Marketing Strategy: Defining Your Target Market
Today we are going to talk about how to identify your target market or ideal customer. One of the exercises that's useful to do is to try to create an avatar of your ideal customer. If you think about it, an avatar is creating a pretend person that represents the attributes of your ideal customer, basically the person that you want to deal with in your business.When we create this avatar, we really need to look at three different areas: demographics, geographics, and psychographics. This might sound difficult to do, but it's not. Simply think about your customers, who you would like to deal with, and who are your best customers.
Demographics
What are the demographics? What's their family makeup? What type of business do they have? Are they self-employed people? Are they working for others? What's their income level? Do they tend to be married people, single people, younger people, older people? Try to drill down on just exactly what the demographics are.
Geographics
Then we look at the geographics we are looking at where they are located. You might think your ideal customer can be located anywhere in the world, but you are not really marketing to anywhere in the world. Certainly people from anywhere could come and buy from you, but there is a focus, especially if you don't have an online presence. In that case, you have a geographic focus and maybe that's within your city, or a portion of your city, or within your region. Think about where that is because you want to focus your marketing efforts to the person who lives within that geographic area.
Psychographics
Psychographics is a little bit more interesting. It's how people think, how they make decisions, and what motivates them. This can be a little more challenging to figure out, but you need to start thinking about it. Let's say one of your best customers comes in to talk to you or talk to a sales team. Take advantage of that opportunity to start probing a little bit. Try to get some ideas as to how they make their decisions and what matters to them. Try to understand how they think and how they make decisions. Learn what's important to them, what their emotional trigger is, what gets them excited, and what they care about.
Put It All Together
Once we know a little bit about their demographics and what kind of a life that they have, perhaps we can do a better job of crafting marketing messages to fit and to be understandable to them. We can connect with them and clearly explain what the benefits are that we are bringing to them. This is all vitally important in order to understand your ideal customer and communicate with them better. Trying to create this avatar and determining your ideal customer is really important. It's the first step to a solid marketing strategy, because in all of your marketing you are going to be talking to that person. Whether you are writing hard copy, website copy or social media copy, you'll always keep in your mind the picture of that avatar. In fact, give it a name! It could be Brandon, right? So you've created this avatar called Brandon or Jaince and you are always talking to him or her with your marketing efforts. We serve people, not groups, not masses...just people. This is why we need to understand who that person is that represents our ideal customer. Thanks so much for visiting and stay tuned for the next post in this marketing strategy series. Check out my other videos for more ideas on how to break through and reach the next level in your business. And, if you like this video, please subscribe.