Good morning! Do you have one minute to read and one hour to do? If so, you can improve your small business’ marketing in a big way. Each week, we will provide new ideas. Grab your morning beverage and let’s get started:
This Week: Target Audience – Less is More
One of the hardest concepts to understand is target audience. When you’re a small business trying to grow, it doesn’t “intuitively” make sense to cut anyone out of your target audience. After all, it’s hard enough to find customers as it is, without eliminating anyone.
Turns out that’s wrong. If you are all things to all people, then you’re nothing special to anyone.
A related example makes this concept clear to me: I have two friends leaving college. One wants to go into business and the other wants to be a residential architect. They have both asked me for referrals. Almost everyone I ask knows an architect to refer and are happy to give me a name. Alternatively, almost no one I ask can give me a business referral. Why? Because the request is too general. The people I question may know 100 people in business. Without being more specific, (commercial real estate, financial advising, marketing automation) I will have a hard time getting any answers for my friend.
How can you narrow down your target-audience universe?
STEP ONE
Think about the ideal customer for your business.
Start with discerning which customers have been the most satisfied with your services and have led you to make the most profit.
Think about how to define this specific customer.
Age, location, income, behaviors, attitudes, etc.
These will be the characteristics you will use when you advertise on social media or Google Adwords.
STEP THREE
Think about what you uniquely know about them.
It may be: they always engage with posts about sports, or they primarily live in certain zip codes, or they love technology.
These characteristics will be what you use when you write copy for them or will help you choose the right photos.
These details will be how they know you truly understand them and start to build trust.,
STEP FOUR
Think about the language they use.
For example, is it trendy and full of slang or is it highly intellectual and formal? Do they pepper their remarks with industry jargon or talk to you on your level? It’s important that your communications sound like they do.
Again we’re building trust.
Once you have this trust, this ideal customer is yours. However, you couldn’t have reached this point if you continued to think of your target audience as anyone and everyone.
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