Knowing that your customers are lurking somewhere on the internet, but not knowing exactly who they are or where they’re hiding is a maddening but all too common experience for anyone making their way in e-commerce.
Fortunately, there are some very basic steps you can take to radically improve your chances of figuring out who your audience is and where to find them.
Let’s break it down.
As a wise man once said: incredible marketing sent to the wrong person is ten times worse than terrible marketing sent to the right person. Understanding your target market is therefore the first port of call when it comes to effective digital marketing.
A good way to start breaking down your audience is by demographic and psychographic markers, or put simply: by type and by interest. We can use demographics to get us in the right ballpark and psychographics to help us to refine.
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Demographics |
Psychographics |
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Age/Gender |
Personality |
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Geographical location |
Interests |
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Education level |
Attitudes |
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Income level |
Values |
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Marital status |
Lifestyle |
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Employment status |
Tastes |
For instance, if you are trying to sell skateboarding equipment, you probably want to make sure you’re appearing more regularly in the search results of urban youth (demographic) with an interest in underground music and extreme sports (psychographic), than say, the search results of retired military personnel (demographic) who are passionate about the Royal Family (psychographic).
Having bracketed your audience in terms of their type and interests, you can then focus on their so-called ‘pain points’. I.e., what is their problem and how can you solve it? Asking the right kind of questions about the needs of your audience at this stage will help you to clarify your own value proposition and accurately imagine exactly who it is you are trying to reach.
Once you have nailed down your audience profile comes the next most important thing: figuring out where and how to find them.
By far the best place to seek your audience nowadays is on social networks. On platforms such as Facebook, people literally self-aggregate according to interest group. Theoretically, as a marketer, you simply need to tap into the relevant groups with the right content and you will attract customers.
However, Facebook is just one of many online platforms, and may not necessarily be the best for identifying the clients for your specific business. Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn all have distinct user profiles but are all potential goldmines when it comes to finding pre-qualified leads. Understanding the difference between social networks is therefore essential.
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Largest social media network in the world |
32 million users in the UK |
17 million UK users |
29 million UK users |
11 million UK users |
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55 million users in the UK alone |
Visually oriented and geared towards lifestyle |
More urban, educated user base compared to other social networks |
Professional, highly educated, mostly urban audience |
More female users who tend to be affluent and educated |
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Older user base (broadly speaking) |
Slanted towards younger female, users |
More male users |
B2B user base |
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It is also important to understand what each social platform offers its users and to allow that to guide your marketing decisions. For instance, Facebook has an incredibly broad base of users looking for all types of product, whereas LinkedIn is overwhelmingly geared towards professionals searching for B2B goods and services.
Therefore, if you are looking to find new clients for a restaurant, Facebook is probably a better place to focus your efforts than LinkedIn. On the other hand, if you are marketing legal services, LinkedIn maybe your best bet
Up until this point, everything has been about how you can find your audience. SEO is what allows your audience to find you. While SEO is a vast and potentially complicated subject, it essentially comes down to this: having an up-to-date, mobile-friendly website that contains original and relevant content.
Other strategies that can improve how well your website ranks for SEO are as follows:
Identifying your audience and developing strategies to reach them is not a straightforward process and will definitely require you to experiment and fine-tune your efforts. However, once you start to crack the code, it will only become easier to pull in new clients organically without having to actively search for them.
We are here to help you connect with the right customers, in all the right ways. For more expert insights you can act on, read Digital Discourse – the digital marketing guide for businesses just like yours.
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