A key advantage for businesses in the modern age is the ability to target your advertising directly to the audience most likely to be interested in your product. For small businesses especially, this ability to pay for ads to be shown to your target market, as opposed to a billboard shown to anyone who drives by, is cost effective and a way to get in the arena with the big budget businesses.
But to take advantage of this edge, you first have to understand how.
Creating Your Customer Avatar
Your target audience are the people who will want to buy your product. Marketers work to discover what common demographics your customers fall into and then use this information to target those people with ads.
Many marketers find it useful to create an avatar of your ideal customer. By creating a persona for one ideal customer, you can work out from there to find people like them. Where does your ideal customer work? How old are they? Where do they live? What kind of car do they drive? What are their goals? What problems in their life does your product solve?
As a base, you want to discover things like age, gender, marital status, education level, and occupation.
By knowing who your audience is, you can customize your advertising to speak more directly to them and create a powerful connection with your customer base.
If you are struggling to create a customer avatar, there are ways to collect more data to help you paint this picture.
Who Is Your Competition Selling To?
What marketing strategies are they using? Dig through their social media. See who is following them, who is engaged, and how they are handling writing their copy. Who are they targeting when they write their ads?
If they have a similar product, you may sell to the same target audience. Of course, this doesn’t have to be the case. Marketing is a creative experience. There is not a singular best way to sell any product. It depends on how you see your product and the angle you pursue with your marketing. This is why testing is so important in online advertising. Test your new ads, see how they do, and refine your strategy until you find the right target audience and copy for your brand and product.
Learn From Your Current Customers
If you are already in business, you have a current customer base you can analyze. Who are they?
If you don’t already have organized this kind of customer data, you can look at what your site analytics may be able to tell you and also survey our customers. This is an opportunity to learn about how they are and ask for customer feedback, which may provide you more insight than you could have guessed. For example, by asking for feedback from your customers, you may learn of pain points your products have solved for them you hadn’t thought of before. A find like that could be a gold mine, because if your customers are using your product in unexpected ways, other customers may too, and you can create new copy to take advantage. Learn about your customers, and you never know what might happen.