Everyone talks about finding your ideal customer or target audience on social media. Many businesses assume they already know exactly who that is. But do you really? Have you sat down and figured out who is buying your product or services and who they are perfect for? Do you really know what a target audience means?
Let’s start with a definition. If you google “target audience” you’ll come up with many versions but a simple one is:
A target audience is the demographic of people most likely to be interested in your product or service.
For example, if you are selling baby products, parents could be your target audience and possibly grandparents. If you own a handyman service, you’d be looking for property owners, maybe both commercial and residential.
So why is it important to know your target audience?
It’s important because that’s who you need to appeal to when creating your social media posts! You aren’t creating content for yourself or even for your product/service. You are creating content for your target audience.
You need to not only know who they are but to completely understand them in order to create personalized marketing content. You need to be able to answer questions like: What are their pain points? Who do they identify with? What do they like vs don’t like? How is a typical day in their life? How old are they? Where do they live? You need to understand this in order to build strong, loyal, lasting relationships online. That is the key to making connections and selling on social media!
What is a customer persona?
To fully understand your target audience, you should create a customer persona. Customer personas are invaluable to target your marketing. They are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. You can’t know every prospect individually, but you can create a customer persona to represent a segment of your customers. Once you have an idea for this persona, it makes it easier to think of them as real people and understand how to reach them.
Corporations often have several customer personas they market to. As small business owners, I suggest you start with building one ideal customer persona and targeting them with social media before you move onto another as you are one person trying to do this rather than a whole marketing team!
Where do you start?
The first step in building a customer persona is to dig into your current audience. Gather all the demographic information you have on your current customers. Learn everything you can about them from small things like age, job, income, location to their buyer behaviors, interests, and life stage.
Another place to gain insights on your audience is your website and social media profiles. Google analytics from your website and the social media analytical tools built into your business social media pages can give you a ton of information.
The last place to get more insights is to check on your competitors. Look at their social media pages and see who is interacting and following them. Are they the same groups of people you found in researching your target audience or are their new segments to look at? This can give you some insights on who you want to target on social media.
Next week, in part 2 of our 3-part Target Audience Blog series, you will learn how to take the information you gathered on your current customers and social media followers to create a customer persona for your business. We’ll explore every detail of who buys your product/service and how they feel so you can begin to understand how to market to them.
Read part 2, 3 Steps to Creating a Customer Persona.
Sign up for my Target Your Audience Challenge in my Facebook Group and build your customer persona with us each day and be able to ask me questions along the way! Challenge starts January 15th!
Have any questions? Feel free to reach out to me: LoriCaralis@gmail.com
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