The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Ideal Customers: 10 Questions to Help You Quickly Narrow Down Your Target Audience
If you don’t know who you’re talking to, how do you know what to say? And if you don’t know who you are helping, how do you know what to do or make or how to deliver your stuff to the right people?
This is the exact reason why you need to know your target audience. Your business’ goal is to help your ideal customers through your products or services. Not knowing your target audience leaves you with a business with no direction, no traction, and inconsistent sales and customers.
Let’s put this another way, you need to find your target audience because you can’t be everything to everyone.
It doesn't matter if you are a solo entrepreneur or a large corporation, no one has all the resources in the world to meet everyone’s needs and be the best in every area. For example, you can’t offer premium quality at the cheapest price, and you can’t offer the fastest shipping for free, you can’t provide a complete personalized service at the most accessible rate. It’s impossible to be the best at everything to everyone and anyone.
So, how do you stand out? You find the people (a.k.a. Your target audience) who care about what you care about, who will benefit most from what you do, and who are your ideal customers, and you become the best at helping them and build a business that is their go-to choice when it comes to what you do and sell.
Knowing who your target audience and ideal customers are, focusing your business on them, and figuring out ways to be seen and heard by them is how you stand out from the crowd and how you can work more effectively! When you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, your revenue grows and so are your loyal ideal customers and raving fans. (Click here to unveil eye-opening ways happy customers can put your business on steroids)
Now you know that finding your target audience is the cornerstone of your success and the direction of your business, let’s first start with the two ways to understand your audience.
Understand Your Target Audience’s Demographics vs. Psychographics
Your target audience’s demographics are the marketing data you use that usually describe who they are on the outside. Demographics include age, gender, race, income level, location, nationality, marital status, level of education, employment, religion, and generation (i.e. tweens, baby boomers, gen-X, Millennials, etc.).
Demographics are usually where entrepreneurs start when they think about their target audience. But because most businesses now serve audiences across different demographic groups, demographics are no longer sufficient for finding your target audience and psychographics are more important than ever!
Psychographics are information and data that are related to your target audience’s internal characteristics, like lifestyle, interests, desires, opinions, values, etc.
To find your target audience and ideal customers, first, get a general understanding of who they are. If you need to get some ideas flowing,
Get Started with these 3 Quick Ways to Start Finding Your Dream Customers and Target Audience:
Go through your past customer list or customer database. Find the ones who have purchased from you more than once.
Go through your past customer list or customer database. Find the ones who are happy with what you delivered, especially the ideal customers who gave your raving reviews and testimonials.
Go to your social media and online platforms, and find active users who are highly engaged and responsive to your content.
Identify anything that these people have in common based on general demographics. At this time, you might have several demographic groups that seem very different and that are too broad and difficult to target. To narrow them down further so you can come up with a more effective marketing strategy that multiplies your business growth, you must know your ideal customers’ psychographics.
10 ultimate questions to spot your target audience & ideal customers:
1. Who's Lovin' It the Most and benefits most from what you do?
Among your target audience, who finds what you do the most helpful? Who values what you do? Who do you connect with and who do you want to help most? Consider where these people are in their journey. Maybe they are new business owners who just started their business. Maybe they just went through a similar significant life transition. Maybe they are going through a similar season in their business. Maybe they are at a turning point in their career. Think beyond their demographics. Instead, think about the stages in life or career that they share.
2. What are the biggest problems your target audience is facing?
Discover their biggest pain points and headaches. What challenges are they facing? What is keeping them up at night? What roadblocks are stopping them from moving forward, reaching their goals, and having what they want? Find out the problems they desperately want to solve.
3. What are your target audience’s deepest desires and wants?
Find out what they desire most. It can be an outcome, a status, or a transformation. Getting clear on what they aspire to most helps you understand the specific benefits and results that your target audience wants with the products or services you sell.
People are buying what your product or service will do for them, not the product or service itself. So, what they desire most should be the focus of your marketing strategy, not your product features, production process, or service approach.
4. What’s a day in the life of your target audience?
Be specific about where they go and spend their time, weekdays, weekends, and during vacations. Imagine a day in their life. Spot any particular behaviors that are unique to your target audience.
Also, find out where they go for information and where they consume content, including magazines, books, blogs, social media, podcasts, newspapers, radio stations, TV channels, forums, and any other tools and platforms.
5. What matters most to your target audience? What are their values?
People now like to buy from brands and work with businesses that share their values. When you’re clear on your target audience’s personal values, you can better align your brand values with theirs, and create content that is more relevant and that resonates with them on a deeper level.
Want to know how to connect with your audience better? Click here to uncover the 5 secrets to build trust with them, boost engagement & increase warm leads.
If you’re working on finding a consistent brand voice to engage with your target audience better, try these 5 exercises to find the right brand voice.
6. Love it or hate it: how does your target audience feel about what’s available in the market?
Find out how they feel about the current market and existing options. Do they feel fatigued with the large number of choices that are available? Or frustrated from constantly being sold to? Confused with how technical everything is presented to them? Disappointed at their previous attempts?
You can use this information to find your competitive advantage and opportunity in the market. Can you fill this gap and meet this demand that is not currently fulfilled? This may be your differentiator.
7. Does your target audience share a common specialty?
If your target audience and ideal customers are businesses, are they all in a specific type of profession? Even within an industry, there are different types of business. For example, instead of serving all clinics, your ideal customers might be dental clinic owners. And instead of selling courses to all coaches, you can narrow down your target audience to specific coaches like life coaches, leadership coaches, or financial coaches. Depending on what you sell, see if there’s a specific line of business that can benefit most from your products or services.
8. Does your target audience use your product or service in a particular way?
Think across demographic groups, and consider your target audience’s behaviors and how they use what you sell.
For example, let’s say you sell kids' books. Instead of selling to any parents and teachers, your ideal customers might be parents, teachers, schools, and even bookstores or libraries that want easy access to different books and being able to rotate them and pass them off the hassle-free way.
Rather than being all in the same industry or sharing similar demographic data, your target audience might be from different demographic groups but share how they use your products or services specifically.
9. What do you specialize in?
Besides looking at your target audience and ideal customers, you can also narrow them down by what you’re great at. Instead of being a social media coach, which can be generic, you might focus on how to grow specifically with videos on social media. And if you run an online shop that sells hats, you can narrow down your target audience by specializing in selling washable and packable hats.
10. Who are you leaving out that aren’t your ideal customers?
Narrow down your target audience further by removing the ones who are not a great fit. These are the people who don’t value the benefits you offer as much, or they may not be the people who can benefit most from what you sell. These are the people who aren’t your ideal customers, and they aren’t likely to give you raving reviews either.
Knowing who is not your target audience is just as important as knowing who is, so you can serve your target audience and grow with a laser-focused marketing strategy. Everyone has different priorities when they make their purchasing choices.
Your goal isn’t to be the best to everyone, but to be the one your target audience, your people, trust and go to, and be the best at serving them!
If you don’t already have an audience or customer base to find out the answers to these questions to understand their psychographics better, use this beginner-proof & simple method to get inside the minds of your target audience, so you can give them what they truly want! And if you want to get started today and start building your audience, check out these 6 tips to grow your audience fast from scratch with $0.
Once you’ve found and narrowed down your target audience, get in the habit of keep refining it and narrowing it down as you grow your business and learn more about them. Better yet, include them in your product or service creation and development process so you can create an incredible, jaw-dropping offer that your target audience loves!
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