How to find your target audience

Making a perfect business plan comes second to knowing who your best users are. This is like the first commandment of any marketing plan nowadays. Knowing them is crucial, as they really define the niche and not the opposite.If you can identify your best user then you have a better chance to market your product or service. But how to do it? There are some basic tips to start with and get on the right track from the beginning.

Why you need to identify your best clients?

If you have a business idea that you wish to see rolling out, you’d better know who your ideal clients are, or at least how they look like .  Also if you already have a business going on and you want to add more products or features, you guessed it : you need to follow these too.

Lesson 1 – How to define your target audience to nail your messaging

Who are they?

In general terms your best clients are principally those who will talk nice about your business to others. They are the ones to become your unofficial product ambassadors. You do want to give them the best personal treatment possible.

Feed them with lots of TLC (Tender Love and Care) and they will be doing free advertising and promotion of your products on social networks, product review sites or any other media you can imagine for free.

How to know who they are?

Go take a look at how engineers examine a new project. They are serious people who have lots of responsibilities. They first start by imagining the worst case scenario in order to know the most dreadful thing which can go wrong to the finished project in order to decide the best strategy to use to avoid things going wrong.

In the realm of internet product marketing this is completely the opposite, because you want to see the best clients and find the best user case scenario . You can then fix your goal to achieve the best product possible.

Happily we are at the beginning of the BIG DATA era, where Internet metrics give us the power to find out more about our potential best clients with real ease. Data analysis is booming and if you know how to use excel, statistical or any growth hacking tools, you are on the way to conquering internet marketing.

Follow these next tips to know the how to steer up your marketing from the start.

1. ”Spy” your competition’s best clients

Don’t get me wrong when I say Spying is the answer, but you have to take a look at your competition and see who is buying their products and services.

You don’t need to scrap the whole web to find out who they are , just log into their social networks. Everyone is publishing content on these networks so it’s quite easy to see what they are doing.

Just know that they are also exploring a certain type of public in order to find their best clients and keep them happy,  and if your service or product is very similar to theirs, studying their followers will give you an idea.

It’s also is the chance to find out how you can differentiate from them , just in the case that you are moving in a small niche where your competition is stronger.

You can add your competitor’s Twitter, Facebook, Google+…  to a list and study their followers. You will want to look for data like gender, age, interests and their geographical info, but you’d better add as much data as you can to get precise.

Some social growth hacking tactics like creating a private list in Twitter and adding all of your competitors to it will help. You can then track their tweets and hashtags in order to see who their followers are. If they have lots of users this can take quite some time so automate this process as much as possible with tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, etc.

2. Create a nice survey

Surveys are easy to set  up and they can save you tons of time and money.

Select the most relevant questions regarding your product or service. These questions have to be user oriented. A good question is not a too direct one such as “What do you like best about our product( or product feature )? “, but one that indirectly can derive you with information as to what features are more suited for this type of client.  

An example of question can be : If you were to do a “type of task” how would you like to get it done?.

You can reward them with a free product, or a discount or anything, or tell them that your product will satisfy their needs and that this survey will help you to deliver to them the best product or service possible.

Publish this survey on sites and growth hacking groups relating to your niche of potential users.

People are eager to answer to surveys that give something back and that are visually attractive. If you have no time or resources for getting a good survey ready you can use a survey service that will pay them for answering it. You can find  here a list of paid survey providers. We recommend Typeform for an easy to use online survey design system too.

3. Select people who “Love” your product

Creating a social network page about your product is easy. This is a pre-launch page , and your potential users need to know where to find it. Let them subscribe to your newsletter and send them recurring news. Your main objective is to find people who love your product.

To find these people you will have to do some time investment. People will love anything that surrounds your product. If you have dancing dolphins around yes they will love these lovely animals, but will they love the actual product? Its very important that you don’t get lost in the marketing, because at the end it’s the user experience that will keep your customers coming back to you.

If you have some cash to invest in marketing, pay some Google Ad words or Facebook ads to get your page rolling. If you don’t, start by creating engaging content relating to your product everywhere you can for free like in bloggers sites, forums, other networks, etc. Get as many emails as you can from them to send your newsletters and info.

Of course this also works if you already have a product rolling and you want to get to know your best client for a new feature that you’d like to see implemented.  Get Likes, re tweets and comments to see the level of acceptance for this new feature.

One important thing which is a great growth hack is to get emails directly from social networks. You can direct this as a campaign to get key contacts in for example LinkedIn . You can use Scrab.in to do that and get a meeting appointment with key figures from potential clients or collaborating firms.

4. A/B Testing it like hell

So now that you have a good best client profile done its necessary to test if your bet is right.

To be sure about it. just do an A/B test and see if they are ready to pour in the cash. An A/B test is a way to compare two strategies, hypothesis or anything and see which gives a better result.

Send them an invitation to test two A/B versions of your site or product, in its beta phase.

Most people like to receive invitations to try something so there is a good probability that they’ll like to give it a try.

Pour as much creativity to your marketing as possible to make things happen. If your know their tastes and habits from their social profiles, your chances will increase 1000%.

5. Get to know them, send them emails with love

Every business startup’s dream is to get the best users or buyers coming to find them with no effort.

Once you’ve identified how they are then just continue creating campaigns to attract them. Target the best clients first, satisfy them and let them do the advertising for you. You will definitely reduce your advertising costs.

As I said they will become your ambassadors if you nurture your relationship with them to increase their engagement .

As told by global marketing influencer Aaron Ross in his book “Predictable revenue”, you can only grow a tree when you plant a seed , pour water to it and give the food it needs to grow. The best clients are like your seeds, you need love them , all the way up to the top.