One of the biggest challenges of opening a brand new company is finding out who their core customer group or target audience is. After all, a company can’t target everyone on earth. The only way a small company can hopefully compete with its larger rivals is to target a niche market.
A core or target audience refers to the certain group or type of people you’re selling your product/service to. The specific group is sometimes referred to as demographics, including teenagers, young adult males in their 20s, parents or grandparents, interests, behaviors, and location, among other factors.
So, without wasting any further time, let’s look at how you can determine your core customer group.
How to Determine Your Core Group of Customers
1. Who is Your Core Audience?
The first step in determining who your target audience is, comes with finding out who the people can identify with your brand.
One way of doing this is to monitor the likes, follows, comments, and shares on your social media posts from platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. If there is someone who wants to engage with you, then that’s your target.
But in some cases, your core group of customers might not always be available on social media. This isn’t to say that they aren’t always online, but may still be able to buy from you from your official website or sign up for your newsletter.
Some customers that have bought from your place once in the past can be considered part of your core audience. In other words, these are people who may potentially buy from you again in the future.
But just because you’ve made your first sale doesn’t mean your job is done. The thing about a business is that it always has to be willing to offer their products/services to their audience from time to time and ensure that the user experience isn’t diminished but rather multiplied.
Your customers would want to feel special, which is why establishing a post-sale process is crucial. Above all, customer relationships have to remain even after the completion of a purchase.
2. Look and Understand Your Brand’s Selling Points
Every product or service has been made or established to fulfil a customer’s need, including your own. The sad part is that most inexperienced businesses fall short in understanding the purpose of their own products. To be frank, these businesses fail to comprehend the problems that their products are supposed to solve and understand why people would want to buy them in the first place.
So, in order to appease your core audience, you need to:
- Talk about what your product/service does and what kind of problems it can solve. Try summing this up in about 2 to 3 small sentences.
- List all of your product’s features. Brainstorm a variety of benefits that those features can offer. Lastly, list the number of ways those benefits can solve your customer’s problems.
- Research the kind of people who experience such problems. Doing this will give you a clue about your target audience.
3. Find Out Where Your Audience Finds Their Daily Information From
When hunting for your potential target audience, you also need to determine where they get their daily information source. These information sources can be just about anything, from newspapers, magazines, and online blogs, instead of the usual social media channels that most of the world’s public commonly frequent.
Identify those communication channels that your core group of customers find most appropriate and then try to engage them in a language and manner that they’re familiar with.
4. Use Social Listening
One way of getting ahead of the competition is to understand what your target audience is saying about your business, the industry you’re in, and the product/service you provide. You can do this by monitoring relevant hashtags and keywords, even if your company isn’t tagged.
This is a very practical approach in finding your core audience on social media, even if they are not following you as of right now.
Social listening can also be used for deeper audience research. By monitoring specific hashtags and keywords, you might be able to discover other types of relevant hashtags and keywords, preferably the ones that your audience uses. After finding those hashtags, you can add them to your social posts so you can broaden your reach to even more target users.
5. Use Google Analytics
If there’s one sure way of finding out who your core group of customers is, it’s by using Google Analytics. Not only does it provide juicy details about demographics, but it can also let you know about your audience’s interest as well.
Using Google Analytics, you’ll have access to a plethora of critical insights and information that’s broken down into several sections, including gender, location, and age. These sections have been clearly labeled on the user’s dashboard and come with colorful graphs for better illustration.
6. Use Facebook Insights
If your company has a Facebook page, then you would definitely want to use this step to your advantage. Facebook offers a wide range of insights to any page for free.
These insights don’t just show the location of demographics, but also interests and integrations with other social media channels such as Twitter or Instagram. These insights also let you know about your audience’s lifestyle like whether they purchase items online or not.
Insights such as these can give you the edge in tailoring a more appropriate campaign for your target audience. Therefore, it’s an extremely useful feature to look into if you have a Facebook page.
I hope you learned something from this article. If you have any question, please let me know.
Keep safe!
