Discovering potential customers

When you are going to start your business, after having the initial idea, one of the first things you should do next is to ask yourself if there are potential customers to support your venture. The answer to this question can determine the viability of your business.

A major portion of this question is which section of the overall market of customers are most ideal for you. You must identify the particular elements of people or businesses that are most likely to have a need for your products or services. These elements fall into the demographic profile of both individuals and other businesses, as your business model may be directly with customers or with other businesses.

Initial Considerations

If you have ever used social platforms such as Facebook to run your ads or have used email or door-to-door marketing strategies you may already know how the process works.

In the process of creating an ad, you usually choose an image representative of what you want to communicate and text detailing your offer. Then you leave your call to action, which could be to click on a link, make a comment, among others.

When the promotional ad is finished, you must publish it. This can be on social platforms such as Facebook or through a marketing company. In both cases you will need information about the objective of the ad. These would be your target customers.

If you don't properly know who your specific customers are and you leave that information blank or put in the wrong elements, the chances of attracting customers with this ad are slim to none and you would be spending money in vain.

Common criteria used in marketing

Among social media platforms like Facebook, for example, allow you to choose a lot of characteristics to better delimit who you want to show your ads to. These can be incredibly varied and serve as a tool to enhance your advertising efforts.

Some of these characteristics, which are common to all marketing strategies, include:

• Location or zip code.

• Gender.

• Age.

• Race.

• Occupation.

• Educational level.

• Income.

• Marital status.

• Sexual orientation.

• Ethnicity.

• Political affiliation.

• Purchasing habits.

• Family status.

• Interests and Preferences.

All social platforms and search engines like Google record the preferences of their users, which can then be used to better target marketing efforts.

Example: If for example you want to publish an ad on Facebook for a life coaching business, you can choose to have these characteristics:

• Gender: Female.

• Location: Up to 30 km from my office.

• Age: Between 35 and 60 years old.

• Profession: Working women.

• Interests: Physical exercises, healthy habits, diets, crossfit, swimming and similar preferences.

In this particular example other elements such as educational level, income, marital status and others are not so useful, but in case you want to further narrow down the customer niche you can use them.

If your business were for example in the real estate market, the other criteria would be necessary for your marketing strategies.

Importance of defining target customers

Many times new entrepreneurs do not want to define their customer niche for their products or services, as they prefer to have a broader clientele. This is proving to be a mistake. Properly defining the company's target customers will serve as a springboard to stand out from competitors and gain more loyal customers.

A new business will exponentially increase its chances of success if it focuses on a smaller, more specialized audience, meeting expectations and needs better than the competition.

Not knowing your customer's specific needs results in you spending more money and resources. This way you know that your products or services will be in high demand, which will allow you to set a competitive and profitable price.

You increase customer loyalty to your company, ensuring that they will become regular consumers and thus increase your sales.

Steps to define your target audience

To define and delimit your target customer, making sure you can offer them a product or service they will need, you must follow the steps below.

Researching your audience

For this step you must research your entire customer base. Dig deeper into what types of people may need or want your products or services. This information is very necessary, as you will rely on it later to better shape your efforts.

Some of the methods to collect this information can be short questionnaires used on web pages or on social media profiles when the customer subscribes to them.

To this end, it is advisable to prepare in advance a quality questionnaire that allows you to collect all the necessary information, without being too long and annoying for the user. Keep in mind that this process can be very intrusive and frustrate the customer. Some of the most useful data to collect in the questionnaire are:

• Age: The age range may be sufficient.

• Location: The country or region in which your customer resides will allow you to choose an appropriate scheduling of your ads to increase their visibility.

• Language: Just because they live in a Spanish-speaking country does not mean that their main language is Spanish. Don't make assumptions, rely on concrete data.

• Interests and preferences: If you already know that they may be interested in your product or service, find out about other interests or activities they may have.

• Purchasing habits: In this option you are trying to discern the way in which the customer reaches the products or services that interest him. Does he use filters, and if so, how does he prioritize them, by price, by features, or by others?

Analysis of social networks

There are many social networks and they are very different from each other. But among the common elements that almost all of them have is that they provide detailed data about your audience. You can use this data to help you define your target audience.

The analytical information offered by most social platforms will allow you to have a better idea of the tastes and interests of all your potential customers. It will also serve as a complement to the questionnaires, which are often incomplete.

