Publisher, Creative, Strategist
If you are a brand or start-up, how often does this happen to you – having an amazing product or service, but you still fail to get noticed by your customers? You think you’re applying the right marketing strategies, you’ve fixed loopholes and made changes, but the customers you dreamt of never seem to appear. It’s a common problem faced by entrepreneurs and one of the major factors that contribute to losing revenue. Misidentifying your target customer base is an epidemic in business. The only solution – going back to the drawing board to understand your customers.
All businesses have customers, but the critical question is, do you know them well? In my previous articles, I explained branding and its elements. Long story short, branding is a feeling someone gets when they interact with your product or service, and that “someone” is none other than your customers. You must understand that the mass audience are not all like-minded individuals. To increase customer acquisition and retention, it’s recommended that you segment your audience to understand and target wisely. Profiling the customer before reaching out to them will not only increase your revenue but will also help you serve them better (since you understand their motivations and hence their needs) and create an experience for them to come back again.
To know your ideal customers, you need to start by asking the right questions:
- Who are your customers?
- What are their needs?
- How is your solution making their lives or businesses better?
If you smartly subset your customers before targeting them with ads, you will be able to make informed marketing decisions and obtain a better response rate. For your marketing efforts to pay off, divide your marketing process into four steps to ensure you follow them all.
The four steps at a glance, are:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Need (or Problem)
- Solution
Demographics
Demographics are basic quantifiable facts about your customers, such as their name and user archetype, along with age, gender, income, location, and other facts. To get your product or service to the right customers, create a persona by narrowing them down with specific questions/questionnaire. For example
- How old are my customers?
- Are they married?
- Do they have children?
- Where do they live?
- What work do they do?
- Are they employers or employees?
- Is it C-suite or manager?
- How much do they earn?
- What automobile do they drive?
Customizing your customers based on these traits will narrow the funnel, providing a foundation for you to follow through with the next steps.
Psychographics or Creating A Story
The user story is the psychographic information that separates the audience based on their personalities. Different traits under this segment include values, opinions, attitudes, interests, lifestyle, and challenges that drive them – their life story. Your marketing strategies can be altered to cater to these core values such as:
- What does a day look like in their life?
- Are they hardworking, family-oriented, stylish, or love taking care of health?
- Are they into physical exercise like playing tennis, swimming or running?
- Are they into entertainment like movies, or do they enjoy traveling instead?
- Do they work from home or go to the office?
Depending on your product or service, create a story of your customers that revolves around your product or service. Your story should feature you as the ‘solution giver’, and every time your customers face a problem, your product or service should be the first to pop in their heads.
Profiling the customer before reaching out to them will not only increase your revenue but will also help you serve them better
User Needs
People always look for means to lead a convenient, hassle-free life. And that’s what your priority must be – to fulfill your customer’s needs and ease their challenges. Identify these from the psychographics and understand what they need from you. Where there is a need, there is a quest for a solution.
Solution to Their Needs
Now, identify how you can meet these needs and exceed their expectations by fitting the benefits of your product and service. For instance – Problem: Housewives tired of handing daily chores? Solution: Rejuvenating spas with a beautiful ambiance to uplift the soul!
Once you have done proper research, you can perfectly accommodate each segment and accurately understand their motivations. Make at least 4-5 customer profiles to see how your product relates to their needs and provide solutions. Depending on your creative streak, you can make multiple profiles of your customer base.
Every product is created to cater to the market space. There is a customer for every product. Once you have segmented your customers, you intuitively know what your marketing objectives should be. Having clarity about your purpose and whom you have created a solution for makes it easier to identify your ideal customer. And once you are good to go, you can create campaigns by writing content, marketing, and advertising based on your customer profile to help you reach your ideal customer and open doors for growth and expansion.
Netflix, the world’s most popular video streaming company has attracted millions of Millennials so perfectly! And how was it able to reach its right audience? Netflix recognized the evolving lifestyles of Millennials that love sharing trending content with friends and has used its social settings and features to appease them with the best mix of marketing techniques. By evolving right alongside Millennials, Netflix continues to successfully advertise its brand even to the non-subscribed individuals.
Indian television regularly features an ad for Harpic toilet cleaner, where a celebrity enters the home of a middle-class family and demonstrates the simple and effective use of the product to kill germs. Harpic was ahead of the curve, astutely understanding the market and the concerns of their customer in rural and urban areas. Creating awareness across cities and villages captured the market so well that Harpic is also driving a campaign of “Swachh Bharat” (“Clean India”) to promote cleanliness and sanitation in the country.
Knowing your customer well makes it easy to sell the product and services, increases the revenue and market share, gives you creative space to come up with more possible solutions for your user, and create a tribe of your own. From understanding your customer’s story, you weave your own, setting a standard for yourself. After all, an idea emerges to change and make easier the lives of people.
You can reach Sumeet at [email protected]
1 Comment
Kellen Aguilar
Kellen Aguilar