Identify your customers to help target your marketing messages.
Marketing is essential to any business, including micro and nano businesses. It tells the world who you are and helps to define your purpose. Using simple marketing tactics can help you promote your product or service and reach your target market more effectively.
Strategic marketing will help you focus on actions that reach the right customers and achieve your business goals. It will also save you time and money.
An effective marketing strategy will help you to define the overall direction and goals for your marketing. Knowing who your current and ideal customers are is an important place to start.
Your ideal customer
If you’ve been in business for a while, think about your current customers.
- Who are you already appealing to?
- Who are your favourite customers?
- Who is using your services the most?
When you’ve answered these questions, describe your ideal customer in detail to help shape a voice or ‘persona’ for your ideal customer that you’ll use for your marketing activities. These might include:
- what they wear
- what their hobbies are
- what they’re interested in.
Customers and market research
Once you’ve done some thinking about your potential customers, do some market research and try to answer the following questions:
- Who are your target customers and how do they behave?
- What are the specific demographics of your ideal customer such as age, social status, education and gender?
- What are your customers’ lifestyles, activities, values, needs, interests or opinions?
- Where are they located?
- What type of environment do they live in?
- What are the key phrases or quotes they would use to describe their problems?
- How will your product or service remedy these problems?
Market research will help refine your customer persona. With a better understanding of your ideal customer, you’ll be able to create more effective marketing messages to reach new customers and grow your customer base.
Further information
- This article is adapted from the Business Victoria resources, Marketing Strategies and Tactics and Define and Know Your Customer.
- For more information about doing market research, see the Business Victoria resource Do Market Research.
