Who is Your Target Audience? (It’s Not Everyone!)

Quality:  The degree of excellence of something.

Reaching your ideal target audience first requires determining the quality or degree of excellence of your customers.  Thoughtfully consider your current client base and decide what key characteristics your most valuable clients share.  Your most valuable customer – your MVP – is the one that exhibits loyalty to your brand. They are long-lasting and repeat buyers. They trust your team and their recommendations, and understand the value in paying you for your worth. Often, the MVPs makeup 80% of your revenue but demand only 20% of your time.

The key to growing your business is the ability to identify the elite – the highest quality customer – and then direct your marketing team to find more like that.

1. Gather up all the info you have on your customer base. Everything from purchasing history, loyalty programs, email engagement, reviews provided, and your sales team insights.
2. Develop a scorecard for each that includes these traits and a few non-tangible items such as how they treat your team, align with your values, and provide excellent referrals for your company.
   1. Find the medium and find the optimum within your scores.
   2. Focus on the optimum section first.
3. Now, conduct an in-depth evaluation of those top clients. What makes them the top? What traits do they have in common? Go beyond the revenue and look for psychographic trends. Is there a commonality in the region they reside? Their industry? Size of business family status?
4. Now, using those insights, create your ideal customer persona. Give them a name, a face. Fill in the profile until they resemble someone you may interact with within your daily business activities.
5. Finally, share this persona with your marketing team, sales team, customer service team, key stakeholders, and everyone within your organization that interacts with your customers.
   1. Develop your marketing strategy around and for your persona.
   2. Educate your customer service and sales teams on who they are, what they like, and how to best communicate with them.
   3. Update your website and trade show events to appeal to this persona.

When you focus on targeting a high-quality audience, you effectively are eliminating waste. Studies have found that 76% of marketing budgets are wasted in Pay Per Click campaigns that target the wrong audience.  In some cases, up to 80% of content marketing reaches the wrong audience.

The more knowledge you have about your customers, the more effectively you can tailor your products or services to them. Understanding your customers lets you customize your marketing strategy to each segment of your audience. This also allows you to sell more effectively.

Knowing your customers lets you see which of their needs your business can fill. For example, you can up-sell, explaining why a high-priced product would serve them better, in addition to cross-selling other products or services that align with their customer persona. Knowing how your products or services can solve customer’s challenges, makes you an expert they will return  to in the future. Studies have shown that Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by between 25% and 95%.

Initially, this may seem a bit terrifying. You will be making a giant leap from trying to reach the masses to targeting a select few. But when you get it right – it is magic! Your revenues will climb, your team will be able to do more business with fewer people, you will gain client loyalty, and have less churn – Making your business more profitable.

If you would like more information on developing an ideal customer persona, target auidence, or growing your business through digital marketing, contact one of our digital experts at KeyMedia Solutions today!