- Are you struggling to (laughs).
Are you struggling to identify or understand
your target audience?
Well in this video, I'm gonna give you six questions
to ask to understand your target audience.
The great news is that having a really good understanding
of your target audience and precisely matching your message
to what they want to hear
ridiculously makes any ads that you're running
much more effective, and it also transforms
the performance of your website.
So stay tuned.
(suspenseful music)
Ever had that question?
Usually from a smarmy business consultant
or maybe even your marketing company.
They said, who's your target audience?
And you're like, damn, I should know this.
Well that ends today.
By the end of this video,
you're gonna have a very good answer for that question.
And the thing is, it's not actually your fault.
If you had a physical shop that people walked in,
then obviously you'd be meeting
and you'd be talking to your customers every single day,
but if we're doing a lot of our business
through the website and through email,
actually, it's very easy to become misaligned
with our target customer, or not really understand
who our target customer is at all.
But the danger is that without having a really tight match
between your message and your customer,
you risk your marketing
not being as effective as it should be.
So deeply understanding your target audience is key.
Now before I give you the questions to ask
to narrow down and understand your target audience,
you might need to do some brainstorming
just to find your target audience in the first place,
and get yourself kind of familiar with what they're like.
So there's a few different ways that you can do this.
The first way is to do
some good 'ol fashioned Facebook stalking.
(squeaking)
Yes, that's right, you can go and find your customers
on Facebook and do a bit of stalking
to learn about what their lives are really like.
So have a look at their family situation.
What sort of house they live in.
What do they spend their time doing?
What are their interests?
What we really wanna do
is be able to profile our target customer
as well as we can our own friends
so that you know if someone asks you about your friend
and they say, oh would she like this for Christmas?
You're like, no she really wouldn't like that.
We need that kind of match with our target customer.
Obviously your customers can have lots of different
personality types, but we need to,
hopefully each of your customers
is gonna have different personality types,
rather than one customer with all the personality types,
but we really do need a good level of understanding
about what our target customer likes and doesn't like.
Another great place to do some audience research,
and one of the methods that our content team uses
to research a target customer
is to go onto Reddit and have a look
at the sort of people that are asking questions
about your product or service or problem that you solve.
Reddit's an absolute goldmine
for people that feel completely at ease asking questions
in their own language,
and you can often have a look at the different types
of language between those that are asking the question
and those that are answering the question
to see if there's any mismatch or misunderstanding.
It's a great place to do some audience research.
But above all, my absolute favourite way
to do audience research
is the phone. (phone ringing)
Yes, that's right, nothing beats picking up the phone
and talking to your customers to find out
what they are like.
What we'll sometimes do is send out an Amazon voucher
in return for a 15, 25-minute, 35-minute call
with a group of customers,
and what we're trying to do on that call
is understand what their lives are actually like.
So we're not just asking questions about the business,
like how did you find us?
Or, what made you choose use?
Or, how would you pitch us to someone like you?
But we're also looking to understand
more about their life in general.
So, what keeps them awake at night?
What are they worried about in the future?
What are they most looking forward to?
What are their favourite things to do?
What do they do when they're not buying
your product or service?
Now as you do a bunch of these calls,
you'll begin to pick out commonalities
between each of your target customers.
And it really helps you build this kind of mental image
of your target audience, which is really exactly
what you want to do.
Okay, so you've done a bit of research
or you've spoken to your customers in the past,
you've met them at shows or whatever,
and you've got a bit of an idea.
So how do you then start to categorise
and define this perfect target customer?
What we really want is actually to be able to make
generalisations about your target customer
so that we can visualise them as a single person
or a few single people.
What we don't wanna do is think of our target audience
as a group of people because we then allow ourselves
to be a bit blurry about the details.
So it's much better to be very specific
about the characteristics of your perfect customer,
knowing that you're also gonna attract people
that are kind of around the outside
of that character as well.
The first question to ask is
how old is your target customer?
Now this might feel like a bit of a surface question to ask,
and like it doesn't really have much relevance,
but actually it can be really important
because to a large extent, this can define
how you reach that person.
So for example, if you're targeting an older demographic,
you're not gonna be on TikTok, right?
Obviously there's some really basic
audience targeting stuff.
