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6 Simple Steps On How to Identify And Attract Your Target Audience
7:44 PM
One of the massive cornerstones that every marketer faces during his or her career is finding and, afterward, engaging a target audience. Some of you this might seem to be easy to achieve; the others will have real problems in searching and attracting potential customers. But the truth is EVERY of you have ever had or has a necessity of making your client database bigger and bigger.
Yeah, easy to say but it is rather difficult to do.
Knowing and understanding needs and problems of your audience will help you craft an excellent strategy that will crash your competitors and turn potential users into paid customers.
In this brief guide, I am going to share with you necessary steps on the way toward ‘enlargement’ of your target audience.
Identify Your Niche First
It goes without saying that doing business online requires you to know the niche you are for sure. It is quite easy to find out. Just put yourself a few standard questions, like:
- What interests or passion do you have?
- What problems could you solve?
- What competitors ”indwell” the niche you are interested in?
- What the profitability a particular niche has?
Or create a list of things you should do instead:
- Draft a wish list (specify the industry that attracts you the most; with whom you want to do your business; expectations you wait)
- List all your achievements
- Outline a brief vision of your brand
I believe it would be far better to demonstrate you a rough example of how I would do this. I am going to answer these question commenting my replies for your better understanding my motives (of course all these answers are random, so don’t go deep into details).
What interests or passion do you have?
I like music, musical instruments. I know lots of things in creating and selling guitars.
What problems could you solve?
I could sell high-quality custom shop guitars for an affordable price throughout the world; I could provide people with a consultation in ordering and buying first-rate guitars that I produce under my personal brand.
What competitors ”indwell” the niche you are interested in?
Talking about music instruments (guitars) I know for sure there are lots of solid musical brands that have dozens of customers (Ibanez, Jackson, Gibson, Fender, etc.)
What the profitability a particular niche has?
Well, I am sure that producing quality guitars will bring me a solid income. Such TOP guitar brands as Fender have a too high annual income to know the actual numbers:) But I am pretty confident in running this business online.
I could easily create a list of things I should do first (a kind of alternative to answers to the questions above).However, I don’t want to waste your time reading the list because I believe you’ve already got a clue of what your first step should be.
Once you identified your niche, it is very time to see what your competitors could “offer” you.
Discover Your Competitors
You might be surprised a bit, but your competitors is a perfect source for getting new insights and customers. I don’t know what the niche you belong but continuing with the example of selling guitars it is as easy as pie to find the competitors out.
I won’t argue with you that knocking the customers down is not always a simple task (especially, “stealing” them from such brands as Ibanez, Fender, etc.) but Google is able to help you find a right target to start with. Presume that I am an ordinary guitar seller and I have no idea of using right keywords. I just want to get the data on who my competitors are. Thus, I put a simple inquiry “buy guitar online” and see what Google suggests:
Now you can “hack up” these websites that sell music instruments and attract some users.
I won’t deceive you saying these websites have dozens of customers, no. We both know that the leaders in an amount of clients are the brands that are familiar to everyone. So, you better focus on “big fish” instead of searching some less great competitors.
- Try to Figure out Audience's Problems and Needs
If you have no idea what your audience wants and what problems it has - you are doomed to failure in the business. Believe or not, those marketers who resonate with their customers, get more positive results in the business.
Yes, opinions differ in every aspect of our life. The same happens to our desires as well. The question is how to find favor in someone’s eyes?
Have you ever heard about “5 Why’s” method? This simple but yet effective method helps you get to the bottom of your client’s needs and problems he or she has. Obviously, it is not about “why your clients sleep poorly at night”; it is about his expectations or misconceptions from using your service.
Let me give you an ordinary example of this “Why” technique and the questions you should ask + the answers I would give if I were your potential client:
- Why do you want to enlarge your target audience?
- Because I want to turn the users into paid customers.
- Why do you need to be paid customers?
- To earn more money.
- Why do you need to earn more money?
- To feel me a financially independent person.
- Why do you want to feel yourself an independent person?
- To spend more time with my family and enjoy the life.
- Why do you want to spend your time with the family?
- To be happy.
I completely agree with you that the last few questions seem to be stupid and senseless, but the general idea is a pretty easy-to-understand.
You, probably, will ask me: What will these generic questions and replies give me?
These GENERIC questions and answers will give you an insight that approximately 90% of your customers want the same. I believe you won’t neglect that almost everyone wants to build a prosperous business, earn solid money and be happy in the life.
But if you put more concrete questions, you will get more serious replies that might move your business ahead.
Another one cool trick you could use is to discover what people ask on Quora. It is a great place to find issues your potential clients have. Just put a question (or inquiry) you want to investigate and read what people write. Let’s put aside my previous example about guitar business and change it to, for instance, Content Marketing. Quora suggests us the following that goes under “content marketing” inquiry:
As you can see there are pretty many questions related to “content marketing.” All these questions contain dozens of answers, pieces of advice and, of course, problems people are concerned about. Investigate, read, and use the information you get.
