Knowing your audience and what makes you unique

Knowing who your customers are and why they should come to you is a crucial cornerstone of your marketing. It will allow you to work out how to reach them, talk to them, what to tell them, and importantly how to appeal to them.

It’s fair to say long-standing businesses will be able to draw customer insight from sales history and customer data. But often this can be skewed by how they run their marketing. If you fish in a small pond, this will reflect what your typical customer looks like. But when you are a small business, it’s essential to identify your target customer so that you can run successful, cost-effective marketing.

As a small business, competing with the big businesses will be hard. This is where you need to understand how you stand out from the crowd. That differentiating factor will be core to your messaging and will enable you to focus your marketing efforts on certain channels. Also, try to align yourself with a niche group of customers, attempting to sell to everyone will leave you susceptible to marketing that does not cut through and doesn’t provide the necessary returns. This is especially important for new businesses.

So where do you start? Ask, ask, and ask some more. Use social media to engage with your audience to ask questions and ask for feedback. Use surveys and look at customer reviews. Host events and find ways to interact with your customers. Review competitors and be honest with yourself. Look at who has bought from you so far and understand what they have in common, or whether there are a few distinct homogenous customer groups.

Then, overlayed with some defining questions, you can start to plan your marketing. Do your customers live in a certain area? What do they like about you? What forms of media do they use and respond to?

All this will enable you to address your customers’ needs, using channels that will reach them, and form the basis of your marketing strategy.

If you want to have a chat about this or any other part of your marketing, contact us today!