Who is your ideal customer or client?
If you answered ‘Everyone!’, it’s time to rethink your approach.
Trying to appeal to everyone often leads to missing your mark and attracting the wrong audience. Defining your ideal customer is crucial to creating and promoting offerings that truly resonate. This article will help you pinpoint who you should serve to ensure your efforts hit the right target.
1. Start with some classic brainstorming techniques
Before diving into strategies and tools for defining your target audience, start with this crucial step:
Identify the specific problem you’re solving.
For instance, if you’re a business coach for small business owners, key issues might include attracting customers, online marketing skills, or budget constraints.
Once you know the problem, refine your target audience by considering their:
Gender
Age
Interests
Occupation
Location
Shopping behaviors
Income
Education level
Brainstorming helps lay a solid foundation for the next steps.
2. Conduct surveys with your current customers or clients
Surveys are an excellent way to gather insights from past buyers. This data can help you identify who is most likely to engage with your products or services in the future.
When designing your survey, start with basic demographic questions. Tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform offer demographic templates to simplify this process.
In addition to demographics, ask questions about the challenges and issues your customers face to refine your value proposition.
Also, inquire about how and where your customers discovered you. This information will guide your efforts in reaching more like-minded individuals.
3. Explore Your Google Analytics
Your website analytics can offer crucial insights into your target audience and help refine your future strategy. Here’s how to leverage Google Analytics effectively:
Identify past buyers: Check Behavior ⇒ Events, Conversions ⇒ Goals, or Conversions ⇒ E-commerce based on your sales tracking setup.
Discover preferred content: Navigate to Behavior ⇒ Site Content and sort by Page Views to see what resonates most with your audience.
Understand how visitors found you: Explore Acquisition ⇒ Overview and delve into each channel for detailed insights.
Get basic demographics: Visit Audience ⇒ Overview to find information on location, language, and devices used by your audience.
These sections will provide a comprehensive view of who engages with your site and how, guiding you to better target your efforts.
4. Monitor Social Conversations
While the previous strategies provide insights into your existing customers and website visitors, social listening helps you tap into the broader audience currently seeking products, services, or content like yours.
By using tools such as Mention, AgoraPulse, or Google Alerts, you can track industry-related questions and problems, gaining valuable insights into where your target audience is active online.
Joining industry groups on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn allows you to see who is asking questions and what they are asking, helping you better understand and connect with your ideal customer.
5. Analyze Social Media Metrics
Major social networking platforms offer built-in analytics tools to help you understand your current audience. Tools include Facebook Page Insights, Facebook Group Insights (new!), Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights (for business accounts), Pinterest Analytics, and more.
To learn about your current audience and attract similar individuals in the future, focus on:
Audience demographics
Content formats that achieve the highest reach and engagement (e.g., text, images, videos, or links)
Popular topics
Top social media platforms where your audience is active
By understanding who your audience is, what they prefer, and where they spend their time, you can refine your approach and target your social media ads more effectively.
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