Did you ever feel like your products or services don’t hit the target? Like maybe you weren’t talking to the right people? Do you know your customers as well as you thought you did? I mean really know them – inside and out? Few businesses know their customers well enough to catch that coveted bullseye. And you are certainly not alone if you feel like it’s time to take a different approach!
Fortunately, there is a way forward. Assembling the right value proposition for your target customer requires identifying them first and then learning about their needs, wants and knows, and how they are behaving. Knowledge of this variety provides clear insights into what makes them tick as potential customers – and guides you in how to position your offering in a way that resonates most with them.
Are you now ready to start identifying and forming a deeper understanding of your target market? This definitive guide will walk you through the main steps you need to follow to identify your target customers. Get set to gain insights that will rework the way you communicate with others.
Step 1: Define Your Target Customer Segments
The first step is to identify your target customers: who are they? Answering this question is a process of segmentation, first finding groups of potential customers that have characteristics in common with each other, and segmenting your potential market into these prescribed behavioral components. With this approach, you are much better placed to tailor to the needs of your customers.
Here are some common ways to segment your target customers:
Demographics (age, gender, income level, education, location)
Psychographics (lifestyle, personality traits, values, interests)
Behaviors (purchasing habits, brand loyalty, usage patterns)
Needs and goals (what they’re trying to achieve or the problems they’re trying to solve).
Please note that you can combine these options to make you able to create more precise and complex customers’ segments, like ‘urban millennials with an active lifestyle who are cautious about sustainable products’.
Step 2: Conduct Market Research
Once you have defined the customer segments that you are going to target, it is important to start collecting data and insights about those customers. Market research will help you understand your customers’ preferences, pains (both emotional and physical) and the process they go through to make a decision to buy.
Here are some effective market research methods:
Surveys and questionnaires
Focus groups
Interviews (in-person or online)
Social media listening
Competitor analysis
Industry reports and studies
In doing market research, make sure your questions probe the reasons behind why your target customers behave the way they do, the problems they face and the ways they make purchasing decisions.
Step 3: Analyze Customer Data
Businesses today have access to a lot of customer data, which you can analyze to identify trends and gain insights into who your target customers are, what they are buying, why and in what quantity. This can help to shed a light on their behavior, preferences and pain points.
Here are some sources of customer data to consider:
Website analytics (traffic sources, user behavior, conversion rates)
Social media metrics (engagement, demographics, sentiment analysis)
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
Purchase histories and transaction data
Customer support interactions (inquiries, complaints, feedback)
Use descriptive, predictive and inferential analysis methods (data visualization, segmentation analysis and predictive modeling); nd finally, assess the associated costs and benefits of those relationships.
Step 4: Create Customer Personas
After you conduct your research and analysis on the needs, wants and behaviors of your target customers, that next step is to convert that data into compelling ‘customer personas’. A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on the data you’ve uncovered during your research.
An effective customer persona should include:
Demographic information (age, gender, location, income level)
Psychographic details (personality traits, values, lifestyle)
Goals and pain points
Behaviors and preferences (purchasing habits, media consumption)
Quotes or anecdotes that capture their mindset and voice
Creating customer personas helps you imagine and empathize with your target customers, and, as a result, design and deliver more effective products, services and marketing campaigns.
Step 5: Map the Customer Journey
Knowing who your target customers are is an important part of the answer. What is missing is the customer journey beyond acquisition. The customer journey is the series of stages a customer goes through when interacting with your brand – from awareness through to purchase and post-purchase.
Regardless of whether you tend towards making predictions or head-scratching, if you can map out the customer journey you can spot the pains, niggles and annoyances; the places where they’re crying out for something a little easier, a little nicer, a little smarter.
Here are the typical stages of the customer journey:
Awareness: The customer becomes aware of your product or service.
Consideration: The customer evaluates their options and gathers information.
Purchase: The customer makes a buying decision and completes the transaction.
Retention: The customer continues to engage with your brand and make repeat purchases.
Advocacy: The customer becomes a loyal advocate, promoting your brand to others.
For each stage, think about what your customer’s frame of mind is, what questions they have, and what their interaction with your brand will look like. The goal is to pinpoint where you can improve the experience and deliver in ways that will be most valuable to them.
Step 6: Continuously Refine and Adapt
Understanding your target customers is an iterative process that should evolve with them as their needs, preferences and behavior change. Stay on top by constantly improving and adapting your customer insights and strategies.
Here are some ways to keep your understanding of your target customers up-to-date:
Regularly conduct market research and gather customer feedback
Monitor industry trends and changes in customer behavior
Analyze customer data on an ongoing basis
Update customer personas and journey maps as needed
Test and iterate on your products, services, and marketing strategies
If you can learn to approach it with a growth mindset, you’ll stay on top of who you think your customers are – and make good decisions to help your business grow.
Conclusion
If you don’t know who will buy your product or service, and who will be most likely to purchase it repeatedly, you won’t know how to run your business to be sustainable. Following the steps outlined in this guide will help you understand your target customers and begin to develop offerings and experiences that they will love.
But remember, understanding your target customers is a process. Before creating meaningful educational content – and pragmatic game mechanics – you need to develop a keen instinct for the people who are engaged with your school-at-home site; study their questions or activities, their comments or dilemmas. What worked, what could improve? Get into a habit of collecting and curating their ideas and perspectives. That’s the beauty of the game, and most importantly, it’s fun.
And by the time you do this, you’ll have enough information about what makes your target customers tick to be able to make better decisions.