The fourth step in identifying your ideal customer, your target market, is to look into where your customers do their research.
Watch the video for an explanation.
This step can be quite time consuming. We recommend allowing a few to several hours to complete this step. You may wish to break your research up over a number of days.
If you haven’t already done so, you can download the Course workbook in the Materials section.
Note: you need to watch the video to be able to mark this module as complete and progress to the next module.
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome back.
We are up to the stage of looking at where your ideal customers, your target market, play. Where do they do their research on who can help solve their problems?
Now, there’s a number of ways that you can do this.
One of the things to understand is the type of customer, that they are your demographics may come into play here. So if you look at the industry that they work in. Someone who works in the corporate world is potentially more likely to be, say, on LinkedIn than someone who is in the fashion industry, who is more likely to be probably on Instagram, which is a much more visual platform.
So your first part is to think about that aspect of that. The values again, of your ideal customer will come into play there, but your demographics around age, industry, that type of thing will also come into play.
So how to find out the way your ideal customer is playing.
Well, one of the things that you can do is, and there’s a list as you can see here, search through relevant hashtags and keywords. Instagram is great for that, so you can see who, then the platforms that are using those hashtags. And you can then delve in and look at the type of people who are following those businesses and identify if they’re your ideal customer as well, if they look like your ideal customer. So it’s a way of identifying if they’re on Instagram or not.
Look at your successful competitors and see where they’re active. If their target market is the same is same as yours, and usually if they’re a competitor that will be the case. Where are they active? Are they on Facebook? Are they on TikTok? Where are they actually being active?
And the same with aligned industries as well. So industries that you might be able to, or businesses you may be able to collaborate with, look at where they are active as well.
The other way is to run some polls on your socials. So if you already have a number of pages set up, if you’re on Facebook and on Instagram and on LinkedIn and on TikTok and on Snapchat, run some polls and just see. Ask people which platform they prefer. And the responsiveness of those polls will also give you an indication of whether your target market is playing there.
Ask your existing customers.
So you have that list 10. Talk to them and ask them which social media platforms they are on. That’s a pretty easy one for you to do, especially if you’ve got good relationships with those customers, which I imagine you will have, given they’re on your list of 10 ideal, most profitable customers you love to work with.
Facebook and LinkedIn give you opportunities to join groups. So, you can join into those groups, connect and engage. Comment in those groups and see the type of people who are active in those groups and whether they would be your ideal customer. If they are, then they’re platforms that you should be engaging with.
Another one it’s important it’s to look at your Google analytics. Google analytics can give you some great insights into where your traffic to your website is coming from and why, particularly in the social media space.
And check if you’ve got links to your social media platforms on your emails. Check which ones get clicked on the most. That gives you some indication as well.
And use your insights. So again, if you’re on existing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, they give you some pretty good data. Again, look at that and identify which platforms that you ideal customers are going to be playing on.
And then you can circle the appropriate answers below. Now, you will see down here we have some non-social media answers, so to speak. The reason that they’re there is if you ended up with a lot of people saying, local chamber or newspapers, magazines, radio, television, then chances are your ideal customers actually aren’t on social media. And that’s when you would question whether you actually should be focusing your time there rather than in those more traditional spaces.
So there you go. Your next exercise is to go and find out and do some research. Find out where your ideal customer is playing. Good luck.