Despite the fact the process of searching and identifying customers’ needs is tedious and time-consuming, believe me, it will give you the results you’re expecting.
Try to Build Interconnection with Your Audience
Perhaps, building interconnection with your audience is one of the most important steps in your marketing strategy. But how to do this in a proper way?
I won’t run around the bush, so I cut to the chase:
- Comments on your blog. Reading comments on your blog is a wonderful way to see what people are talking about, what they want from your service and, maybe, personally from you. You can engage in conversation right in the comment section and provide people with the information they’re willing to get.
- FAQ or help section. I highly advise you to create a comprehensive FAQ section on your web resource. For example, here how my teammate from Ahrefs did:
Each separate section contains 1-47 brief guides on the most frequently asked questions.
- Insider. Another one awesome opportunity for you to stay close to the customer. Creating ‘insider’ page on such social media as Facebook helps you share some new features of your service with users online. You can read comments, reply to users, conduct a talk (formal and informal manner). Here how we do it at Ahrefs:
- Live Chat. There is nothing better in getting experience than spending your time in a live chat. Yeah, it requires you to think on your feet providing customers with an up-to-date reply. It requires you to be patient as hell (must admit sometimes some customers put stupid questions). It requires you to be a kind conversant. Nevertheless, you will get an enormous amount of knowledge about customer needs and, definitely, emotions after the whole day long chat:)
- Don’t Forget About Social Media
Social media platforms are the places you should never neglect to work with. It is one of the biggest sources where you can enlarge your audience.
The first step you should is to create brand’s accounts on such platforms as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest. Don’t forget to customize every social media account you have in a proper way. They must be attractive and full of the information related to your brand.
Let me put a few sentences about the most usable social media platforms.
- Facebook. The place where you can meet people from various niches and get in touch with everyone personally. Facebook allows you to use its special features for creating more engaging brand’s profile.
- LinkedIn. I believe it is the best business platform every businessman should be familiar with. I highly recommend you to build business connections using LinkedIn. Just remember that the contacts you can get here might be representatives of the companies who would love to use your service.
- Twitter. Use Twitter as a place where you could find new followers, new connections, and new customers.
- Pinterest. Attach pins with the services your company offers, create boards and get new followers.
Taking all the aforesaid into consideration, your social media presence must be constant. Otherwise, you are able to miss customers you deserve.
- Outreach Stage
Unfortunately, it is merely possible to attract new customers and promote your brand without an outreach process. I believe the “beauty” of outreach is not just promoting your brand but building personal relationships with customers and other respectful marketers.
Outreach is a step-by-step strategy that requires your time, efforts, patience, and a bit of luck. Yes, it is tedious and time-consuming but, believe me, you will get only benefits from it. So, let’s straightforward to the actual guide on how to do this in a proper way.
- Find your potential users. The first step is going to be a way easy to do with the help of Ahrefs Content Explorer tool. Just take a link to your competitor’s material and check out the backlinks it has:
I won’t give you false hopes that all 1.69K backlinks will be your potential users. No. You will have to do in-depth research of each backlink and see whether you could find the representatives of your target audience. Afterward, move forward to the following step
- Try to find personal email addresses with the help of such tools as Voilanorbert and findthat.email.
- Craft as personalized email templates as possible. Make sure the subject line of each template rocks:)
- Follow up emails. If you see that the recipient hasn’t replied you yet, don’t be afraid of reaching the recipient out one more time. It won’t hurt neither you nor him (or her).
After your very first outreach campaign, you will see that your database of contacts will enrich. Thus, you will get in touch directly with your target audience, and a part of it will become your customers for sure.
SIDENOTE: you can find more comprehensive insights on how to do blogger outreach in this outstanding guide.
Conclusion
To sum up, I want to say that attracting and turning your target audience into direct customers is a kind of “labor-intensive” process. Moreover, you will have to never stop doing it. As many users you will have to attract, as many times you will have to invent something new, interesting, and engageable. Remember this, my friend!
I hope these 6 steps have lifted you the veil of attracting your target audience:)
If you have anything to add or share with me and other readers, please, feel free to reflect your point of view in a comment section. And don’t forget to share this material wherever you can:)
Author’s Bio:
Sergey Aliokhin is an Outreach Manager at Ahrefs. He spends most of the time discovering and learning SEO and Internet Marketing tendencies. His primal goal is to study and practice new aspects of an outreach strategy. In his spare time, he likes to spend his time with family, visit specialized sports club, study martial arts. If he has nothing to do at all, he prefers reading books on science-fiction and playing the bass guitar.
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