Identify your target customer

target customer

Identify your target customer and consider their natural strategic alignment to your services.

Your target customer is the blueprint of your audience market and all of your marketing efforts. It’s a concept that is constantly evolving and adapting to changing trends and evolutions in your business. Sometimes businesses wait for their target customer to reveal themselves. But who knows how long this could take!

Instead, the key to business success is to stay confident and take control of who you are and what you do. It’s important to recognise that you can decide who you want to market your business towards. Once you have established who you want your ideal customer to be, your strategy will instantly start to take shape. Remember, marketing isn’t about trying to promote something that you don’t fully believe in. So, once you’re confident in who you want to target your efforts towards and why then the world of digital marketing will suddenly become a whole lot easier for you.

Follow the steps in our digital marketing guidebook to continue becoming more confident in your business plan. In addition to this, you can also follow our social media accounts for regular updates and marketing tips.

The best way to narrow down the identity of your customer is by looking at your services. Consider the 5W’s:

Who – who is your audience? Consider age, gender, family status, educational status, etc.
What – what is your service/product meant to do? What will this change in your audience’s life?
Where – what kind of company/shop/site would you expect to sell/promote similar products/services? Are you aiming locally, nationally or globally?
Why – what makes your product/service different from your competitors? Why should people buy from or work with you specifically?
When – do you want to promote your products/services seasonally? Is it something people can purchase once? Or is it an ongoing contract?

This will start to build an idea of your typical target customer who would regularly buy from you and loves your services/products. Next, put yourself in that customer’s mindset: start to brainstorm what their interests and hobbies are most likely to be. This means understanding where those people look for information, products, entertainment, knowledge etc. This will give you a better indication of where your customers are looking so that you know where to place your business in the digital market. Once you have pinpointed who your current and potential customers are, this will give you a greater understanding of your market.

What makes this exercise even better is that it doesn’t need a large investment in market research to get the ball rolling and get your company promoting your business to the right people. Also, it doesn’t matter if you get it wrong! Continue reading our blogs to figure out how you can use insights and analytics to turn any audience feedback into great feedback.

Explore how creating a communication plan can ensure you know what to say and how to say it to your customers.

Resources & extra reading:

How to identify personas: https://www.usertesting.com/blog/customer-personas

How to think about strategic alignment to customers: https://www.davidparrish.com/authentic-marketing/

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Written by Tula Wild

Digital Marketing Manager with e-blueprint digital.