How to Target the Right Customers for Your Business

To effectively promote, sell, and raise awareness for your product and services, it is of paramount importance to reach out to the right consumers – individuals who require your product or service.

Do you know who your potential customers are? What do they like or dislike? Or what their lifestyle habits are?

Picture every chef’s worst nightmare: taking hours to cook up the perfect dish, only to realize that it was served to the wrong customer. Meaning that every bit of time, effort, and resources put into the dish had gone to waste – literally.

And such is the same for many marketers. Out of every 100 leads that come through a business’s sales funnel, only a mere 25% fit the consumer profile that it wants to convert. 

Sure, garnering a large number of leads might fit the bill for some, but obtaining potentially high-qualified leads often poses a more significant challenge for businesses. 

How do you secure the right marketing-qualified leads within your industry? In this 6-step guide, discover how you can target your ideal customer and effectively scale your reach within your desired target audience.

1. Knowing Your Brand Inside Out

First impressions matter. Your brand essence – a business’ core characteristics, personality, values, etc. – dictates your brand image and projects what you want customers to feel about your brand. Knowing your brand essence is key to understanding the type of consumers you want to attract. 

Your brand essence sets the precedence for determining your target audience, outreach strategies, and the various marketing efforts you would eventually employ. Before assessing your brand essence and image, think about the problems your product or service is trying to solve – who exactly faces these problems? 

What brand image do you then intend to portray to your audience? Who do you think would relate to your brand image the most? If your brand essence is athletic and youthful, you’re likely to want to attract individuals who are younger and lead active lifestyles. 

With this knowledge in mind, you may proceed to craft a social media strategy that appeals to a more youthful audience. Possible approaches could include advertising on social media networks that your audiences are most active on, optimizing your content to bump up your website on search engines, or perfecting your targeting strategies through social media content.

2. Surveying Your Existing Pool of Customers

Observing your current consumers presents you with a clear picture of the market segmentation your brand appeals to. From here, you may begin to identify common buyer characteristics, such as their needs and behaviors, and ascertain aspects of your business that may appeal to your potential customers.

Consider expanding your research by surveying your customers. This way of market research can spell an opportunity to understand their motivations behind making a purchase, how your product or service has benefited them, and what could be improved on in the customer buying process.

3. Creating a Customer Profile

To accurately target the buyer personas that fit your business, you need to have a comprehensive knowledge surrounding your consumers. 

A customer profile consists of a detailed description of a typical user of your product or service. A valuable and relevant customer profile constitutes key information, such as your audience’s demographics, the most active channels, and their buying motivations.

Simply put, a customer profile represents your target market. It should provide you with a clear picture of your potential consumers and how you can effectively reach out to them. 

Why is Creating a Customer Profile Important?

Having a customer profile gives you focus – it keeps your eye on who truly matters and, in turn, centers your attention on any changes, trends, or emerging players and innovations surrounding a community. It gives you valuable insight into their needs and behaviors and allows you to remain adaptive in an unpredictable market. 

Having little sense of your target audience is akin to casting a net out into the open sea – you have a minuscule guarantee on the type and quality of your catch. Instead, focusing on clear, specific customer types narrows your scope and allows you to zone in on people that matter, thus creating a consumer pool that is more concentrated and has a higher probability for conversion.

When creating your customer profile, consider the following characteristics:

• Demographics:  Your ideal customer’s age, gender, job title, job experience, income, and education level

• Psychographics: Their type of lifestyles, intrinsic or extrinsic goals, challenges, values and beliefs, hobbies and interests, and daily activities

• Behavioral: Their purchasing habits, product preferences, expectations, readiness to buy, or level engagement in different social networks

• Geographics: Their location of residence (region, country, state, city, etc.)

4. Mapping Out Your Customer Journey

Your target audience is often bombarded with a ton of information, advertisements, and a vast array of brands vying for their attention. The average consumer is estimated to be exposed to about 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements every day. A customer’s purchasing journey is no longer a linear process and has now evolved into one that is more delicate and complex. 

