The most important thing you can do for your business is to learn everything you can about your target market in order to focus your marketing efforts and business image around attracting them to purchase your products and services. Even the most robust marketing campaign is not going to be effective if it doesn’t end up in front of your target market. While brick and mortar businesses have know this for a long time, but for some reason when businesses go online they go for gaining thousands of followers for their website and social media profiles whether any of them will eventually buy or not and that focus is not in their best interest.
Taking the time to complete a detailed profile of who your target market is, and going for fewer followers that will actually pay off in the long run will save time, money and effort over the long haul of creating a sustainable and successful online presence. The easiest place to start is to look at who your customers are right now and what they have in common. This includes their age, what needs they have that they are purchasing your products or services to fill amongst other details. Knowing for example, if your target market wants a more casual approach or if you should keep your tone very professional is an important part of the puzzle for online branding purposes.
The age of your target market is very important in knowing how to best reach them online through social media marketing and advertising. Younger consumers follow social media sites such as Reddit, Twitter and Tumblr. Older customers are oftentimes on Twitter as well, but they are on Facebook in much higher numbers than you will find on Reddit and Tumblr. Of course, if you are appealing to professionals in a business to business environment, LinkedIn is a critical social media site to create a presence on, while if you are marketing to stay at home mom’s, you would be better off on a site such as Pinterest.
When you find out what social media sites your target market is most likely to spend the most time at, you can focus your social media marketing efforts to those sites for the best return on investment. You can then turn your focus on your website to make sure it’s designed in a way that is going to better appeal to your target market in regard to colors, tone, style and how you feature your products and services. Finally, consistently reviewing analytics reports to gage your progress and make adjustments if needed will help you fine tune your approach to line up to your market in the best way for online business.
