How to Build a Laser-Targeted Audience for Success
Digital marketing success hinges on your ability to efficiently use the tools and knowledge at your disposal. The days of plentiful organic traffic are in the past. Successfully competing in your niche requires an intimate knowledge of your prospective customers' needs.
While some customers will find their way to you on their own, achieving sustainability for your business depends on advertising. However, throwing money at advertising campaigns without understanding your target market is a recipe for failure.
The Digital Marketing Trap
When online juggernauts like Google and Facebook first rolled out their advertising platforms, the competition for ad space was low and clicks were cheap. In these nascent circumstances, small businesses can afford to build their brands on small budgets. It's like an ocean to yourself where fish are so plentiful that you barely need to cast a net.
Many entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to start successful businesses due to the cost-effective way of generating leads. Paying pennies on the dollar for advertising makes successful entrepreneurs out of anyone with some savings and an ambitious spirit. Finding customers on platforms like Google and Facebook is easy when you can show your products and services to thousands of users for pocket change.
With time, however, these tech giants need to grow at rapid rates to cover their expenses and satisfy their shareholders. For example, Google has a trillion-dollar market cap that is the product of annual growth that often exceeds 20%. This is only sustainable by expanding their service offerings and seeking new markets.
The tactic big tech organizations employ is to acquire smaller companies with large audiences. Facebook was already a massive company when it bought Instagram in 2012. However, the photo-sharing website allows Facebook to apply its advertising-based business model to Instagram's large audience.
Eventually, big tech companies charge more for their ad space in order to support the growth necessary for their survival. This means that business owners that rely on advertising can be priced out of this client-getting source.
How to Thrive
Succeeding in an increasingly competitive digital space requires some growth hacking. Becoming more efficient in your customer acquisition will allow you to achieve economies of scale. A loyal clientele will keep your business sustainable and help you grow your business. It will also help you build a solid understanding of who your ideal customer is. Knowing your target audience and tailoring your advertising to them will drive down your costs and increase conversion rates.
Creating a Customer Avatar
A customer avatar is a detailed profile of your business's ideal customer. Without categorizing people into groups, an avatar analyzes the characteristics of this ideal customer in as much detail as possible.
Your customer avatar should include demographics such as age, gender, marital status, interests, profession and anything that will be relevant to your relationship with them. Do they have children? What do they do in their free time? Anything you can list about your ideal customer will come in handy when implementing your digital marketing.
How to Build Customer Avatar
Different types of people will purchase your products or services but your ideal customers are those that will drive growth. Creating a customer avatar depends on your ability to find the type of person whose pain-points your business solves best.
Build a persona that you can visualize. You can even go as far as creating a cartoon version of your avatar. Alternatively, you can use a photo of a person that is best represents this ideal customer. The goal is to empathize with them and understand their needs on a deeper level.
Example of Customer Avatar
Let's talk about an example from our client list. We work with a business that offers a service for parents with children under the age of ten. They offer a service that redefines a child's experience of a common tradition. The business's goal is to create an experience that children will remember for years to come. This business stimulates children's imaginations while creating a family binding experience.
An average entrepreneur with such a business might simply end their ideal customer profile there: parents with young children. However, a customer avatar is much more specific and provides invaluable insights.
In this example, market testing shows that mothers of young children are more likely to purchase this product. We then drill down further into the data to determine whether the ideal customer is a stay-at-home mom or a full-time working mother.
This discrepancy can make all the difference in creating our customer avatar. Stay-at-home moms may have more time to bond with children but a working mother may fit the avatar better. A mother that doesn't have the time to organize bonding activities with her child at home may experience mom-guilt. This is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiousness felt by mothers that worry they are falling short in their maternal roles.
If the ideal customer is a working mother with limited time at home, we can tailor our message to her. This increases our conversion rate and allows the business to compete focusing on their unique product.
Avoiding the Fear of Loss
FOMO is the abbreviation for Fear Of Missing Out. It is a concept prevalent in investing as well as marketing. FOMO is a fear of loss that can often lead to poor choices for business owners.
Think of it as an excessive preoccupation with opportunity costs. FOMO is like trying to watch two or three different television programs simultaneously by channel surfing. When all is said and done, you will miss out on all of them since you didn't dedicate your time to one experience.
This fear of loss is therefore a problem of attention. Your success depends on focusing your resources on the prospects that will maximize efficiency.
Mitigating this fear of loss is one of the main benefits of creating a customer avatar for your business. By focusing on your ideal customer, you will avoid targeting a wider audience than is sustainable for your marketing budget.
In our example, imagine if the business owners decided to advertise to mothers, fathers, grandparents and daycare centers. This would spread their marketing budget thin while showing ads to users that aren't the main decision-makers.
Choose Proper Channel
Now that you have your customer avatar, you need to begin generating leads by advertising to your audience. The biggest marketing budget in the world will not bring results if you are spending it on channels that your audience does not frequent.
Finding and prioritizing all available channels will ensure you achieve sustainable growth for your business. In our next post, we'll deal with how to pinpoint the channels that will boost your results.