If you're targeting 75-year-olds,
you're not gonna spend your time
marketing on TikTok, for example.
But as well as that, we've also got the life stages
and the different needs that people have
at different stages of their lives.
This has a lot of importance for the sort of messages
that you use in your marketing.
Say, for example, that you're targeting
professionals in their 20s.
A lot of your messaging might want to be about
proving yourself and earning your stipes
and showing those around you that you're valuable
and that you can do something.
Whereas if you're targeting professional people
later in their careers,
you might have a very different message
about making things easier or whatever.
Now obviously I'm making massive generalisations here
and you'll really need to understand your target audience
to be able to make those for your customer,
but the point is, you do wanna have a good idea
of how old your customer is.
One great example is a dental client
that I remember having a conversation with a few years ago,
and they'd just had a website built by a company
and they said, you know what,
one thing that really doesn't work for us
is the images that we're using on the website,
because this business specialised in dental implants,
and a lot of dentists websites are pretty much
just young, happy people with perfect teeth.
The trouble is, that's not the target audience
for dental implants.
Dental implants are predominantly sold to older people.
So because the images on the website
didn't match the target audience,
that website was actually underperforming
because the target audience arrived on the site and said,
that's not me, so this website's not for me.
And they left.
So you really wanna make sure that there's a good match
between your audience's age
and the images that you're showing on your website.
And also the sort of messages
that you're sharing in your marketing.
Question number two is where does
your perfect customer live?
Now there's all sorts of subtleties to this question,
but one of the main reasons that you wanna understand this
is for ad targeting and improving the performance
of the adverts that you're running.
For example, you might be able to focus your ads
on one particular city or one particular area
where you know your target audience is right there.
And by not targeting your ads in other areas,
you can save budget to put into this really productive area.
For example, we have a client that sells
high-end mens shoes,
and we've had a lot of success with them
targeting particular streets and areas in London.
We've targeted higher-income bracket areas
and areas where people are more likely
to have more disposable income,
because that's just where their customers live.
So understanding where your customers live
can be a good way of saving your ad budget
and focusing it on the people
that are most likely to buy now.
Question number three is a potentially contentious one.
But what's your customer's most common gender?
The reason I say this is potentially contentious
is that many businesses don't feel like actually
they have a gender bias.
Now often, if you're selling women's underwear, for example,
no, that's not even a good example.
It's fairly common for a business to say
we don't really have a gender bias
because actually they don't think that there's any reason
that either men or women would want to buy from them.
But actually if you look at the analytics
and you look at the data behind the purchases,
often that can tell a very different story.
So here you can see the traffic
for this particular client site.
So we started working with them in October,
which is when they've seen this kind of gradual,
steady increase in sales.
And this product sells gifts for children.
And what's really interesting about this
is you can see the different gender split here.
So we've got females.
Now females account for 77% of all of the traffic
to the website, so we might think that actually
this business is really, really focused on females.
But if we look over here, we'll actually see
that females convert half as well as males do.
So although females make up 3/4 of the traffic to the site,
actually they only make up 60% of the sales,
and 40% of the sales are made up by men,
so men are more likely to convert
when they're on the website.
Now there's all sorts of possible reasons for this
but what we really need to understand
and what this business needs to understand
is who is making the buying decision,
who is making the research decision,
because the content and the imagery on the site
might need to be adjusted
according to who is making purchases here.
Now obviously we never wanna exclude anyone,
and I'm not saying that you should be targeting
one type of person or another,
or you should be excluding anyone in your marketing at all.
What we really need to be careful to do though
is have a look at what's the reality
with the purchases on our website
and make sure that our marketing reflects that.
Question number four is how do you promote
to your target audience?
And this is really about the sort of advertising methods
and messages that are gonna be most effective to them.
For example, if you're targeting people
that have a very long decision process,
they need to see something a lot
before they make a decision to buy,
that might mean that things like remarketing
and retargeting adverts could work really well for you
because they will constantly see that ad
throughout their kind of decision-making process.
Whereas if you're selling products that are very
kind of impulse-purchase led,
well that's gonna mean that actually
you probably want to pay higher cost per click.
