After months of planning, financing and working countless hours, you’re finally opening your business. You smile and wait for the customers to start enquiring about your product, but only a trickle of people are showing interest.

No doubt, you’re asking yourself, “where is everyone?”

Experienced business owners often find themselves asking the same questions too, even more so after starting to expand their advertising through the use of social media. They start Tweeting their deals, regularly posting offers on the Facebook pages and adding interesting articles to LinkedIn, but their conversion rate stays the same.

“Where is everyone?” they ask.

You’re both asking the wrong question.

Before asking where they’re hiding, you first need to ask who it is you’re seeking. Who is your ideal customer?

As Susan Chritton of Dummies.com once wrote:

“One of the biggest mistakes that budding personal branders make is trying to appeal to everyone. Think about the game of darts: You have to aim in order to hit the board. If you hit the board, you score. And if your aim is very good and you hit the bull’s eye, even better!”

Only through understanding who your customer is can you truly convert and increase your sales.

So how can we understand our customer if we’ve yet to meet them?

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

Six Target Audience Questions

Through a short exercise with a pen and paper, you can quickly understand both who your audience is and where you should be aiming your social media marketing strategy.

Short for time? Take a look at this handy infographic covering all six questions.

1. How Old Is Your Target Customer?

If you’re selling a high-end luxury brand of cars, it’s unlikely that people between the age of 10-14 are going to be interested in your social media updates. Alternatively, it’s unlikely that many customers between the ages of 55-65 are going to be interested in purchasing a pair of trainers designed by rapper Kanye West, either.

Understanding the age range of your current and potential customers will help you to forecast which demographic has the keenest interest in your industry and the financial support to be a repeat purchaser.

According to data from the US Census Bureau in 2020, at least 80% of people in each age group. If you want to hit your target audience, email campaigns are stull a hugely effective option.

Image source

There’s more variety in age when it comes to social media channels. Different age groups are more likely to use one channel over another, but that doesn’t mean they don’t use it at all.

It’s a good idea to start your social media strategy on one or two platforms where data says your audience are spending their time, and then branch out to others once you’ve established a solid audience on your main channels. These stats from Sprout Social will give you an idea of the channels you should be focusing on.

Facebook
Largest Age Group: 25-34
Gender Split: 43% female, 57% Male

Instagram
Largest Age Group: 25-34
Gender Split: 48% female, 52% Male

TikTok
Largest Age Group: 10-19
Gender Split: 61% female, 39% Male

Twitter
Largest Age Group: 18-29
Gender Split: 38% female, 62% Male

LinkedIn
Largest Age Group: 25-34
Gender Split: 48% female, 52% Male

Pinterest
Largest Age Group: 50-64
Gender Split: 78% female, 22% Male

YouTube
Largest Age Group: 15-35
Gender Split: 46% female, 54% Male

2. Where Do They Live?

Understanding the location of your prospective customer isn’t an insight that only local small and medium-size businesses need to be aware of. Businesses both offline and online need to understand where their customers are to better target their social media marketing efforts.

As a local business owner, you’re keen to target and acquire customers within the workable radius of the service you offer. If you’re offering plumbing services in Leicester in England, it’s unlikely that people viewing your adverts or social media updates in France are likely to call you any time soon.

As an eCommerce entrepreneur, you’ll be able to distribute your goods across a much wider distance, yet you may not have the courier facilities in place to ship your product to the opposite side of the world.

Rather than spending all your money on Pay-Per-Click and social media adverts that target people worldwide, you can instead narrow down the range to only the most suitable locational demographic, thereby increasing your conversions and saving you money in the process.

Get to the top of Google

Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).

Download my free copy

3. What’s The Most Common Gender?

Please note – most social media channels only report on the binary gender options of male and female in their demographics. We expect in the future this could change, but for now you can only target the male or female gender binary.

As important as how old your audience is and where they live is their gender.

Targeting your women’s cosmetics brand at men isn’t necessarily a bad choice in the run-up to Christmas, but throughout the rest of the year, it’s unlikely those adverts are going to convert into a sale.

By aiming your updates and adverts at women only, you can decrease the waste expenditure of your advertising campaign and reinvest that money into re-targeting the customers you already have for a repeat sale.

Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter have in-built advertising networks that are increasing in-depth every day. Today, you can create an advert aimed solely at the right gender — plus age group, location and many more metrics — for a much cheaper cost per click.

Your customer’s gender, along with their age and location demographics, will help you come up with a solid buyer persona.

4. How Do You Promote Your Product to Those Individuals?

Once you have a buyer persona pinned down, you can start to explore how you should be marketing to these individuals.

Understanding your demographics greatly aids you in creating social media updates and adverts that convert.

Some people need to repeatedly see a product in action through photos and videos over the space of a few days before making a purchase. Networks such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Reels are perfect for demonstrating not just how your product works but also how much easier it makes the lives of the people using it.

Others need to see a product multiple times before they feel like making a purchase. If your product is slightly out of the comfortable price range of the customer, they may take weeks or even months to save up and make the decision to purchase.

These customers are just as valuable as immediate-spend customers if their lifetime customer value is worthwhile.

Image via crealytics.com

Over the course of that period of saving and indecision, you can subtly target your audience through regular, jovial and engaging updates on the social media network your intended demographic uses the most, such as Facebook or Twitter.

In these instances, one advert running throughout the period, plus irregular engagements with them through social media, could be all that’s needed to secure a sale that might otherwise have been missed.

