5 Ways to Learn About Your Target Customer

You'd be amazed to learn how many businesses out there don't actually know their target market. They're pushing out products and services without the slightest clue about who they are catering to. This also means any marketing initiatives they pursue are fruitless. If the owner doesn't have an idea of the target customer, then you can be sure the sales department doesn't know either. This is a concern that every small business needs to address. The experts at Corporate Business Solutions can perform a full-company analysis to help identify things like this.

One way to determine if your company is on point is to ask your head of sales who the target customer is. They will likely have an answer for you, but is it the correct one? Do they understand why that is the target market? How about the issues this market is facing? What distrusts and trusts do they have? What do members of this audience fear, love, loathe or anticipate?

Without being knowledgeable about the psychology of your target customer, whatever demographics you have are just mere semantics. If you really want to ensure your marketing is effective, you need to learn as much as possible about your audience better.

The following tips can be used to help you get more acquainted with your target customer.

Always Challenge Your Assumptions

Never trust your assumptions. Rather than assuming your audience is the middle-aged man, ask yourself why? If you can't answer that, then you have some digging around to do. Halt any advertising you have geared towards that market until you have solid data to back it. Refrain from using anecdotal evidence alone, you need hard facts.

Corporate Business Solutions can help remove some of the guess work by analyzing your company for weaknesses and suggesting improvements.

Look Over Case Studies

You can find a variety of case studies available within your industry, which can be used to learn from those before you. You can read through their psychological analyses written by marketers in the same field. Sociologists may have also put out case studies worthy of reading.

Develop a Customer Persona

After you have collected a variety of data about your prospects, you can begin building customer personas. You want to begin with solid conclusions and objective data. This is a fictional character that will help depict who your audience is. It's the average member of your audience. Some of the facts you want to include are sex, age, income and education level. Other important factors include sensitivity, curiosity and temperament.

Conduct Small and Large-Scale Quantitative Surveys

Whatever assumptions you make can be confirmed using large-scale quantitative surveys. These should cover the widest cross-section of your target audience. Make the questions multiple-choice, so that you can gather hard stats about the habits of your audience. The questions you ask should be related to your brand and product, like “How important is x to you?” or “What do you consider most when buying a x?”

You can then complement your large-scale surveys with smaller ones. The data from these won't be as objective, however, you'll have more detailed insights about your customers' psychological makeup. In these surveys, you want to target a small group within your audience and ask open-ended questions rather than multiple-choice, like “What does this mean to you?”

Analyze Your Competition

They may have already done a great deal of research that can be used by your organization. This will cut down some of the footwork and get you on the path to effectively marketing to your prospects. Pay attention to how successful competitors are speaking to that crowd and how they react to marketing messages.

The consultants at Corporate Business Solutions work with small and medium businesses across America. CBS offers consulting services, tax planning services and business valuations.