How to Identify Your Ideal Customers in 2024

Two totally random guys, Andrew and Toji, decided to go fishing for Tuna's in a very remote area. Andrew takes the lead by hitting the waters first, equipped with his fishing tools, while Toji heads towards the guides and asks them:

"Hello there fellas! Say I came here fishing for Tuna's, where d'you suppose I stick my fishing line?"

"I'm not an expert at these things, but I do see some local fishermen catch a few Tuna's, not too far from the river bank," one of the guides replied, "Isn't that so, Mike?"

"Yes. I know a bit about Tuna's and I've seen fishermen catch them easily close to dawn. Just don't stray too far from the riverbank when the time comes," Mike adds.

Andrew, who has been toiling all day far into the river, returns a few minutes to dawn with no Tuna, looking distressed and worn out. He sees that Toji has not caught any either so he feels some relief about his situation.

It is dawn and Toji does just as he was instructed. In a few minutes, he had caught the first Tuna. The minutes that follow earn him just enough Tuna's to make a point which leaves Andrew awestruck and dumbfounded.

Now this is the reality of target audiences. If you launch into business without a clear understanding of who your ideal customers are, you will definitely end up like Andrew—with no Tuna's! And it would not matter how much effort you put into it, as long as you are not marketing your products or services where your target market is, you will have very little to no conversions.

The biggest mistaken assumption that most small business owners and start-ups have is that everybody is their customer. There are about eight (8) billion people in the world, these people have different interests, preferences, personalities, beliefs, values and what have you—they cannot all possibly be interested in your business.

This is why you need to locate your target market and take your business where they are. Targeting your ideal customer is important to every business because it determines the marketing strategy of businesses. The reason being a good understanding of who your target audience are will give you an incling on how to craft a brand message that aligns with them.

A message that they can resonate with and will result in favourable outcomes. Take for instance; a business that is out to cater for teenagers will have to incorporate slang and expressions that represent the interests of the teenagers they seek to reach in their message, because that is the only way to get their attention.

Before we proceed, it is important that you have an accurate knowledge of what a target audience or ideal customer or buyer persona is.

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What is a Target Audience?

A target audience refers to the specific group of people whose needs a brand provides solutions to and can afford to pay for such goods and services. They are a small group of people out of the worlds population whose interests your business caters for and by their belief system are likely to buy from you. Just like the analogy of Tuna fishing in the opening paragraphs, your target audience are also determined by the locations in which they can be found and a number of other factors such as:

Age
Gender
Income
Marital Status
Profession
Values, among others.

Most persons use the terms target audience and target market interchangeably because of the close similarities they share. However, they differ by a little margin. Target audience are the specific groups of people whose needs your business profers solutions to while target market is the general market whose interests align with that of your business. For instance; the target audience of local finance organization are the well-to-do locals in the geographical area of such an organization for instance, Nigeria, while the total number of persons interested in managing their finances all over the world form the target market. Target audience—specific, target market—general.

How to Find your Ideal Customers

The task of knowing your target audience requires gathering a ton of data about them. You need data on their demographics, psychographics, and behaviors in order to better strategize your marketing scheme and messaging.

Demographics

This covers necessary information of basic things about your customers like their age, gender, location, hobbies, economic status, and interests. A proper demographics research will give you these basic information about your ideal customers and you can use the data generated from it to reprogram your marketing and messaging to better align with your target audience. It also helps you in generating your buyer persona.

Note: A brands message is the vision of a brand as well as its goals and objectives. It could also be the marketing goal of a business which has to align with its audience's interests.

Psychographics

Unlike demographics, psychographics does not focus on the physical qualities of your ideal customer, rather it places a premium on their mental or cognitive qualities. It generates data from such questions as:

How do your ideal customers think? This is important if you want to know how to channel your marketing.

What belief system do they have in common?
What values do they share?
What forms their understanding of the world?
What factors influence their purchases decisions?

Behaviours

It is important to understand how your ideal customer acts and react to things. These form important yardsticks in packaging your marketing strategy. They require you to ask questions as;

What will provoke a favourable response from your audience?
What kinds of subcultures do they share in common? These may include movies, music, mega stores they can relate to.
How do they react to change? Could be in terms of rebranding, repackaging of products, upgrade of customer service, price hike among others.
How likely are they to help their favourite brands spread the word?

If your business has a media presence, you can get these pieces of information about your target audience by leveraging sources like Google analytics—if you have a website, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. However, if your business is mainly physical, you can gather these information from relevant sources in the geographical area of your buyer persona.

