WHO are your clients? WHERE can I get information about them? AND WHAT to do with this information? In this article I will tell you how, and most importantly, where to find clients for your business.
The power of living portraits
Let me give you an example of deep work on audience analysis. There is a man Valery, he is 32 years old. You want to sell him something through social networks. This is the entire portrait of the target audience, which is visible on the surface. Now let’s look deeper.
We choose the time to place targeted advertising so that Valery will definitely see it. Most now thought: we’ll post it at lunchtime – Valery is on his lunch break, he’ll be scrolling through social networks, or on the way home, while he’s on the subway or stuck in a traffic jam.
What if Valera Internet marketer or a freelance journalist? He just starts his work day at lunchtime and ends after midnight. What if he is a foreman at a factory and they don’t have access to the Internet there? Or a surgeon who spends 8 hours performing an operation… And in general, there is no metro in his city, and traffic jams are small compared to central cities. What happened? They didn’t hit the target, Valera wasn’t caught. Because there is not enough data.
It also often happens that Valera is not the final consumer at all. Or not the one who makes decisions in their family. His wife chooses men’s shirts or perfume for him. And there was no point in looking for Valera on social networks; it was better to look for his wife, who was sitting at home on maternity leave. And this is a completely different story.
Different attributes for different target audience segments
It is important to understand and take into account that for different target audiences the same attributes will have different degrees of significance and presence in the product. Let’s continue the example about Valera – he needs to buy a sofa, which he chooses not on his own, but together with his family.
Nuclear service is an object to sit on. For a teenage daughter whose friend comes to spend the night, the folding mechanism will be an important parameter. The wife will be pleased with the removable cover that can be washed. And Valera will like the sofa model with a built-in bar – a small thing, but nice.
It is important for a sofa seller to identify the needs of each target segment and convey the necessary values to them. And for this, find out who Valera is and with whom he chooses this sofa. I’m explaining it in an exaggerated way, but the essence should be clear.
A correct and detailed client portrait is a powerful tool in the hands of marketers. And these are not just beautiful plates with detailed descriptions, they are precisely a tool for managing demand and sales results.
How to collect information?
Collecting information about target audience is the most labor-intensive process. Frankly, at this stage most people who want to put things in order with the target audience stop. The whole process consists of 4 stages:
- Collect factual information about users.
- Collect behavioral information about users.
- We generate insights for the target audience.
- Collecting behavioral information and statistics.
Where to collect information? Here are the options. I’ll say right away – it’s optimal when all of them are used:
- Let’s go “to the fields” and do our own research. We survey our customers, observe customers in a competitor’s store, ask people to test your product.
- Let’s go to social networks. Study the pages of your clients and think with facts, not stereotypes.
- Let’s go to Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica. Use open data
- Read statistics and market research.
- We conduct surveys. Everything is simple here. If you want to know something, ask.
- We study trends. Life hack: see the dynamics of requests and evaluate demand trends and its seasonality.
- We study competitors. A great option is to become a client of your main competitors and study their product yourself. But it doesn’t hurt to monitor sites, their accounts and review sites either.
These seven sources, if used efficiently, systematically and regularly, will give you an incredible amount of information.
Where to start?
Having read the article to this point, it may seem that there is an incredible amount of work and it is not clear where to start, who will do it… My advice is just start. First, collect data from the sources that are easiest to access at the moment. For the majority, these are social networks, surveys and web analytics (if you have a website).
