Do you truly understand your target audience?

One of the key points of any brand is knowing who your audience is. However, over the last few years with the growing rise of Social Media and marketing influencers and along with the changing of times and how we consume our information in the digital age, knowing who your audience is can be challenging and often at times overlooked.

Many of us have a very broad sense of who our customers are. Who are in need of our services or who would be interested in buying our products? The unfortunate reality, however, is that having a general or broad scope of who our customers are just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. Focusing on large generalizations based on gender, social trends or what’s popular is a fast and surefire way to gain you very little long-term success, especially if you are a young business looking for an innovative way to enter the market.

So What is the more efficient way of getting to know your customer base?

There is a better more tactile way of understanding your users and that’s by uncovering their habits. Every single person has a set of habits that they routinely follow that plays a role in how they spend their money, what they consume and how they get their information. What’s even more important about uncovering your ideal customer’s habit formations is knowing their pain points.

Good products and good businesses work to help solve a problem, knowing what your customer pain points are and having the solution to help ease those points are key to winning over both new and existing clientele.

Here is an example:

During our latest case study with to:Resonate we worked together as a team to clearly define an exact persona that the company will be launching their new test product to. After going through each customer profile and pinpointing their habits, pain points and how we could help solve them, our team discovered that creating a call to action marketing funnel on the to:Resonate website would help extract enough information for the company to then test their new product in the marketplace while targeting their core customer base.

Getting to know each individual group based upon their attributes will not only leave you with more comprehensive data to examine but it will also allow you a deeper insight and understanding in regards to who your customers are and why they would choose you. Valuable insights that you can then test to help launch your new product and/or service.

So how can you put this into practice?

You can try this method out for your existing product/business right now. Simply write down two types of customers you would like to target based on their habit formations. Where do they spend most of their time? How do they get their information? What are some of their pain points and how can you help solve them?

Try to identify each person as an individual with a specific set of characteristics or habits rather than falling into the trap of generalizations. It can be a bit tough at first, but the end result will be far more rewarding in the long run.

As the saying goes, you only truly need 1,000 real fans to champion your brand. Knowing this core group of customers like the back of your hand and taking the time to really connect with them and bring value to their lives is key.

I hope these insights and simple strategies help you learn to expand your market and dive deeper into knowing who your market is.  If you would like to learn more, or to see case study examples of our work, get in touch with us at: hello@monographco.com