How to Find Your Ideal Customer
Narrowing down your target audience
Finding your ideal customer is one of the most important steps to creating a brand and business that generates a loyal following. While it’s tempting to try and appeal to everyone, you’ll find more success if you instead define a narrow target audience and focus on tailoring your marketing and design to them.
What is a target audience?
Your target audience is the group of customers who want your product or service. They are the people who are most likely to seek out (and ultimately purchase) your offering.
While you might imagine that your product or service would benefit a large group of people, it’s best to keep your target audience narrow and specific.
Instead, when you define a very specific audience, you create a brand that is uniquely and perfectly tailored to that audience — when they see your brand, they feel like you’re speaking directly to them. It grabs their attention and forms a deeper connection with them. This is exactly what you want your brand to do!
How to engage with different segments of your audience
To narrow down your target audience even further, you can use audience segmentation to create distinct groups within your target audience. These groups might be defined by location, how many previous purchases they’ve made with you, whether or not they’re newsletter subscribers, whether they came to your brand after a specific marketing campaign, and more. Segmentation lets you get laser-focused with your everyday marketing efforts (tailoring your email newsletter to just your customers in Chicago, for example).
A great way to naturally segment your target audience is by being active on a variety of social media channels. Most social media platforms serve somewhat unique demographics (Facebook, for example, tends to skew toward older audiences more than TikTok). By having your brand present on a variety of channels, you can experiment with tailoring your language even further to the unique slice of your audience that’s present on that app.
Finding your target audience
The best way to find your target audience is to examine who is already buying your product or service. Check Google Analytics to get data on who is visiting your website, and check social media analytics dashboards as well. Look for patterns in the data — are a ton of your Instagram followers men in their 20s or women located in Minneapolis, for example?
Another great way to build your target audience is to examine your competitors. If they’re offering a similar product to yours, who are they targeting? What language are they using? Who does it seem like they’re trying to appeal to?
You can also brainstorm who you imagine your target audience to be. Ask yourself, “Who most needs what I have to offer?” Start by identifying their pain points, and then identify which groups of people tend to have those pain points the most.
Note that finding your target audience isn’t something you can check off a list and be done with. You must refine it constantly as you learn more and get new data.
How to make audience personas
Once you’ve found your target audience, you’re going to want to find ways to help communicate that information to the rest of your marketing team (and keep it top of mind). The best way to do that is to create an audience persona.
An audience persona is a fictional character that serves as a representative of your audience. In the persona, you should list out demographic information, where they work, what their hobbies are, where they shop, what their pain points are, what their goals are, who they follow on social media, and more.
How your target audience affects your design and brand strategy
Once you’ve identified and defined your target audience, you can use that knowledge to tailor your marketing and branding strategy to them. When you’re creating your design, you should always be asking: what will resonate most with my audience? What other brands do they enjoy and interact with most? How do they speak, and how can we emulate that?
What all these questions seek to do is help you understand your audience better — and demonstrate that understanding through your branding and marketing.
Brands who speak their customers language have strong attachments with their audience creating long-term relationship with them.
Finding a target audience isn’t easy, and neither is creating a design that makes them feel deeply understood. Working with a professional, though, makes this process seamless. If you’re ready to find your ideal customer and create a branding strategy that resonates with them, let’s work together!