Help! How do I Find my Customers?

How to find out what customers want?

Although our in-house research found that 55% of our clients had an idea on who they believed their target audience was, we studied during persona development that in fact only 4 in 10 companies were actually correct.

In a world where competition is fierce and everyone is in a war to attract the most customers to their business, you might be asking yourself “How do I find out who my target market is?” or “How to find out what customers want” and more importantly “what my customers want?”

You must be sure about what your business can offer to your target market. Do some market research; there is no use having a product which isn’t even in demand or marketing to the wrong people. First, determine who you want to target based on your services and then based on their interest - decide what you can do to entice them.

How to identify potential customers?

Create personas.

You can create a detailed embodiment of who your audience is. They can be based on existing tangible customers, and even intangible ones if you’re a start-up! You can get specific when doing market segmentation, for example knowing where they live, what are they earning yearly and family size. The different ways to segment markets are:

• Geographic segmentation  
• Demographic segmentation
• Psychographic segmentation
• Behavioural segmentation

How to encourage a customer to buy your product?

Once you have segmented and have an idea of at least 3 personas who are your ideal customer, you’ll understand exacting their buying preferences. It could be in the way they search for a business, their deciding factor on what gets them to use a business, or it could simply be how they like to contact a company. These factors will be the most important to include and showcase in web design to really speak directly to their interests.

Remember - Personas can be either a buyer or a user. As they are not always the same, you need to take both into account to understand specific needs.

Tips to attract customers...

How to think of creative ways to attract customers: Create graphics, videos or images that promote your brand but also makes the user feel a part of your brand too. Why not create a personal hashtag for your community and fan base to start discussions, share experiences and build customer loyalty?

Share tips and ideas - don’t just push sales and products on your timeline. Get customers to take part too, to create something and then reshare that on your business pages. These are all great ways to get more business and increase interaction but only work if you know the businesses target audience.

Getting more business from existing clients is a “quick-win”. It is said that it’s easier to retain a customer than gain a new one. This will vary on your business, the services that you provide and existing place in the market, but often through customer loyalty and brand loyalty initiatives, customer retention is key.

How to encourage customer to buy your product? Show them the value of doing so. What will they gain from this? What do you have to offer? What makes you stand out? For example, it could be creating a raffle, and to enter customers must have purchased something from your site or include a prize that one lucky shopper could receive with their order.

Be different, be strategic, be creative!

How to reach a target market with marketing strategies?

Whether you reach your target market or not will depend on if you use the correct marketing platform in the first place. Email marketing, for example, can work very well if you are a service-based company - keeping your target market up to date on changes in the industry and how it can affect them. And when SEO is used correctly it can also have huge lasting impressions on your business organic ranking and improve visibility with your target market.

Ever saw somebody wearing a Mcdonald’s uniform working in IKEA? If you have, I don’t think they were meant to be. Jokes apart, the point being made is that you should place yourself where your customers are, and we think that social media marketing is the best, direct way to engage with your customers in our ever-growing digital world.

Listen to what your customers have to say.

You can be too familiar with social media marketing tools which automate brand name mentions, keywords, and follows because listening is equally important to the individual. Research from the Institute of Customer Service reveals 1 in every 3 customers turn to social media to seek advice or communicate with a business. Put some time aside to reply to those good and bad reviews, send our personalised messages, re-post customers photos – Do what you can to keep them happy!

How to reach target audience through social media?

It is found that 78% of people aged between 30-49 years use Facebook, and 64% of people aged 18-29 years use Instagram. Where is your audience? Use your personas to help determine where different target audience segments are online, and this will help you market to them.

Usually, Facebook users tend to be older, they search to find knowledge from a company and are always searching for discounts and deals through business online. On the other hand, Instagram users are of a younger demographic, they are drawn to vibrant images and eye-catching videos. Users today have a short attention span when using social media platforms so you must capture their attention quickly to encourage interaction.

Social media audience analysis

You might think it’s just easier to use the same message across the platforms because of the time taken to research. But just imagine, you had spent weeks preparing an out of this world business strategy to present to potential investors, you made sure all investors could all make it on the same day, but your investors lose interest. By not delivering the correct message to attract them, you might as well of asked children to showcase your pitch.

The delivery of a message is detrimental to the success of finding new customers. It is no good having a perfect strategy if you don’t understand where your target market is or how they liked to be targeted - It was a waste of money and resources.

Finding new customers is easy!

Target market analysis will get you information on how you can go about identifying your target audience and how you will be able to not only reach them but to also send message to them in a way that they will understand and interact with. To understand which social media platforms are best for your business and how you can utilise them contact our social media and content creation team today.

Build audience consideration: have you created an amazing marketing plan that fits perfectly with your audience, gaining likes and comments but no sales or leads? Maybe you need to get them to consider you as a business where they want to spend money? Do you even appeal to them?