How do you hone in on your ideal customer?
The marketing strategy is an incredibly important piece of your marketing success. In this video we’ll talk about some of the key elements you need to consider when thinking about your ideal customer, which is a key part of your marketing strategy.
The customer avatar is a view of who your consumers are based on key information you know about them.
In another time this information was relatively simple, with demographic data being the primary way a brand would describe their consumer.
A brand might say their customers are females 25-34, with a household income of over $75,000 per year. You have age, gender, and household income.
Today, that question is much more nuanced. We have a lot more data about consumers than ever before. And as a result, we know information about our customers with great precision.
In fact, it’s possible that you right now have a gold mine of information about your customers sitting in your vaults in the form of Google Analytics data and email addresses.
What you want to think about are the signals that your ideal customer gives off that tells you they are interested in your product or service. This applies to every business.
There is a digital action that consumers will take that will yield a signal that tells you they are interested.
We covered a lot of this in past posts, about consumer journeys.
We’re currently running some local political campaigns, and there’s one clear data signal that identifies voters. It’s their location.
For city council seats, or Congressional districts, there is one key identifier for your customer: their location.
If the person lives outside of a Congressional district and, or outside of a certain set of zip codes, no matter how they feel about you, they can’t vote for you. So, location is the primary identifier about whether a person should see an ad.
Certainly, in the political campaigns, for larger seats at the state level, and the presidential level, there are additional signals that people put out that identify themselves as important voters. Usually, for these larger campaigns, a person in a swing state, or a person who hasn’t made up their mind, is going to be an eagerly courted user with political advertising.
Do you know the signals to look for to find your ideal customer?
Knowing who your audience is helps you understand whether you are reaching the right people, and driving the right leads that generate a sale.
When we think about your customer avatar we are looking for signals about who they are. And whether they are interested in our product or service.
One really great way of understanding your audience is understanding the media they consume.
Think about the podcasts, media personalities, websites, publications, and TV programs they consume. For some marketers this may be helpful, and for others this won’t be helpful.
For example, a brand that is selling, say, computer monitors, will know when a person is interested in buying a computer monitor when they go to CNET.com and research different computer monitors. That’s a straight forward consumer signal.
By comparison, a person who ends up buying a cool cup for their morning cup of coffee, may not exhibit behaviors that tell the brand they are about to buy.
We covered a lot of this in earlier posts about high consideration purchases and low consideration purchases.
With the example of the cup purchase, the brand can look at data sets of their past purchasers to identify some key traits that run across their buyers.
Maybe these people are more likely to visit websites like HGTV and DIY Network. These are clear indicators that these people are thinking about home routinely.
How do you use your existing business data to create a marketing strategy?
Buried in your site’s browsing data, a series of locations, and email addresses of your past customers is a wealth of information.
So, how do you access this. The easiest way for most companies is to look at Google Analytics data because it’s free and readily accessible.
In Google Analytics, go to the Audience tab for insight into who your site visitors are.
You’ll see demographic data, geography, interests, site behaviors, and the technology platforms they use.
This is helpful to have a baseline view of who your site visitors are if you don’t have any other data.
A good way to use your past buyer email list is to create a custom audience in Facebook.
This won’t give you a direct output of information about your audience, but it does allow you to do something very powerful: target ads to people with similar characteristics to your past buyers.
This look a like targeting does really well.
If you want to pull out actual insights from your past buyer list you have a variety of paid solutions to do this.
Enterprise advertisers can scrub email lists and push them into Mosaic Clusters, which categorizes Americans into 71 lifestyle clusters.
For independent businesses you can look at analytics data from a variety of companies, including Versium.
Finally, if you have a physical location you can work with companies that monitor location data and output reports about the attributes of the people who visit your locations. This works really well for restaurants and retailers who want to understand who their ideal customer is.
You may look at a company like Intalytics. This company will share insights including how far people traveled to the physical location, their education background, their household income, and their interests.
So, these are three types of data that you can use to understand more about your customers to help you develop a strong marketing strategy.
How do you use your existing Facebook data to identify your audience?
Facebook has two great insights tools for your audience as well. Buried in Facebook Business Manager is Analytics and separately Audience Insights.
Inside Analytics you can filter to your various pages on Facebook to learn more about your audiences on these pages, pixel data, and even Standard Events.
This then allows you to see insights about people who triggered that Standard Events, such as a lead generation, or a sale.
You’ll be able to understand when people interact with your business.
If you go into Audience Insights Facebook will give you data about either broad audiences found on Facebook. And narrower audiences pertaining to your business page on Facebook.
On the left side of the screen, towards the bottom, you’ll be able to select your business page. You’ll get a slew of information, including: job titles, interests, other types of pages that your Page Likers, like, and their technology usage.
So, this information is a more delineation of people interacting with your page, and their overall interests.
So, Facebook data is another avenue for businesses to dive into who their customers are.
You can get more insight into creating a cohesive marketing strategy with Your Lead Generation Guide.