To target the ideal customer, it is imperative that brands understand the intricacies of the end-to-end process that leads to a purchase decision. In doing so, they achieve a thorough understanding of their customers’ pain points, expectations, and how to create a seamless purchasing journey.

Having a clear sense of the above allows you better to comprehend your target audience’s needs and behaviors, enabling you to further perfect your marketing strategies and address your consumers’ pain points. It sets you apart from your competitors when consumers know that you care about their needs.

A customer journey map is a comprehensive visualization of how your consumers interact with your brand – from the time they come to know about your brand to the moment they decide to advocate for your product or service.

An elaborate map consists of the various consumer touchpoints. These are specific instances where a consumer comes into contact with your brand, product, or marketing strategy before meeting your conversion goal.

From Awareness to Advocacy

Your map should include the five main stages of a consumer journey: 

• Awareness: The first point of contact between your brand and the targeted customer, be it through a simple Google search or paid advertisement.
• Consideration: This is the stage where your consumers are considering your product or service but decide to research more about your offering and compare with your competitors on aspects such as pricing, product quality, market reviews, or brand reputation.
• Conversion: After comparing and conducting their due diligence, consumers decide to purchase at this stage.
• Loyalty: The customer journey doesn’t just end at conversion; to retain your customer base, it is crucial that you still meet their needs and that you care about their overall experience with your business.
• Advocacy: What happens when you have a satisfied customer who is passionate about your product or service? They talk about you! Customers who have had a great experience with your company will often become advocates for your brand through social media or word-of-mouth channels.

Here’s a brief example of what a customer journey map might look like in your business. You may even choose to be more specific by indicating the different marketing channels, KPIs, or emotions that a consumer might feel when coming across the various touchpoints.

5. Leveraging Social Listening

Successful, targeted marketing is no longer just about having the latest, new-in product. Consumers want to be heard and understood; they resonate best with brands that listen and meet their needs. 

To better target your desired audience, you need to be adaptive and respond to what resonates best with your customers. Maintaining market vigilance is the best way to mitigate the uncertainties in an ever-changing consumer landscape.

Social listening tools such as Digimind Social provides you with real-time updates on market trends, consumer insights that surround your target audience, and the best influencers who can advocate for your brand in the right communities.

Social listening provides your brand with exclusive intelligence on what is essential to your target audience. It allows you to jump in on conversations that could help you strike an impression amongst your target audience. 

Check out the latest updates within your industry with our Year-in-Review, where we used Digimind Social to obtain valuable insights on ten consumer-centric industries across 200 brands in APAC.

6. Using Targeted Advertising

Now that you have a structured customer profile, consumer journey map, and the relevant tools in place, you can begin reaching out to your consumers via targeted advertising on social media platforms. 

Remember to be as detailed as possible and narrow it down to the specifics when determining your audience in the ad settings! Take into account the different buyer characteristics when you’re creating your advertisement. Narrowing your scope allows you to acquire leads that are higher in quality and obtain a higher conversion rate. 

Content is also important for effective social media advertising – make sure to create content that is concise, relatable, relevant, and value-adds to your audience.

Be it for the latest updates, amazing content, or exciting visuals, give them a reason as to why they should listen to and support your brand. 

Discover how you can effectively increase social media engagement in our latest step-by-step guide.

The Circle of Marketing

Just as what we call the circle of life, the process for consumer targeting is no different in the objectives of marketing: when you know your audience, reach out to them effectively, and provide a satisfactory customer experience, they become advocates for your brand and bring in other customers alike.

Firstly, identify the right set of customer personas and how you can best engage them. In doing so, you’re able to allocate your resources to the right channels which work and craft strategies that can generate a higher return on investment.

Having a deep understanding of your audience also creates opportunities for you to provide a better overall customer experience, which increases customer retention rates and the likelihood of them becoming advocates for your brand. 

Nothing truly beats the efficacy of having your audience speak organically about your product or service.

Read our 2021 Year In Review Report that consolidated the unique brand positionings of 200 consumer brands on social.