Category: Target Audience

3 SIgns You Might be Targeting the Wrong Audience - And How to fix it

11/1/2018

Red person represents the challenge of finding your target audience in a sea of people.

Your sales team seems to be doing everything right. You know what you offer, what value you provide and how those attributes align. But you just aren’t seeing the lead velocity you want.

Are you running paid search campaigns and finding the leads are a poor fit for your business, or that your sponsored ads are showing up in the wrong locations? Are your sales teams having meetings with the right people? Maybe they bring you along to the meetings and when you get there you realize the lead will never buy your service. Do you get the feeling when you’re interacting with leads that something isn’t quite right?

These breakdowns may indicate that you haven’t found the perfect product-market fit. Here are some signs you might not be targeting the right audience — and what to do about it.

Your Target Audience is Anyone Who Walks in the Door.
You’re passionate about your offerings. You have no doubt that they could benefit a wide variety of people. Are you harder pressed to think of who you don’t want to contact than who you do? If that’s the case, your target audience might not be targeted enough.

Imagine you’re shopping for a gift for a teenager. Try and picture what you’d get that teenager. Tricky, isn’t it? Without knowing anything about the person except their age — not their gender, their location, their interests, their needs — it’s really difficult to buy an appropriate gift for them.

You might be thinking, "Ok, but what about a car?" Any teenager wants a car! And since our offerings are so awesome, anyone will want them.

Not so fast. Even if your products or services could benefit anyone, not everyone will really resonate with the value you’re providing or be drawn in enough to listen to your message.

Consider a small electric car and a full-size pickup truck. Neither is better than the other. They are just each aligned to audiences with completely different experiences and lifestyles. So their target audiences are completely different, too: an eco-conscious single mother with a tiny car budget for her teen daughter vs. a father whose teen son will use the truck to help with their family landscaping business.

Plus, if you’re casting too wide of a net, you and your team are wasting a lot of energy sorting through the flotsam and jetsam that you pull in. You may catch a fish or two, but not before discarding the tin can, the lost shoe, the spare bicycle wheel. And, if you do catch that big fish, you won’t know if it was because you were fishing in the right area or if you just got lucky.

On the other hand, if you research where a particular type of fish hangs out, go there and bait specifically for that fish, you can tie your success to your intentional efforts and repeat it in the future.

Raise the bar from “anyone with a bank account” to some really specific criteria that will guide you and your sales team to client gold. Examine these three criteria to identify your target audience.

Industry – What industry is the best fit for your offerings? Imagine you sell high-tech gloves that automatically adjust to external temperatures. All of Chicago may want your product in the winter. But, for a reliable source of clientele, dig deeper -think professional skiers, construction workers, ice skating instructors.
Demographics – What is the age, gender, location and other basic identifying information of the audience that will most benefit from your offerings?
Psychographics – What are your target audience’s habits, interests and values? These run a little deeper than dry demographics.

You aren’t Finding Leads in the Places you Thought They’d Be.
You’ve got your industry, demographics and psychographics down, and you’re hot on your target audience’s trail. You’ve talked to your sales team, and you’ve heard that the group you’re looking for lives on LinkedIn. So, you do some targeted outreach, even join some professional groups on the platform, and nothing manifests. Sure, you have some good conversations, but deals-wise, you’re still coming up empty.

If your target audience isn’t showing up where you expected, it’s time to do a bit more research. Here's how.

Talk to your existing customers and ask them where their favorite industry watering holes are. Where do they go for information?
Hold informational interviews with a few people who would be ideal clients for you. Even if these meetings don’t turn into new business, you can get valuable information on the best places to turn to find your next big sale.
Hit the trade shows, especially the smaller, more targeted ones. Chat with attendees and really dig into their interests and needs.
Research the social accounts your competitors follow. Pay attention to who they retweet, repost and respond to.
Read up on industry blogs and journals to get inside information and to understand how to maximize your outreach efforts.

Your Target Audience Isn’t Engaged.
But, maybe you’ve done all of that. You’ve found the right people in the right places, and you’ve brought them to your door. And maybe they take a peek in, explore your website, read an email or two, and then wander away.

If you’ve found your ideal clients and they’re nibbling but swimming away, what you’re offering might not be attractive enough to hook them. In this case, you may want to take a look at your messaging. Ask these three questions.

