Your perfect audience is out there. Here are easy ways to find them.
Finding Your "People" - Who is your perfect audience?
As you create your marketing plan, you have to consider several things:
- Who is your audience?
- What problem do they have?
- What have they tried before?
- Does your product or service match not only what they want to buy but their ability to buy.
Let's look at each of these.
You must know precisely who you market to to connect through your marketing messaging. Readers relate to material that is specific, actionable, solves their problems, and satisfies all their questions.
Don Draper, the fictional ad-savant from Mad Men, understood that it was all about connections—and the very best way to connect is through your reader's thoughts, wishes, and dreams by understanding your audience.
Pro tip: Grab a notebook or your favorite note app and write down your answers. Science shows we learn and retain more if we do this.
To really understand your audience, you must be able to answer all these questions. Some marketers even like to look for photos online of their ideal customers to help them write about them.
What are the customer demographics?
Is the ideal customer older, younger, male, female, or non-binary?
Are they comfortable with tech?
Do they have specific personal or physical needs?
Do they live in a particular place like a ranch, a city, or a region of the country?
It all can sound silly, but it is really important to dig down and understand your perfect audience.
What drives your customers? What makes them tick - or ticks them off?
There are many psychological reasons behind your marketing message. Do your customers boldly go forward, or do they follow the leader? Are they loyal or willing to shop around?
What industry or business type does your audience work at?
Are they actively looking to solve a particular work problem or reading for general knowledge? What size company does the reader work for? What is their job title?
Is your ideal customer an influencer or decision-maker?
If the ideal customer is an influencer, do you also get to connect with a secondary reader? Can you make the content appropriate for both, or should they be separate pieces?
How familiar is your audience with the product or service you are selling?
Are you a household name (or at least well-known) by your audience? Are you just like (or completely unlike) something else that your audience is already familiar with?
As you research your customers, frequently ask yourself: Why is this fact, service, product, feature, expert opinion, or benefit important to our ideal reader?
Really dig down and keep asking questions. You will probably end up with 3-5 specific customer avatars rather than one that is general.
Next step, brainstorm about how your product intersects with your ideal reader.
Example: You provide office management services and products and have 1200 co-working spaces nationwide.
- Who is your ideal customer? A CEO, CTO, office manager, facilities manager, Human Resources, or someone else?
- Does your service solve different problems for these other users?
- Is your messaging the same?
- Does your service meet one reader's needs better than any other?
- Who is the typical buyer for your service?
- Are you trying to attract a different buyer?
Pro tip: If you have multiple ideal audiences, create separate profiles for each.
Regardless of your business type, go through the list and answer questions.
You need to think like your ideal customer and provide the solution to the problem.
Log into Facebook's ad manager if you struggle to slice and dice your audience. The categories (age, geography, marital status, household income, etc.) will give you many ideas about defining your ideal customer. Here is a tutorial.
What drives your customers? What makes them tick - or ticks them off?
There are many psychological reasons behind your marketing message. Do your customers boldly go forward, or do they follow the leader? Are they loyal or willing to shop around?
What industry or business type does your audience work at?
Are they actively looking to solve a particular work problem or reading for general knowledge? What size company does the reader work for? What is their job title?
Is your ideal customer an influencer or decision-maker?
If the ideal customer is an influencer, do you also get to connect with a secondary reader? Can you make the content appropriate for both, or should they be separate pieces?
How familiar is your audience with the product or service you are selling?
Are you a household name (or at least well-known) by your audience? Are you just like (or completely unlike) something else that your audience is already familiar with?
As you research your customers, frequently ask yourself: Why is this fact, service, product, feature, expert opinion, or benefit important to our ideal reader?
Really dig down and keep asking questions. You will probably end up with 3-5 specific customer avatars rather than one that is general.
Now, it's time to take action and find your perfect audience.
Write 2-3 paragraphs about your customer avatar (a description of your ideal customer). Be very specific. Find photos that look like your reader and their workplace.
Be detailed.
Write like you know the person. You want that person in mind as you create your marketing message.
Example: You sell a done-for-you service that helps people complete their technology for a new business.
Here is one avatar:
Chris is a 37-year-old single parent of two teens living in San Diego. She works as a nurse in a local hospital and loves traveling and teaching.
After paying her bills and student loans and putting money aside for her kid's college fund, Chris has about $5000 a year of disposable income.
She takes 1-2 vacations a year. One with the kids, and some years, one with her friends. She dreams of starting a side gig teaching nurses how to become traveling nurses.
She had fun being a traveling nurse when she graduated, but she remembers it was not always easy to settle in.
Starting a business seems too complicated, and she is overwhelmed and frustrated.
She wants to teach people where to find an ideal job, great housing options, and how to find a community.
When her kids are grown, she wants to return to the travel nurse lifestyle and run her business from wherever she is.
The value of this exercise is to get you to think more broadly about how your audience intersects with your products and services.
Most businesses will have more than one customer avatar. Some will overlap, and many will not. It's worth it to dig down and write a few avatars.
We know who are audience is (Chris)
We know what problem she has (she would like to start a side gig to make it easy to become a traveling nurse but she is stuck trying to start a business.)
We don't know what Chris has tried - (we will need to research this)