Carving Out Your Brand’s Ideal Audience with Precision and Purpose
Understanding who your ideal customer is serves as the guiding compass for any successful marketing strategy. Small business owners, let’s use the Storytailors as a case study on how to clearly define your buyer personas. This client will not only love your brand, but also help it grow.
Step One: Begin with a Data-Driven Foundation
Data is the cornerstone of any robust marketing strategy. According to a recent survey from Invesp on the Importance of Influencer Marketing, 92% of marketing teams believe using data and analytics to inform decisions can enhance customer relationships and their bottom line.
To get started, first begin by analysing your current customers. This includes looking for commonalities amongst your potential clients. What does their demographics, pain points, and purchasing behaviour look like? At Storytailors, for instance, we saw that our most engaged users were small to medium-sized business owners looking for efficient, high-quality marketing video solutions. These insights allowed us to tailor our message and services to match that type of customer.
Step Two: Dive Into Psychographics
Demographics can tell you who your customer is, but psychographics reveal why they buy. For example, we understood that our target customer wasn’t just looking for video production services; they were looking for an affordable video production partner to help them create videos without expensive camera crews or equipment. They didn’t mind that we used AI to create marketing videos, they just wanted a video that told their brand story and make an emotional connection with their target market.
Using the knowledge that approximately 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service through video, as reported by HubSpot, we developed a message that would align with our clients’ purchasing decisions and desire for simplicity and effectiveness.
Step Three: Craft a Customer Persona
A customer persona is a semi-fictional character created to represent your ideal customer. It’s not just a faceless entity; it’s a detailed profile that includes challenges, goals, and behaviour patterns.
For example, Storytailors’ ideal buyer profile might be a blend of a real person and a fictitious company: ACME Trades. It looks something like this: “Owner Owen, the small-business owner of ACME Trades needs quality storytelling to reach prospective customers and boost his online presence but faces time and technical constraints.”
Once we’ve identified our persona, this becomes the focus of marketing campaigns and outbound sales efforts, ensuring that content and messaging are aligned with the target audience’s expectations.
Step Four: Analyse the Customer Journey
Each customer interacts with your brand through a unique path – the customer journey. Hootsuite defines customer journey maps as, “a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.
Hootsuite goes on to explain that, “There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:
- Inquiry or awareness
- Interest, comparison, or decision-making
- Purchase or preparation
- Installation, activation, or feedback”
This method of customer profiling goes way beyond basic demographics, education level, or job titles, it’s a method that the best digital marketing teams use to uncover their “perfect client’s” decision-making process. Why do this? To forge a deeper connection with your client base and skyrocket customer retention rates.
According to Salesforce, 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. We dissected our own customer journey, from awareness to consideration to decision, in order to align our buying process with the buying decision of future clients, ultimately guiding them toward conversion.
Step Five: Utilize Social Listening and Engagement
Social platforms are not just promotional tools; they’re goldmines for customer insights. Social listening can help you understand what your potential customers are talking about, their needs, and their feedback. At Storytailors, we use these platforms to engage with our audience, listen to their conversations, and adapt our offerings accordingly, a strategy that Sprout Social says “aligns with the 63% of marketers who agree social listening has increased in value.”
By actively engaging with our audience across platforms like Reddit, YoutTube, and LinkedIn, we’re able to gather valuable feedback and insights that shape our content strategy and product offerings. For example, after noticing a trend of customers expressing interest in brand marketing videos, we started incorporating more of this type of content into our social media strategy. This not only increased engagement but also helped our marketing efforts.
Step Six: Gather Behavioural Data
Behavioural data provides a deep dive into how customers interact with your brand online. Tools like Google Analytics, Fathom, or TWIPLA can show you which pages they visit, how long they stay, and what content they engage with. We pay close attention to this data to refine our sales process and ensure that we are reaching our ideal client with content designed to convert.
Step Seven: Establish Feedback Loops
Never underestimate the power of asking direct questions. Surveys, interviews, and feedback forms can be invaluable in defining your ideal customer. For Storytailors, regular communication with our customer base is helping to refine our understanding of their preferences, leading to better-targeted video solutions.
Putting Your Customer Research Into Action
Continuously Refine Your Ideal Customer Profile
Your ideal customer profile is not set in stone. As your business grows and the market evolves, so should your perception of your dream client. Storytailors keeps our finger on the pulse, continuously iterating our customer profile to adapt to changing market trends and technologies.
Take Actionable Steps
Armed with a clear ideal customer profile, it’s time to put that knowledge into action. Customize your marketing strategies, product development, and customer service to make a lasting connection with your audience. For Storytailors, this means producing video content that speaks directly to the needs of small-business owners, crafted to educate, engage, and convert.
Final Thoughts: Your Ideal Customer Awaits
Defining your ideal customer involves a blend of art and science. It’s an ongoing process of discovery, analysis, and refinement. Use our approach to inspire your own ideal client profiles. Once you understand the type of people you’re trying to reach, you can create marketing messages that delve deep into the hearts and minds of your potential customers. By building a clear image of who your ideal buyer is, you can tailor your offerings to meet their needs, ensuring your business resonates with the right audience.
Have the perfect customer in mind but need a marketing boost to make the connection? Think video. Think Storytailors.
