Why Target?
Your company or product cannot be all things to all people. When you evaluate your product honestly, you will find that it has merits and faults, depending on the priorities and values of those who might use it. It does some things excellently at the expense of other things it could do instead. It may be high quality but expensive; fast but generic; beautiful but fragile; comprehensive but technical.
When advertising, you want to target a specific segment of people with a specific set of values for which your product is the perfect fit. When a product is a perfect fit for the customer, it creates a stellar experience for that customer. And customers who have stellar experiences are the kind of customer you want, because they will keep on coming back to you over and over again, and they will sing your praises to other people. Having customers like this reduces the cost of acquiring conversions, because they don’t need to be advertised to and moreover they actually sell your products for you.
Start With You
So, to determine who you are going to target, i.e. who is the perfect fit, you first have to define who you are as company and what your product actually is. You will need to answer these essential questions:
- What are your core values?
- What specific problem(s) does your product solve?
- What do you do better than anyone else?
- What is your chief competitive advantage?
If you are a startup and are still formulating your company’s ethos, a practice I suggest doing to explore these questions is creating a Message Map. Message Maps are a formalized writing exercise that will help you choose a meaningful core value, identify your fundamentally valuable company/product qualities, and identify the concrete assets that contribute to those strengths.
If you are an established company but you are not clear on the answers to some of these questions, you should try gathering feedback from your former or existing customers. Ask them why they chose/choose you, and what value or unique advantage they feel you offer them. You may be doing something very right without knowing it (and you may not be doing what you think you are).
Customer Personas
Equipped with information about what the true value of your business/product is, you can now identify precisely what needs you can effectively serve and whose values you are the right fit for. Once you know what needs/values you are serving, you can begin to think about who has those needs/values. Those people are your target customers.
You want to fill out the identities of those people who you will be serving. What are their interests? What are their pain points? What kind of information are they looking for? Where do they find it? What resources do and do they not have? Knowing the rest of their story will be highly instructive regarding how to reach and appeal to your potential customers.
You may find that several distinct types of people emerge from your research. For example, an eCommerce business selling high-end artisinal furniture may appeal to both discerning homeowners on a normal budget, and commercial interior designers sparing no expense on their posh new project. Those people have very different needs and will take two different journies to discovering that business’s product, assuming it creates avenues that appeal to both of them. That’s good! For every type that emerges, there is different opportunity for engagement: a different advertising space, a different content type, another different appeal to your product.
For each of these types that emerge, create what is called a Customer Persona: a concise profile of what it is like to be this person, containing essential and relevant data such as: What age and gender are they, on average? Why are they in the market? Or when will they be in the market? Where do they find information? These don’t have be long; a couple paragraphs or some key figures.
I suggest adding representative photos of people to your customer personas, too, to give them an extra boost of empathy. We relate to human faces because we are evolved to be with people. Conversely, when faces are missing we can be pretty inhumane, which is why emails can be so tone deaf, or how a person’s humanity can disappear altogether when they are reduced to a number in a spreadsheet.
Keep your customer personas handy, taped to your wall or in a file on your desktop, and review them when planning content and engaging with your customers; you may find it helps your ability to relate to and understand them, which will improve your ability to help them.
You can these profiles as the foundation of your marketing strategy whether you are crafting and online content marketing strategy, where you can map them onto the different “chains of value” that emerge from your Message Map, or a PPC advertising campaign, where you will be targeting concretely defined demographics.
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.
That’s Permaculture principle number 4.
Revisit and review your customer personas regularly to help you reflect on whether you are in the business you think you are. Are your ideal customers who you thought they were? Are you planning changes to your business that will meet the needs of your target customer more or less than when you started? Do you need to change your concept of your business to better serve the market? Or target different customers to stay true to your brand?