Discovering the essence of your brand

If you are learning how to grow your brand and increase your profits, you might be hearing a lot about sales funnels, market research and lead generation. All these things are important, of course, but when you learn more about these strategies you might find yourself lacking some essential knowledge. The reason? You need to define your target audience.

Your target audience informs every decision you make when creating your brand and marketing your products. Therefore, getting to know as much as possible about the people you want to market towards is imperative if you want to be successful.

By researching your audience and finding out what kind of people want to be involved with your product, you can more easily craft content that is relevant to them and target ads in a way that reaches that demographic effectively.

Your target audience might differ depending on what kind of company you have and what kind of product/service you are offering. For example, an online meal service can market to practically anyone, from middle-aged parents to entrepreneurs. Meanwhile a website selling protein bars will have a more specific audience, that being young, active people looking for extra nutrition during their workout.

 

How do you find your target audience?

 

To start finding your target audience you have to start collecting information. This can be done by reviewing your sales figures and analyzing leads that have expressed interest in your product. Alternatively, using logic will get you pretty far in judging some of the factors involved. You should be careful making these assumptions about your target audience and only do so when there is no alternative.

The most important data points are:

• Age
• Location
• Language
• Wealth
• Interests
• Challenges
• Stage of life
• Job

 

Using the right technique

 

There are many ways that you can use to determine your target audience. As mentioned previously, reviewing your sales figures and plain logic are a good start if you want to determine what factors contribute to the generation of your leads. There are, however, many other ways to approach finding your target audience that offer more of an in-depth perspective and allow you to maximize your results.

 

Analyse your competitors

 

You can always do your own research, but why would you invest time and money when you can just look at what others have done? Looking at the marketing strategy used by your competitors is a useful way to determine certain factors related to your product.

It is imperative that you remember that, in online marketing, standing out from the crowd is a major factor in lead generation. So while it might be useful to see what strategies others are using, simply copying what others are doing will never get you to the top.

 

Interview your clients

 

If your company has already been active for a while and you have built up a clientele, conducting interviews with those clients will give you a lot of useful information. This can be done in a 1-on-1 interview but there are a number of more effective ways to handle gathering this data.

It will generally be advantageous to ask clients to fill out a questionnaire once they have completed a purchase. This technique will suffer from low engagement if you don’t attach a reward on completion. You can, for example, attach a 10% discount to completing the post-purchase questionnaire. This will give you the data that you need and increase the chance that your customer becomes a repeat customer.

You can also bake a questionnaire into your funnel, interviewing leads as they come in. It’s even more important to attach a reward to your questionnaire now because having to take a quiz might drive away potential customers. It’s best to place this questionnaire towards the end of your funnel so that only leads who are likely to make a purchase are involved. By doing this, you make your dataset more accurate while also being careful not to antagonize your leads.

 

Adapting to your environment

 

When determining your target audience, like every aspect of marketing, it is vital that you adapt to changes in the online environment. As the online world changes, so will your target audience and unwillingness to invest in continually updating your data and changing your strategy accordingly.

If you want to learn more about how you can take your newfound knowledge and apply it to your own business, get in contact with the skilled and tireless Digital Profits team. Plan a meeting and we’ll see how we can help you get to the next level.