Everything in marketing boils down to getting to know your target audience. SEO, user experience, conversions, content marketing—no matter what marketing tactic you employ, the more you understand about your target audience, the more effective you will be at capturing their attention and converting them into loyal customers and customers who refer others. But how do you go about getting to know your target audience?
Make use of Customer personas
Identify your key customer groups and develop detailed personas for them, including basic demographics such as gender, age, geographic region, education level, profession and income, as well as psychographics such as preferences, dissatisfactions, values, opinions, purchasing habits, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle, among other things.
Consult with your employees
Your customer service representatives and sales representatives deal with your customers on a daily basis, and they will have valuable insights. Instruct them to identify common customer problems and questions, as well as what customers like, dislike, want, and require. Identifying common customer problems and questions
Conduct Surveys
With simple tools such as SurveyMonkey, you can quickly and easily create a survey with questions designed to elicit important information about your customers’ demographics and purchasing preferences. If you want to encourage customers to participate in the survey, you might consider offering an incentive such as a prize or a special offer.
Keep an eye on social media and online review sites
Strategic social listening and monitoring of your online reputation are essential for understanding what your customers are saying about you and to you. Make use of alerts to notify you when your brand, your industry, or topics relevant to your business are mentioned online. This will allow you to learn more about your customers’ priorities and pain points.
Make use of keyword research
Unless you know exactly what your customers want, you will be unable to provide them with what they desire. Use of Google tools such as Keyword Planner, Trends, and even autocomplete to conduct keyword research can help you find relevant words and phrases that you can use to target your message and reach your ideal customer more effectively.
Make use of web analytics
If you look at the audience report in Google Analytics, you can learn a lot about the people who visit your site. You can learn things like their age and gender; location; interests; lifestyle; habits; and what they are looking for online.
View the competitors’ websites
Understanding your competitors’ customers can actually help you understand your own customers better, and it can also help you clarify your positioning, unique selling proposition, and what makes your business different from your competitors’.
A/B test is a type of experiment in which two options are tested against each other
When it came to creating the perfect landing page, call to action, or customer email, you used every tool in your customer-knowledge arsenal. But how do you know if it’s actually effective? When it comes to improving the effectiveness of your customer engagement efforts, A/B testing is a great tool to use. It is possible to test almost anything imaginable—design, tone, calls to action, contact or order forms. And so on—in order to determine which does a better job of connecting with your customers and making adjustments as needed.