The Secret to Attracting the Right Customers

by Karianna Cirnitski

You’ve done it! You’ve poured time, energy, and resources into creating the most amazing business offering. The question is: how do you attract the right customers to buy it?

In the process of developing your product or service, you likely identified a viable market. But if your definition of an ideal customer is limited to only “Gen Z” or “people with an income of $70k,” then you need to re-examine your targeting strategy!

The secret to finding your ideal customer (and hence creating effective marketing campaigns) is to craft a persona for your target market. You may have multiple target markets for your product or service, but don’t focus on too many at once – you need to generate a distinct marketing strategy for each persona.

The way in which you construct your persona depends on whether your business is B2C or B2B. In either case, a multi-dimensional approach is required, but the dimensions you consider will look different. For the purposes of this article, we’ve focused on B2C, but stay tuned for a B2B version coming soon!

Create your B2C target market persona by analyzing these four areas: demographics, geography, behavior, and psychographics.

Demographics

Many business owners will limit their targeting to only demographics, such as age, income, gender, etc. While demographics are important, they only provide a shallow view of your audience. To gain depth in your targeting and better understand your ideal customers, demographics should always be used in tandem with other dimensions. It’s also important to combine multiple demographics, such as:

• Age/generation
• Income
• Gender
• Family life cycle
• Ethnicity
• Family size
• Occupation
• Education
• Nationality
• Religion
• Social class

Behavior

How will your customers interact with your product or service? Is it a one-time purchase or a monthly subscription service? Are they new or existing customers? Consumer behavior is a critical consideration when defining your target market persona. This includes:

• Benefits desired from the product or service
• How often the product or service will be used
• Situation in which the product or service will be used (daily use, holiday use, seasonal use, etc.)
• Buyer’s status and loyalty to the product or service (potential user, first-time user, frequent user, etc.)

Geography

Location is always important to consider, although it impacts some businesses more than others. For example, a small, local coffee shop may define a narrower geographic area for its target market compared to a national coffee chain. Geographic factors include:

• Region (continent, country, state, neighborhood)
• Size of city or town
• Population density
• Climate

Psychographics

Psychographics are perhaps the most important (and often the most overlooked!) component in developing a target market persona. These are the elements that truly paint a picture of your customers: what they do, what they value, the activities they enjoy, and how they live their lives. Psychographics are the key to understanding how your product or service can fit in with a person’s values or lifestyle. Examine aspects such as:

• Activities
• Interests
• Opinions
• Values
• Attitudes
• Lifestyles

Example Persona

Let’s use that local coffee shop as an example – we’ll call it Bean Love Café. The owners of Bean Love have identified their primary target persona, which they are calling the “Morning Rushers”:

Demographics: Middle-aged working professionals (35-50 years old) with a median income of $50-$70k.

Behavior: Frequent users who want a good quality but reasonably priced way to get quickly caffeinated en route to work on weekday mornings.

Geography: Towns within 10 miles of Bean Love’s location (with an emphasis on commuter neighborhoods because Bean Love is located on a main commute corridor).

Psychographics: These people value convenience and time-saving options, but they also expect good quality at a fair price. They have busy lives and are often rushing out the door to get to work. They are involved in their local community, and they pride themselves on supporting local small businesses instead of corporate chains.

Now that you’ve identified your target market persona, your next step is to build a marketing strategy that speaks to that audience!

Need help? Reach out to us! Our marketing and communications experts can develop a plan to connect your brand with the right customers!