Every year in February many people celebrate Valentine?s Day with the ones they love. This year, Beacon Marketing is spending the month of love focusing on how we, as marketers, can show our current and potential customers some love. All of Beacon?s blogs, YouTube videos, and Beacons of The Weeks will be centered around how we can go beyond being a salesperson and be the resource our target audience wants and needs. Join the conversation on our Facebook group.
In a previous blog we spoke about the need to show your audience love. Essentially showing love to your audience means positioning yourself and your business as a resource as opposed to a salesperson. To paraphrase; ?Your current and potential customers are buying, but no one wants to be sold.? Before you can become that resource your current and potential customers are looking for; you need to first find out more about your target audience. This means getting to know more about who they are and what are their pain points.
More importantly, you must illustrate that you and your organization not only recognizes what their pain points are but that you understand the impact those struggles have on the lives of your current and potential customers. Knowing more about your target audience is essential to any marketing campaign.
6 Ways to Know More About Your Audience
There are many ways you can get to know more about your current and potential customers. Here are some of our favorites.
- Look at who your competitors are targeting – Your competitors are competitors because you are targeting the same audience. You can learn a lot by looking at how they are engaging their audience and how their audience is engaging them. Look at the types of content being shared, the topics, and gauge the reaction. You should be able to get an idea of what is important to your audience.
- Evaluate social media engagements and comments – While you are reviewing the engagement of your competitors, analyze the engagement you are getting from your social media activity. What types of content and topics seem to resonate with your audience? Whatever gets a reaction should be able to drill down to what really matters to the people engaging with your content.
- Develop a customer persona – Create your ideal customer based on your past experience. Detail their name, gender, job, marriage and family status. Imagine the issues relating to your industry that they struggle with regularly. Then imagine what the solution would look like. A roadmap should appear in your mind as to how to engage this person.
- Speak to your staff – There are probably no group of people who know your audience better than your staff. Chances are some might even know the needs of your current customers better than they do! If you want more info on your target audience, especially if you want to develop a customer persona, then your staff should be able to tell you a lot.
- Speak to your current customers – While we are on the topic of current customers, take some time to speak to them directly. Select a few of your best customers to speak with or send a survey to all your current customers. This tactic allows you to hear directly from paying customers as to what they are struggling with and possibly what they wish you would do about it.
- Work with strategic partners – As with your competitors, your strategic partners most likely are targeting the same types of customers. Consult with them to ask if they are seeing any trends or if they have any insight that you do not have. Together you can discover more about your target audiences.
However you decide to learn more about your current and potential customers, the end goal is to develop a deeper connection with your target audience so they can begin to see you and your organization as a resource. Knowing who they are, what they struggle with, and the impact of those struggles gives you a leg up when you attempt to engage your target audience.
