How well do you know your customer?
Part of the discovery phase that marketing team goes through when developing a marketing strategy is an in-depth target market analysis. Through this process, clients are asked to take a deep dive into everyday lives and minds of their customer to understand their needs, habits, desires, and aspirations. This process allows marketers and their creative team to devise a creative strategy and execution that will emotionally connect with the target market to influence consumer behaviour.
Target markets are commonly described by their demographic profile, that is their age, income and where they live. The property industry is notorious for this; with target market descriptions like; “30-45+ high net worth individuals living in north Brisbane” or “60+ male and female empty nesters from west of Sydney”. If you really want to understand your customer, you should pay closer attention to their psychographic profile; that is their attitudes, beliefs, and interests which is what influences buyer behaviour. Think of it this way; demographics may describe who your buyer is, but psychographics will explain why they buy.
There are many ways to develop the IP you need on your customer to make informed marketing decisions. Sometimes research is anecdotal with business owners having unique customer insight and knowledge from ongoing customer interaction, product turn over and years of experience in the industry. Spending time sharing this knowledge of your customer with the marketing team is a vital to success.
Looking to your digital platforms and analysing trends and information can help you understand your customer as well as deep diving into your close competitors. Social media performance platforms like Hootsuite provide audience insights that may help inform trends, habits, and reasons for engagement. Marketers will also look to Google Analytics and Google Console for information on your customer’s digital footprint.
Customer surveys and mystery shopping is another sure way to help understand your customers needs, habits and thoughts around your brand.
Once a full demographic and psychographic profile of your audience has been established, marketers will segment the target market. Segmentation is an important part of the process in developing a strong strategy that engages with different groups of customers through varied marketing tactics and platforms. You may have customers who fall within the same demographic profile with a varied psychographic profile. It sounds complicated but the brainstorming process uncovers valuable information that marketers can use to ensure your campaign is a success. If you would like an easy-to-use template for customer profiling, get in touch with the team at Strictlymarketing and we will gladly send you one. Bev Strickland bstrickland@strictlymarketing.com.au