It also serves as a mechanism to know the methods that users use to communicate with each other, the frequency and schedule in which they use them.

Some of the tools of the Facebook social platform such as Business Suite, Creator Suite, Facebook Insights or Hootsuite contain a wide variety of information among which may be:

• Number of clicks.

• Comments on your posts.

• Reach of publications.

• Number of times a post or posts have been shared.

• Views of posts or videos.

• New followers.

• Interactions.

Competitor research

Researching what your competitors are doing is also one of the tools you can use to better define your target audience. You should define if your competitors have also defined the same objectives and market niches as your company.

This way you can also know in advance which strategies they used that worked and which did not, so you can expand on their ideas and better define yours.

Defining the value of your product or service

Before you can decide who your target audience will be, you must first establish the real value of the product or service you plan to market. It is a basic marketing strategy to assign a utility to your product or service that can satisfy the needs and problems of your consumers.

When designing your promotional ads it is important to focus them in such a way that your product or service is the best solution to your customers' problems. When you clearly define the advantages and features that your goods have, which solve particular problems in the market, it will become clearer to whom you should target them.

Test marketing strategies

To achieve the best ads and attract the most customers, it is essential to test your strategies until you find the one that works best. Once you have determined your target audience, it is time to test all the promotional strategies you have created.

You can start on social networks, using all the information you have gathered to direct your advertising efforts to the market segment you have chosen. Establish the appropriate language for your audience, it is not the same an ad aimed at teenagers up to 17 years old or an ad for single mothers between 20 and 40 years old.

You must take the time to choose quality images that are related to the content you are creating. The place or places you choose for your marketing strategies is very important. You should differentiate the type of strategy you use depending on the social platform you choose, although you should make sure that the message remains consistent across all the channels you decide to use.

Follow-up research

You should not just stick with the information you have collected up to this point, you should keep collecting more data and regularly review the results of your marketing strategies.

Thanks to this research you have information that you did not have before, so subsequent efforts will be much easier to carry out. This way you can evaluate the possible corrections you may need to make. And also check if your product or service manages to meet the expectations of your target audience, or if some improvements are needed.

Again, in the business world nothing stays static, and your target audience is no exception. That is why you should constantly review whether your products or services keep satisfying customers and how your brand identity is evolving.

Example

I will use a practical example so you can see the usefulness and importance of choosing your target customer:

• Anna used to be a professional dancer and after many years of career it was time to retire and pursue other interests. Thanks to her experience she decides to start a dance studio business.
• When she starts teaching her first classes, she notices that not everyone can afford this kind of classes, as well as the necessary clothing. The students she receives have different degrees of aptitude for dance, which makes it difficult for her to teach the classes.

• She decides to add a larger number of classes to her studio to accommodate the range of students she can accommodate. It occurs to her that she can add lessons in yoga, fitness, classical ballet, hip hop, salsa, tap, among many others. When she's done, she has at least 20 types of classes, which she can teach in a variety of formats. She could also expand her curriculum to couples, adults of different ages and children.
• As she compiled all of her thoughts, she began to get overwhelmed with the number of classes, thinking that she would not be able to cover them all on her own. She wondered if she would have enough budget to hire more teachers to assist her with the additional lessons. Her enthusiasm and passion was slowly fading in the face of the magnitude of what she would have to do.
• To lean on someone, Anna asks a friend with years of experience in business coaching for help. She explains to him all her ideas for expansion, and that, because of their quantity and variety, she has begun to feel that it is too much for her to handle alone.
• Her friend then suggests that she should choose a target audience to better focus on solving their needs and not try to provide something for everyone. Anna decides to think about what her friend suggests and feels very relieved by this.
• She has always wanted to inspire other women to take better care of their bodies through exercise and dance. This is why she decides that her target audience will be mainly women between the ages of 20 and 55, regardless of their marital status, with an annual salary of at least $50,000 that will allow them to pay her fees and the required clothing.
• Thanks to this, she began to experience a considerable increase in her business. His clients felt more rewarded and remained loyal to his studio for longer. She also began to position herself as a pillar in the dance community, and has been invited to give lectures and seminars focused on women.
• Imagine if Anna had not decided to choose a target audience, and try to implement all her initial ideas. She would not have been able to grow her business as much or gain recognition in her niche market. Without this essential step, her business would most likely have failed.