How To Identify And Target Your Ideal Customer
The effectiveness of your digital marketing can be improved greatly if you tailor your campaigns to suit your ideal customer. An “ideal customer” could be defined as someone who is most likely to benefit from using your products or services. For example, the ideal customer of a stair lift company could be elderly people who have mobility issues.
Before you can improve your marketing campaigns you must first identify your ideal customer. This article provides information on how to find your ideal customer, and how to create targeted digital marketing campaigns to suit.
The beauty of online digital marketing is you don’t need to pay to advertise to the masses. Social media platforms encourage refined demographic targeting so your content and advertisements reach the right people. This also means you can measure and refine campaigns to ensure each click counts. User experience is improved when viewers receive the right content and advertisements for them – so it is in the social media platforms’ interest to provide the powerful tools to facilitate this.
Step 1 – Identify your ideal customer
So how exactly do you determine who your ideal customer is? In some instances, this might be obvious – certain products and services are always geared towards a specific demographic.
Nail polish remover, for example, is predominantly sold to women and those that have previously bought nail polish! Other products may not have such a clear target audience, such as cars and finance, for example. Regardless, you should always take steps to identify your ideal customer before spending a penny on advertising.
The following pointers below are some ways you can achieve this to reduce your ad spend and increase penetration. Identifying your customer and researching exactly what it is they are searching for is one of the most valuable things you can do for your business.
Free Digital Marketing Tools To Identify Audiences
Facebook Pixel – This is undoubtedly one of THE MOST POWERFUL marketing tools for a digital marketer today. Facebook’s pixel will track social media users, website visitors and provide data that enables the most refined targeting imaginable. If you’re unsure on how to add Facebook Pixel to your website code we can assist.
Ubersuggest – Discover search volume for specific keywords, competitor websites and understand exactly what people are searching for when trying to find your products or services.
Google Analytics – It is an absolute must to plug your website into Google analytics. There’s a few simple ways to add your coding to the website to ensure it tracks visitors correctly. The audience tab and acquisition tab will enable you to build up a better picture of your customer. If in doubt, ask us 🙂
Google Search Console – Helps further understand Google search traffic and performance. Another absolutely must-have free tool.
Google Keyword Planner – In conjunction with tools such as Ubersuggest – Google’s keyword planner will provide the data you need to identify your customer and what they are actually searching for. Leave the guesswork behind.
Facebook Insights – What better way to understand your customer than to analyse your social media audience. It will help understand audience demographics – and the content that is having the most impact on the audience.
Buffer – at the end of a trial you can downgrade to Buffer’s basic free plan. It offers some useful features such as content discovery and social media scheduling
Analyse the competition
To give you a broader insight into your target market carry out extensive research on your competitors, especially the successful ones.
What does their website look like? Do they use Google Ads? Do they advertise on social media? Refine this to understanding the fonts they use, the size and the style. Images, their SEO ranking positions for various keywords and their overall presence online. Who are they targeting?
This will give you a good starting point, especially if there is an established competitor in the market as the chances are if they’re successful, they will have naturally refined their selling message over the years – saving you lots of time and money if you use it to your advantage.
Create customer surveys
Surveys are a fantastic and direct way to identify your ideal customer and gain tangible feedback about your products and/or services. Consider creating simple online polls on Twitter or accompanying your social media posts with questions.
Your audience will appreciate you getting to know them and you will receive valuable data back. Users that have big followings on Twitter can get an almost instant gauge on their audience views on specific products or topical subjects.
Use Social Media
Social Media is a powerful analytical tool and most platforms are free to use unless you are using paid advertising. If you have a large social media following, you can analyse your existing followers and look for trends to help identify your ideal customer.
Look at your followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and see if you can find commonalities – you may be surprised as to what you can find! You can also advertise to ‘lookalike’ audiences to the people that Like or follow your page, a useful way to let the algorithms refine your target market for you automatically.
Analyse Google analytics and Google Ads
Both Google Analytics and Google Ads can provide statistics relating to the demographics of your customers. Google analytics, for example, can identify various pointers about the users who visit your website such as their location. Take time to look through the different statistics provided and use them to further identify your ideal customer.
Once you have used the above methods, you must collate your data. If you have gathered enough information, you should easily be able to identify your ideal customer. The key is to gather a large enough range of data to provide you with accurate and reliable results.
Step 2 – Targeting your ideal customer with digital marketing
By now you should have successfully identified your ideal customer. The next step is to modify your marketing campaigns to target the defined customer.
A targeted marketing campaign should yield fantastic results and return on investment, as you should be appealing directly to someone who has a genuine interest in your product.
Create images and text to suit
To appeal to your ideal customer, you must produce the language and imagery used in your digital marketing media to suit them.
Look at the content you have written and the images you have used and ask yourself – does this appeal to my target customer? If not, change it! Use language that is appropriate, and try to select images and media that your ideal customer can relate to.
Create consistency across all platforms
To build your brand and a consistent message – it’s important to use the correct tone across all platforms. Don’t post cute cat memes on LinkedIn, for example.
Tailor the content to suit the platform and your audience by all means – but remain consistent. Remember, a potential customer could come into contact with your brand in all manner of ways online – so it’s important to keep standards high and consistent.
Finally, once you have implemented your targeted marketing strategies, be sure to analyse the results and see exactly what impact they had. Did they improve exposure? Did they attract your ideal customer? Did they generate the results you expected?
If not, make adjustments and try a new approach – digital marketing is a continuous process that evolves with your business and new data / tools available!
If you find all of this overwhelming and would like some assistance with identifying your target customer and how to target them – reach out to Kahootz Media today.
