Get to Know Your Target Audience By Following This Process

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. You need them to keep your business afloat.To do so, you need to understand things from their perspective. What are their business needs? What product and service solutions are they looking for to solve those needs?

If your marketing efforts aren’t personalized to demonstrate your company’s ability to meet those needs, you will have a difficult time convincing them to start doing business with you. It’s the same with your current clientele: if you don’t demonstrate a good understanding of the pain points they deal with, these customers may choose to take their business elsewhere.

To prevent this from happening, you need to get to know your target audience.

Why You Should Get to Know Your Audience

The companies who chose to do business with you likely chose to do so for a particular reason. This reason helps define your competitive advantage. This reason may vary from customer to customer, depending on a number of factors such as that business’ size, industry, and particular needs.

To successfully market to the needs of the industries you serve, you need to produce marketing materials that touch upon those needs. Without this level of personalization, your audience is likely to disregard any communication they receive from you, causing the majority of your marketing efforts to go to waste.

This has been shown time and time again:

• More than 78% of consumers will only engage offers if they have been personalized to match their previous engagements with the brand
• 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a more personalized service or experience
• 63% of consumers said they would think more positively about a brand if they produced content that is more valuable, interesting or relevant to them
• Marketers who are able to personalize their customers’ web experiences see a 19% increase in sales

As you can see, it’s very important to personalize your marketing materials to your target audience - 94% of marketing professionals believe this to be true. However, 83% struggle to do so, and see it as their biggest marketing challenge.

How to Better Understand Your Target Audience

Understanding and marketing to the needs of your target audience doesn’t have to be a challenge. By following these six steps, you should have a better understanding of how to do so:

1. Don’t assume: You may think you know why your current clientele chose to start doing business with you, but do you really know? Consider creating a survey and distributing it to your current clientele to see why they continue to do business with you. You should also build one to give to new clients that you sign on to discover how they heard of you and why they chose you over your competition. 
2. Understand the buying process: Knowing the general process that your target audience takes when first looking for a managed service provider will allow for more efficient marketing. You should make sure you understand who is involved in the purchase decision, what other options they considered, the reasons why they chose you, the criteria they used when making their decision, and their opinions on your marketing materials that they reviewed when making their decision (your website, social media channels, any physical marketing materials they may have received, etc.).
3. Monitor customer satisfaction: Make sure you are continuously collecting feedback from your clientele on your service offerings. Their opinions may change over time. After receiving feedback, make changes as necessary to keep your clients satisfied.
4. Analyze all of your data: One you have collected all of this information on your target audience, as well as any analytics you have used to benchmark the success of your promotional efforts, compile it and analyze the success of what you are doing. Make note of any areas that could use improvement.
5. Create customer profiles: Once you have a good understanding of the type of businesses who look to you for managed services, start defining that by creating customer profiles for each niche that your business serves. This will allow you to create marketing materials that attract the attention of businesses in these niches.
6. Change and adapt over time: This isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ sort of thing. You need to be continuously evaluating and updating your processes to ensure that your marketing hits on all of the pain points that the industries you serve have to deal with. This includes updating your efforts to meet any sort of technological advancements, changes in government regulation, and the evolving needs of your clientele.

Personalized to Perfection

We have experience in producing marketing materials that are designed to reach any niche that you may serve, from printed materials such as postcards, brochures, and other direct mail pieces, to digital marketing materials such as social media posts, blog articles, and website pages. Contact us today for help!