Embarking on an online marketing campaign or website development project for your Calgary business without a solid understanding of your target audience is basically a lot of wasted effort. To maximize your marketing investment, you not only need to know where you want to sell your product. You want to know who wants to buy it.
Finding Your Best Customers
If you already have an active social media presence, you can use your online following as your starting guideline. These people are already interested in you, and the information they provide is invaluable for creating a detailed customer profile. From them you can determine:
- The average age of your target market
- The gender ratio
- Their average income level
- Where they are located
You might even be able to figure out what sorts of occupations are most common, as well as marital status and whether they have children, all of which can help you keep providing the best service and ideal products.
You could also send a direct solicitation to your customers. Hopefully you have customer relationship management tool (CRM) that has allowed you to collect emails and contact information. Send out an email asking for a little more information. Provide an incentive, such as a coupon or discount, and make sure to reassure the recipient that you would never share their information and that everything is safely stored and secure.
A survey is also a great way to get to know who you are providing services to, and can also be incentivized to encourage participation.
Focus groups are also beneficial. A trained professional, someone who knows how to ask questions in order to elicit the best response, should run these. One-on-one interviews can also give you access to interesting insights and as well as build confidence in your business.
Use What Others Have Done Before You
Analyze what your competitors are doing in terms of online marketing. You can take advantage of the research they have already carried out. If they are seemingly successful at engaging the right kind of customer, you can either use a similar technique or else tailor a different one towards a market that is being overlooked.
Get Detailed
You can actually figure out your target market quite effectively without ever having to talk to anyone. Make a list of the products you sell and the benefits they provide or problems they solve. From there you can derive the type of person you should be trying to focus on. For example, if the products you sell tend to make life a little easier at home, you may want to target towards busy parents. Or if you work with software that is meant to help businesses keep organized, the owner of a small start-up or entrepreneur is where you should be directing your attention.
More Your Customer Relationship Management Tool Can Do
CRMs can be formatted so that you know everything from how you first made contact with a lead to how you closed your first customer. By properly analyzing this sort of data you can effectively determine your ideal target market, which will tell you where you should be concentrating your ad-buying efforts.
As well as keeping track of all customer and sales information, a CRM tool can also provide valuable data on what products people are buying most, which ones are brought back often (and therefore are probably not worth it to keep in stock), and buying trends, such as what products may be picking up steam in popularity. With enough data about the past, you can also make better predictions about what customers will want in the future. This data also allows you to understand what’s working, what’s not, and what you can do to improve performance, so study away!
Use Social Media to Your Advantage
Engaging effectively in social media in Calgary is about creating community; it doesn’t mean joining every site out there and constantly promoting your business. By focusing your efforts and staying consistent, you can become a recognized and valued member of important online communities, which will create an enthusiastic pool of potential customers for your online business.
Final Questions to Ask Yourself
Once you’ve figured out who your ideal target market is, ask yourself the following questions just to make sure you haven’t missed anything that could throw a wrench into your business plan.
- Are there enough people in your target market to sustain your business, even with competition?
- Are you providing products and services that offer real value to your clients?
- Do you know what drives your target market to make consumer decisions?
- Is your product or service affordable to them?
- Will your marketing efforts be able to reach them? In other words, do you know how to find them?
If you answered a confident “yes” to each of these questions, then you’re well on the way to developing a tactical and streamlined inbound marketing and communications plan.
Emphasize Design are Your Calgary Inbound Marketing Experts
Calgary inbound marketing allows you to cut through the noise and target a core audience by offering them useful content that will draw them in and encourage them to learn more about your business’ products and services. It brings the qualified prospects to you. Technology made outbound marketing less effective, but inbound marketing relies on it. A successful inbound marketing campaign requires a responsive, well-designed website, social media engagement and effective brand reputation management. Contact Emphasize for more information today!
