Knowing who your target customer is, is super important for the success of your product/service and your brand. However, where does one find them? How does one find them? In today’s post, we’ll explore some options we have in order to find and study them.
Introduction
Before you start, you first need to be able to answer this question: who is my target customer?
Your target customer is your group of people who are actually interested in purchasing your product/service. In order to reach them, you need to have a properly defined brand, as well as a thorough understanding of who your target is and finally a well defined product that will suit them.
After you have determined who your target (target customer) is, you have to study and observe them in order to determine how to fill their needs with your product and if in fact they are the right target for you. To do so, we have three main methods to help us, let’s discuss them.
1. Find Out where They’re Located
The first step to reaching your customers is to find out where they’re located. In the past, this was pretty easy, all you needed to do was find the right place in town to set up your shop and the people would come.
With the dawn of the digital age, things changed a little, especially after the Covid19 lockdowns, even tasks like buying groceries can now be done online, where in the past, only drop shipping companies like Amazon and Etsy were online and smaller digital shops. This means that there are a lot more potential sales avenues to consider, your avenue could be a blog, a website, a YouTube Channel, or even a Facebook group (that is, if they allow you to advertise on their space).
Finding out where your potential customers are can be tricky, fortunately, there is one thing that could make that a little easier for you: AI! With nothing more than a well phrased prompt, you can get a lot of the info you need in a matter of seconds, keep in mind that AI at this point is not flawless and can generate incorrect answers, so be sure to fact check them. The AI bot I most highly recommend at this point is Bing, a free-to-use model developed by Microsoft that gives you answers using current information from the web (this is gold for market research!). Accessing it is quite easy, if you have access to Skype, chances are you already have it ;).
2. Observational Studies
The goal of observational studies is to study human behaviour, in particular how they behave as pertaining to purchasing a product or using a service. Observational studies can be done either online or in your target’s natural environment. Observe how they behave, How they talk, how do they make choices when buying a particular product?
When observing human behaviour, things can become interesting as they’ll say one thing but do another. They may talk about making sustainable purchasing choices when being asked about it, but when placed in a natural environment, they might make completely different decisions to what they talked about. There could be a number of reasons for this; maybe price comes first, then sustainability, perhaps they even want to look good in front of others. People have told needs as well as untold needs.
After you’re done, you’ll have some nuggets of info to take the next step we’ll discuss, namely interviews. What kind of lifestyle do they live? What does their income look like? Even knowing what their marital status is can help.
3. Interviews
Once you have gotten to know your customer better through observation studies, you can proceed to Interviews. The goal here is to go beyond the research you were able to gain through observation and dig deeper. Ask about past experiences, what their day to day lives look like, how they do things from day to day, even knowing their marital status can help.
Doing interviews doesn’t have to be a lengthy process, 30min per customer should be good enough. After you have interviewed a certain amount, you’ll notice that the answers tend to be more or less the same, this is how you know that the research is saturated and you’re done.
4. Surveys
Surveys give you valuable info on purchase psychology through statistics. They are a great tool for learning about demographics and what people like and don’t like as a whole. As opposed to observation studies and interviews, surveys are also more measurable, given that they depend on numbers. Keep in mind however that because of this, surveys won’t give you the kind of info interviews can give you. Through observation and interviews, you are able to both determine what your customer’s behaviour is and even needs they don’t tell you about, i.e., surveys give you quantitative information, whereas interviews give you qualitative information. This doesn’t mean surveys are useless, what it does mean however is that you won’t be able to solely depend on them.
Conclusion
There are many ways you can find and study your target customer to learn about them – who they are and what their needs and wants are. By using these techniques we discussed, you will be able get the information you need that will help you determine how to reach your target, or whether you should find a new target instead.
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