In the most recent episode of my podcast, Building Success Stories, I discuss the “Why” step of my system, “How to Get in Front of the Right People.” After you’ve gathered the demographic and more practical information about your target audience, I suggest you look at their “Why.” What drives your ideal customer to take action and make decisions? How will your offer help that person fulfill their “Why?” Looking at the “WHY” of your target audience is key to reaching your ideal customer.
Why Consider the “Why” of Your Target Audience
- When creating business strategies and working on marketing and sales, It is sometimes easy to forget that your prospects and customers are individuals with real aspirations, needs, and desires. If considering their “Why” is part of your process, you will not lose sight of the individual.
- Knowing and understanding what drives your target audience will give you deeper insight into the Who, What, Where, and How to best reach, engage, and sell to your ideal client.
- With their “Why” in consideration, the language you use in your content will more effectively communicate to your audience.
- You will find a greater variety of methods to reach and engage your target audience, most likely more effective methods that your competition hasn’t yet discovered.
- Your content will show your understanding of the reader and will more likely earn their trust.
- When the needs of your audience are more sensitive, understanding the “Why” will allow you to more effectively show compassion, rather than pity.
How to Discover the “Why” of Your Target Audience
- Consider your own “Why?” Is it likely to also be what motivates your target audience?
- Listen. What information can you glean from conversations (emails, phone calls, and in-person chats) with existing customers and prospects?
- Ask. Create surveys, hold focus groups, start relevant conversations in Facebook Groups, Reddit, etc.
- Take a 360-degree look at the life of your ideal audience. Whether your offer is related to their personal or professional lives, you need to understand both and how it relates to what you offer.
- Connect with people with insight into your target audience: industry and regional bodies, businesses that complement yours, academic advisors, HR professionals, counselors, etc.
3 Steps to Get Started Now
- Review the information you already have on your target audience and organize it into meaningful categories or by segment of your target audience.
- Establish a system to gather relevant information as you go along – screenshots, links, survey data, etc.
- Set up a survey with relevant questions to send to a group you can access that most closely reflects your target audience: mailing list, existing customers, social media connections, networking group, etc.
Use these steps to gain a better understanding of the individuals in your target market so you are more likely to reach, engage, and sell to these individuals.
For more discussion on this topic, listen to Episode 6 of my podcast, Business Success Stories:
Read More: Tools for Market Research