Well that's gonna mean you actually might want to pay
more for new traffic to your website,
knowing that if this is a very impulse-led audience,
or you're selling a product which is very impulse-friendly,
then you just really want that person on the website
as soon as they think about that thing,
and you're willing to pay a high cost per click
on Google Ads, for example, to get them there,
because once they come on (snaps fingers)
they're much more likely to buy.
If your audience is doing a lot of research
and they're comparing different options,
then you might wanna consider running ads
to an informational page like a blog post
or a buyer's guide, and then retargeting people
that have been on that page.
Because we're not expecting someone to convert
the first time, so really what we want to do
is get them on our website
so that we know they're going through that decision process,
and then you can retarget your ads to them
so that when they're ready to buy, they see an ad for you.
Another way of thinking about this is,
if your audience have some kind of cynicism
about the purchase.
For example, with Exposure Ninja,
we work with a lot of businesses
that have worked with a digital agency before
and had a horrendous experience,
so when they come to us they're like someone
who's just had a really messy breakup,
so they're really hurt, they're really wounded,
and they're very sceptical
about entering into a relationship
in case that happens again.
So what we need to do with people
is build a lot of trust
by showing testimonials and case studies.
So what we need to do is build trust with people
by showing testimonials, case studies,
and other forms of social proof
to reassure them that actually this is gonna be okay.
We're good at what we do.
And finally you might wanna think about
the time of day and day of the week
that people are most likely to be interacting
with your business, because you might be able
to save yourself a lot of ad spend
by turning off your ads during the times of day
and days of week that you're getting traffic
but you're not necessarily getting conversions.
Question five to identify your target audience is,
where do they spend their time online?
There's kind of three different categories here.
We really wanna know which social network
your target audience spends their time on.
So what you can do here
is you can look for groups if you're on Facebook,
which are about your topic
or for people that have your need.
If you're looking on Instagram,
you can look for theme pages,
so are there theme pages dedicated
to serve the sort of customers that you're going after?
We also wanna think about the different publications
that your target audience spends their time reading.
So for example, do they read online magazines?
Do they follow bloggers?
Do they read newspapers?
And then the final category of where
they spend their time online
is particular influencers that they follow.
So it's a good idea to survey your customers
and just ask them, who do you follow online?
And you're not necessarily even looking for people
that are thought leaders in your space.
You're really just trying to build up an understanding
of who your audience follows.
For example, we know that actually quite a large percentage
of our audience is familiar with Grant Cardone.
Now Grant Cardone has a very different style
to us here at Exposure Ninja,
but it's really interesting to know
that Grant Cardone and Exposure Ninja
do share a bit of an audience,
because that tells us about some of the traits
and the characteristics that our target market looks up to.
10x baby.
And do feel free to send all of your life savings
through to me, tim@exposureninja.com.
The final question to answer for your target audience
is what type of content works best for them?
The danger is that we think whatever the type of content
that we like to put out
is gonna be the best for our audience.
Well it's pointless writing really in-depth detailed blogs
if your target audience is 16-year-olds,
'cause they're just gonna be on YouTube.
So, does your audience respond best to text,
either long-form posts like medium articles and guides,
or short-form blogs?
Or do they respond best to video?
And if it's video, how long?
What are their preferences?
Again, check the influencers that they follow,
and also don't be afraid to just ask them.
Hey, when you're looking for videos on YouTube,
how long do you like these to be?
I did this with our audience just today, in fact.
And they said, 10 minutes Tim.
So hopefully this video will be exactly 10 minutes.
What sort of social posts do they like?
Are they really busy?
If they're really busy, they might not have time
to check in to stories everyday but they might be looking
through main Instagram posts, for example.
But if they're not that busy,
they might be checking into social multiple times per day,
so if you can drip feed little bits of content for them,
that might work really well
and help you keep top of mind.
and I hope that you spend some time
going through those questions
and doing a bit of audience research.
It genuinely is one of the most useful
marketing exercises that you can do.
Don't forget to like this video
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And don't forget also that if you want some help
with your digital marketing,
then over at exposureninja.com
we have the world-famous free website and marketing review.
All we need is a bit of info
about your business and what goals you have
for the next 12 months,
and we'll go and put together some marketing ideas.
We'll do an audit of your current website
and how you're generating traffic,
and suggest some ways that you can increase that traffic
to hit your goals for the next 12 months.
It's amazing, a really good service,
so head over to exposureninja.com for that.