It’s imperative that you identify the target audience for your product or service in order that your message reaches those most qualified. Naturally, you need to reach them with the right message and/or offer in order to drive demand, but that’s another subject altogether.
Assuming you either have customer data to analyze, or have performed the type of market research necessary to glean the right conclusions, you already know your target audience. But to ensure you drive in qualified leads from within that broad target audience, you first need to draw accurate customer profiles (aka personas) of the lead type you require.
To do that, you now need to identify all the demographic information and significant data points you have at your disposal, including:
- Age
- Gender
- Geo (location)
- Annual purchase ($ amount)
- Purchase type/s (actual products/services they have purchased)
- Customer profitability (based on their purchase type/s)
- Where they originated (Ad, referral source)
- Channel where they made their purchase/s
- Any psychographic info you may have
…there’s likely more data points, and I encourage you to get as deep as you can possibly get.
Now, if you’re struggling with this exercise, and you have a relatively mature business with customer data on hand, simply look harder at your present customer base, applying these data points to the customer information you already have on hand. If you do this properly, you should be able to identify your primary customer (let’s call them ‘A’ customers). In addition, using the data points to identify your primary (‘A’) customer, you will subsequently be able to set the appropriate parameters and identify your ‘B’, ‘C’ and possibly ‘D’ customers as well.
After you have completed this exercise, an ‘A’ customer might look like this:
- Age: Between 25 – 45
- Gender: 75% male, 25% female
- Geo (location): Major urban markets
- Annual purchase ($ amount): $575-$1,250
- Purchase type/s (actual products/services they have purchased): 75% Product A, 20% Product B, 5% Product C
- Customer profitability (based on their purchase type/s): 40% GP
- Where they originated (Ad, referral source): 90% Instagram advertising, 10% customer referrals
- Channel where they made their purchase/s: 80% Direct, 20% Brick and mortar
- Any psychographic info you may have: (Typically foreign nationals are buying the product due to its ethnic origins)
Once you have this information, I have always found it helpful to create a ‘visual’ of the primary target audience. I literally mean a picture or standee that ‘looks’ like your audience and paints this “persona” for you to see…nothing beats a visual to help you clarify who is your primary buyer!
Now it’s time to determine how you are going to reach out to drive in leads from your primary target group, but it’s made so much easier by your having conducted this key exercise. So let’s get to it!
