Identify Your Target Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide

Identify Your Target Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide

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In this video, I'm going to show you a two-step process to identify target audiences to attract the right customers, be more profitable, and happier at the same time. There's a twist at the end that even professional marketers forget to do. Stay until the end! Welcome back to our digital marketing strategy planning series. In the last video, we talked about the importance of smart digital marketing goals and the importance of reverse engineering to create marketing objectives. Now it's time to identify your target audience. Subscribe and hit that bell for notifications so you don't miss another video in the series!

Using a Matrix to Identify Your Target Audience

Use this matrix to identify your target audience. B2B companies tend to make the mistake of selling to too many people at the same time. Too many people means wasting your money trying to cut through the marketing noise. The more surgical you are at identifying your audience, the easier and cheaper it's going to be to attract those customers. Here's how I've done it in the past for my own company.

Create a spreadsheet of 20 of your highest-paying customers over the last 2 to 3 years. Then answer what industries they're in, the size of the company, and the region they're in. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being poor and 10 being excellent, answer these questions and be honest:

  1. How good are you at servicing this client?
  2. How profitable are they?
  3. How much do you actually like working with them?

Tally up the points and see who comes up on top. You're going to see a pattern of what industry, size, region as well as what kind of company you want to work with and how profitable they're going to be for you. This information will give you a basic understanding of who your customer is. This is your target audience!

Ask "Why" These Customers Are Working With You vs. Your Competitors

But knowing who they are is not enough. We now need to know why these customers want to work with your company. Don't be afraid of asking your customers why they're working with you versus the competition. This information is gold. In my experience, asking clients why they want to work with us versus the competition is critical for marketing growth. Sometimes the why is something I didn't even know people valued.

Okay, you got the "why." Now what? Now you turn those whys into your USP, unique selling proposition. USPs are the reason why your high-paying, most profitable customers love you. To get more of these customers, you have to put your USP into your marketing strategies. We'll delve into more of that in later videos.

Demographics Bad, Psychographics Good

Here's the twist: you now have your target audience, don't make the mistake of turning them into a demographic. Marketers today still use demographics like age, gender, income, region to identify target audiences. But people buy with emotion, and demographics don't uncover the why. Psychographics, on the other hand, help you understand attitudes, lifestyle, motivation, the emotion. This is the why you want to tug on.

Now that you have the who, the why, and know to use psychographics to identify your target audience, it's time to build your target persona for your digital marketing strategy plan... in the next video. In the next video, I'm going to give you four easy steps to build that target persona. Subscribe, remember to like and share. I'm Ted Lau, I'll see you in the next video. Bye.