Knowing which media platform your customers spend most of their time on will better inform your decision on ads placement. Also, knowing the times they are most active and the times they are not also go a long way in determining how you program your ads so that you can always reach your ideal customers at the best times and increase conversion rate.

How to Reach your Target Audience

Television: Television commercials may seem like an outdated marketing method in these age but they still prove to be very useful and convert well for many businesses. Mapping out your ideal customers through demographics and psychographics research will determine whether or not you use television commercials to implement your ads. For instance, if your target audience turn out to be families, it would not hurt to run commercials on TV shows that your ideal customers tune in to most of the time.
Radio: Knowing your ideal customer is knowing where they are and knowing where they are will help you determine what medium of communication to use in reaching them. If your target audience happen to be situated in a remote or rural area, sponsoring ads on radio stations would be a good way to reach them. Your target audience may not be people with access to advanced technology, in fact a fragment of your target audience may be domiciled in remote areas and you cannot afford to sideline them because of that. In such cases, radio broadcasts can serve as useful mediums for reaching your target audience.
Emails: Many people think that emails marketing is dead, but contrary to that opinion, emails are still very much effective because most businesses in the world today, invest heavily in email marketing and this is because their market research proves that emails resonate well with their target audiences. Hence they leverage its provisions. For instance, personalized emails mostly get a high click through rate compared to generalized ones. Overall, emails that resonate with the interests of your target audience are more likely to be opened than others, e.g., A business owner will most likely open an email that focuses on business growth or finance management.
Social Media: Social media has come to become the most used media platform compared to emails, SMS, TVs and radios. Hence, if you want to reach a larger number of your ideal customers, you need to leverage the provisions of social media marketing. Needless to say that your target audience's preferences must be taken into consideration before setting up social media marketing campaigns. Preferences in terms of times they go online, how long they spend, pages they visit often, people they follow, contents they interact with among others play crucial roles in determining how you set up your ads.
Posters: Posters are still effective means of marketing especially for physical or brick and mortar businesses. Businesses that have no internet presence or those that have and are willing to connect with their local audiences can leverage posters to create awareness of their brands and also reach out to their target audience by carrying messages that reflect their interests. For instance, if you are planning to host an event in an area for the locals, it is only reasonable that you use posters to create awareness for the program.
Billboards: Billboards were and are still effective agents of marketing. The more people you can get to see your ads, the higher your chances of conversion. However, you need to do a background research on the people that ply the areas you intend to place your billboard ads. You might want to ask questions about their interests, incomes, statuses to mention a few as these will guide you in formulating your marketing strategy. For instance, if your research proves that majority of the person's that ply the road you intend to place a billboard advert in are employees, and your target audience are employees, it will be useful to go ahead with the ads especially for long term benefits.
One-on-one Marketing: One-on-one marketing still works. Even though it is now one of the least patronized mediums of advertising owing to the fact that everyone has supposedly gone digital. It still converts well for businesses that incorporate it in their marketing scheme. One-on-one marketing involves marketers having brief meetings with the target audience of business and trying to sell them the values of the products of such businesses. Although it is an enduring process, it tends to pay long term. For instance, banks still dispatch marketers to their local target audiences to sell the services of such banks to them and in the end, have them open accounts with the banks.
Sponsoring events: Though it tends to be a long term conversion process, it is still an effective means of advertising. Sponsoring events and having your brand logos displayed on their red carpets are great ways to create awareness for your brand. This is especially if such events align with the interests of your target audience—now you see how the dots connect. Take brands like Nike for instance, constantly sponsoring sports events because of their major products are sports shoes which resonates with the interests of their target audience—football enthusiasts. While sponsoring events is a useful method for creating awareness for your business, it is also important that you do a background research on the audience that will be interacting with such events to know whether or not it would be advisable to proceed with such means of advertising.

Understanding that your business is not meant to cater for the needs of everybody is the first step to achieving success in marketing. It makes you understand that not everybody is your ideal customer and that your target audience are a small and specific group of people whose interests align with the message of your business, or people whose interests you must ensure aligns with your brand message. The next step is to understand their psychographics and behaviors before concluding on which medium of communication to use in reaching out to them be it Television broadcast, Radio, Social media to reach them. Knowing who your target audience are will help your business to formulate better marketing strategies that centre on their interests thus increasing conversion rate and leading to success.