Narrow Your Focus: How to Identify Your Target Audience
Identifying the right target audience for your business is the key to success. If you’re struggling to convince people to make a purchase, you might be talking to the wrong people. This article will help you find your ideal customers and make them love you.
Identifying Your Ideal Customers is Vital to Business Success
Many people need the service you offer. Only some of those are able to afford you. Even fewer want to work with you specifically, and only certain people from that group are people you're excited to serve. Identifying who those few are is crucial to reaching your full potential. Those people are your target audience.
Why do we call it an audience? Marketing your business is all about communicating. These are the people you share your message with and who consume your content. Your brand message is created specifically for them.
You can’t use CRO to increase conversions if you’re targeting the wrong people. SEO is useless if your website isn’t created for your ideal customers.
3 Mistakes Business Owner Make When Attempting to Identify Their Target Audience
Mistake #1: Focusing on the money
It’s common to be most concerned with “what’s the most profitable” niche. While that’s a valid consideration, it shouldn’t be your primary focus. You’ll provide better results, earn more, and truly enjoy your work if you find the people you love working with (and who love working with you). That’s the most profitable target audience.
Mistake # 2: Not choosing a niche
It’s easy to avoid choosing a niche if you offer a service a variety of people need. You can even get by without choosing a niche, but your messaging will be generic. That will hold you back from reaching the top levels of success. In today’s world, flourishing online and in business requires service providers to be authentic. Generic messaging that resonates with no one in specific won’t get you far.
Mistake #3: Constantly changing your mind
The struggle is real. Choosing a target audience means eliminating prospects. That’s scary and makes us feel indecisive. You're allowed to change your mind if your strategy doesn’t work, but you're wasting precious time if you don’t follow through on anything. It takes a significant amount of time to test out a strategy. If you stop before that point, you’re basing decisions on feelings not numbers. You need those numbers.
Find Your People: How to Identify Your Target Audience
Who your ideal customers are might surprise you. Your idea of who will buy your services, and the reality of who is excited about your offer might not match.
This was true for me when I started my copywriting business. I’d been a wellness provider for more than a decade. Therefore, my plan was to use that expertise to create content for health and wellness brands. I succeeded at that, but that’s not who was most excited to work with me.
Photographers were really excited to hire me. They weren’t even on my radar. That was an unpredictable plot twist. One random photography website turned into many more in a short period of time. Photographers quickly became my people, not because I sought them out. They practically fell in my lap.
What I learned from that is to be open to possibility, and pay attention. Sometimes your best laid plans don’t go as planned, but there’s often a silver lining.
3 Steps to Identify Your Ideal Customers
Don’t make assumptions. Follow these steps to figure out who’s most likely to buy what you really want to sell. It might not be who you think it is.
Clarify your offer. As a service provider or small business, there’s a lot of things you can do for your customers. What’s your favorite? What’s the one thing you do exceptionally well because you enjoy doing it? Your ideal customers need that thing.
Analyze your client list. Who is buying from you right now? Is there something those people have in common? Compile a list of shared characteristics and demographics. Get as specific as possible. Then, narrow the list down to only the customers who buy the offer you chose in step one.
Here’s what that looked like for me:Female photographers, in their 20’s and 30’s, living in the Midwest. These women are running successful businesses and already have a pretty website. They’re interested in SEO. They want more organic traffic. They have beautiful photos on their website, and they want the writing to be the same level of quality. However, writing isn’t their strong suit. Most of all, they want to spend less time marketing their business on social media
Identify your most valuable connections. Who you are connected to will hugely impact who finds your business. Friends, family, colleagues, and the people you’re connected to on social media are valuable assets. You have indirect access to their networks.
Who are the biggest cheerleaders for your work (outside of happy clients)? Who do people talk to? Who do they refer to you?
I ended up writing website copy for a lot of photographers, because a few followed the designer I partnered with on websites. After I wrote website copy for a couple photographers, word-of-mouth marketing took it from there.
Make Them Love You: Tips for Engaging Your Target Audience
After you clearly identify your target audience, it’s time to get their attention. From here on out, direct all your marketing efforts at them. All your website copy, ads, social media posts, email marketing, and branding is exclusively for them.
Learn More About Your People
People crave understanding, and they buy from brands who resonate with them. Hang out in the places they hang out. Follow them on social media. Learn their lingo, understand their struggles, and get a feel for their everyday life.
Create a Persona
When you create messaging for your followers, don’t think of them as a big group of people. Think of them as a single person. Combine their shared character traits and turn them into an imaginary character. This person is the most ideal of all your ideal customers. Create everything for this person.
Be Genuine
Don’t try to sell them on anything. Just aim for making real connections. Be helpful. Be understanding, and be authentic. This is how you build trust and likeability.
Keep Showing Up
The secret to engagement is being a constant presence. When someone sees a single ad or post you create, that’s the end of the experience. There is no engagement.
When someone keeps hearing about you, they get curious.
When someone keeps seeing your content, they become familiar with you.
When someone receives valuable information from you, they consider your offer.
Still Struggling with Engagement?
Creating a brand voice and messaging that resonates with your target audience is a skill. For some it comes natural, for others it takes a lot of practice. Plus, it takes time. That’s why people pay copywriters to write their email campaigns and website copy.
My favorite thing about being a copywriter is getting to know my client’s businesses and learning about their ideal customers. I study both, pull out the good stuff, and wrap it up in a piece of writing that makes people say YES. I’m not bragging. That’s just my job.