Learn about how to run profitable Facebook Ad campaigns in our podcast: How to Spend $1 Million in 6 Weeks on Facebook — and Profit.

5. Where Do They Get Their Information? Social Media? News?

More than 58.4% of people living in the UK are active social media users. That’s 4.260 billion people who are messaging friends over Facebook, following the news on Twitter and scrolling through Instagram wishing they were somewhere else.

Your next advertising campaign must take advantage of that prime real estate.

It’s important to understand how your target audience uses each social media platform. Facebook users tend to access the network during core work hours on weekdays, with mid-week and midday being peak times, whereas Twitter users are early risers and many check in as soon as the alarm goes off.

By focusing all of your efforts on the social media platform your demographic uses, you can spend less time trying to be everywhere and instead create a singular cost-effective campaign on the one network your focus niche uses the most.

For example, if your core demographic is Hispanic females between the ages of 18-29, Instagram should be your primary network.

If you’re looking for leads for your new range of children’s toys, then Pinterest — with a large audience of 100 million active female users (many are at-home mothers with a household income of over $30,000 per annum) — is a perfect network for advertising.

Image Source

6. Which Type of Content Works Best?

Short videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have become increasingly popular in the last few years, but what if your customers aren’t on these platforms?

You’re needlessly spending a fortune creating incredible viral content that’s not being seen by the people who matter most.

By spending just a few moments thinking about the habits of your future customers, you can understand and put into action a social media strategy that works. Even the simple step of uploading the same videos to Instagram instead of Facebook could be all you need to do to reach the right group of people at just the right time.

If you’re selling Software as a Service (SaaS) or Business to Business (B2B), you might find that your videos are falling short but your Tweets are getting tonnes of engagement and clicks through to your business’s blog. Clearly, the right type of content for this particular group is long-form and detailed blog posts. They want as much information as possible before they make a purchase, and you’re not going to find them browsing Facebook for it.

Does your eCommerce website need social media marketing? Find out how interaction on social media can have a dramatic effect on the success of your site in our blog.

Image via bostondigital.com

Understanding Your Audience Demographics

Gradually, your notes are going to become the demographics that shape your future sales strategy, but it’s important to note that knowing the age, gender and location isn’t the end of the road.

At the core, your target demographic are people with individual habits, from which an average can be taken to provide a guide to their general buying habits.

There will be high earners who are penny-pinchers when it comes to spending and people with a low-income level who will purchase non-essential items every weekend as a hard-earned reward to themselves.

Emotional triggers are a crucial part of forecasting the choices your clientèle will make. Ignoring them can cost you dramatically, as Jacqueline Curtis of Money Crashers relates in this examination of JCPenney:

In 2012, CEO Ron Johnson decided to try something new: He revamped the store’s image by putting an end to what he called ‘fake pricing’ … pricing that ended in $0.99, clearance buys, and pricing that was discounted from a clearly inflated number.

In theory, it sounded nice. In practice, customers weren’t buying it – literally. Customers didn’t feel like they were getting value from their purchases. Sales plummeted…

Without that red line through the supposed original price and a sale price printed beneath, shoppers don’t feel like they’re getting huge value for their money.”

The purchasing intentions of JCPenney’s customers were clearly being driven by their emotions and by ignoring those signs, the company saw a drop in sales of close to five billion dollars; their share price halved within 12 months.

By understanding what your customers think and feel when it comes to making a purchase, you can avoid a similar drop in fortune.

Underwhelmed by your digital marketing agency?

Learn all the signs that it might be time to change

Download my free copy

Bringing Your Customers to Life

You’re probably not “Target 1: Male, 18-25, Student”. You’re certainly not “Target 4: Female, 25-45, Graphic Designer” either.

You’re a person, not a statistic — and so is your customer.

As you examine the numbers of each niche group you’ve identified, it can be quite easy to forget that behind each statistic is a person. Someone just like you.
While putting together your social media strategy, it’s much easier to understand the consequence of your work if you have someone in mind while you’re doing it.

“Jeff would love these trainers”
“Annie would buy this book in a heartbeat”

By putting names to the faces of our demographics, we humanise them and make it easier to relate and logically predict how each target audience is most likely to behave.

For example, the eCommerce platform Shopify demonstrated in its post How to Build Buyer Personas for Better Marketing a method for persona building worth replicating. Printing off your own small profiles to have with you will make your next campaign even easier to draft.

Image via alexa.com

Compare to Competitors

If you’ve studied your numbers and you’re still finding it hard to predict how your customers are going to behave, there’s a fast-track method for finding out what’s working — check the competition.

By studying the successful companies in your industry, you can learn a lot about what is and isn’t working for your target audience. It also helps if your main competitor has been active on social media for longer than you, as you can quickly assess their methods and improve on them.

For entrepreneurs and small businesses that can’t compete with the large marketing budgets of their rivals, letting the competition do all the work is a crucial stepping stone for piecing together a cohesive marketing strategy.

SEO competitor analysis is a great place to start with your research.

Putting It All Together

With six simple questions, you can improve the aim of your darts. No longer will you be throwing wildly at the dartboard, hoping that at least one will hit the bullseye.

Understanding your target market — who they are, which networks they use and their purchasing habits — will help you utilise the strength of a strong social media strategy to increase your total sales.

What to read next

• Want to target your audience with awesome content? Learn how to create content that ranks on Google
• Unsure which keywords your target audience are searching for? Learn how to do keyword research like a pro
• Make sure your target customers convert once they land on your site by optimising your website’s sales funnel