Does your message speak to your target audience’s challenges, needs and wants? If you draw a lead in with a solid email or ad, and then they bounce away from your website within a few seconds, it’s likely you aren’t answering the need that drove them to click. An ad with the headline “Does your construction team have the winter blues?” might draw your potential clients into your glove company’s website. But if the page they visit only discusses how fantastic your company is, they’ll bounce away because their expectations weren’t met.
Does it reach them at the right time in the buyer’s journey? If your targeted outreach gets nothing but crickets in response, your message might not match up to the timing of their needs or where they are in their decision process. If you send a few informative blog posts to a list of ski instructors raising their awareness about the effects of cold temperature on reaction times, you may be preaching to the choir. They are well aware that their team needs high-tech gloves and other winter gear to prevent sluggish runs. They will be looking for more solutions-focused messaging.
Does it tell their story? If your leads don’t find themselves in your messaging, you may be losing them. You may have identified the who, what, where and how of your target audience, but you need to dig deeper into the why. What motivates them? Beyond industry, demographics and psychographics, what story will help them see themselves using your offerings? To know your audience on this level, try building out a persona.

So, there you have it — 3 key ways to tell if you don’t quite have a handle on your target audience. Looking for more on finding that perfect product-market fit? Check out our video on target audience and this target audience worksheet you can discuss with your team.

How to Define Your Ideal Customer

10/19/2018

Red chair represents your ideal customer in a sea of clients.Picture

“If you build it, they will come” is only true in sales if you know exactly who you want to come your way. If you assume that creating a great product or service model and “getting it out there” is enough, you may find yourself struggling to create reliable growth.

By narrowing in on who you can best serve, your sales organization can avoid wasting resources on poor product-market fit. By clearly defining your target audience, your team can readily align on messaging, sales tactics and goals. Here’s how to define your ideal client.

Match Your Value Proposition to Your Ideal Customer's Needs
When you’re looking for a romantic partner, you focus just as much, if not more, on what you have to offer as what a potential date might bring to the table. The same is true of identifying your ideal client.

To thrive, your understanding of who you’re selling to needs to be rooted in what you’re selling. What you’re selling is not your product, not your services, but the value you provide. When considering your ideal client, your value proposition must align with their needs.

For example, take a look at the following value proposition. “We help companies create corporate event experiences that expand team knowledge, boost sales and increase revenue.”

If you were the leader of this organization, your ideal client would be companies whose events are dedicated, not just to increasing sales, but also to learning. Companies needing an event planner for their corporate gala wouldn’t be an ideal fit. But, companies looking to establish an annual sales conference would be right up your alley.

Study Your Current Clients
If you’re stumped as to how to articulate your ideal client, take a look at the customers you’ve already built strong relationships with. Explore both who they are and what works about your partnership. Answer these questions.

What problems are you solving for them?
What’s their company size?
What industry are they in?
How did they find you?
What challenges were they facing when they inquired about your services?
How do they rate their experience with you?
What do you like about your working relationship?
What could be improved?
What does your product or service do for them?
What reality (or outcome) do you create for them or make happen?

Answering these questions about your current client base and searching for patterns will help you create a clear picture of your ideal client.

Identify Your Top Industry Sectors
It’s tempting to cast a broad net, especially when you’re looking to get your business off the ground. After all, the more customers the better, right?

Not really. Your ideal client is one that your organization has a good grasp of. No matter how skilled your team is, their capacity to really understand the inner workings of other industries is limited. Partnering with customers from any industry that comes your way will likely lead to a shallow picture of client need, scattered team energy and stagnant sales.

To create repeatable, sustained growth, you want to narrow in on and study your best-fit industries.

Be Realistic
There’s a big difference between your ideal client and your idealized client. Just as it’s hard to give up on romantic pipe dreams, it can be difficult to adjust your expectations about who your best client is. You may think that your services are tailor-made for Fortune 500 apparel companies and discover, with time, research, and trial and error, that your golden ticket is really mid-sized food manufacturing businesses.

You want to make sure you are pursuing the audience that is the best fit for what you offer, not who you think should be the best fit.

When defining your ideal customer, take a good look at what partnerships have been fruitful for you and what pursuits have cost a lot of time and effort — without solid results.

Do Market Research
While looking at your internal data and past experiences is an excellent way to understand what’s working and what’s not, market research can help you uncover paths you might not have thought to explore. What’s more, market research can be especially effective in telling the difference between a pipe dream and a dream client.

Focus groups and external surveys can help you determine if your hypotheses about your target market bear out. You can also do research to understand how big a specific market is to better understand your ideal fit. Do this for each target audience you want to pursue to help validate or reassure a target audience strategy.

Create a Persona
Now that you have a strong idea of the value you create, who you’ve sold successfully to in the past and what industries you’re targeting, you’re ready to delve into the process of creating a persona.

A persona is a semi-fictionalized representation of your ideal customer. It’s grounded in market research, current customer information and industry knowledge. You want to include detailed information in this representation, including:

Job title of the decision-maker
Goals and desired outcomes
Challenges and problems they typically face
Sources for industry information
Demographics, such as gender, age, education and location
Psychographics, such as tendencies, values and habits
Story

Here’s an example of a persona of an ideal client for a B2B communication SaaS company who sells to the staffing and recruiting industry.

Persona: Steve the Staffing Executive

Job title: CEO or President of a staffing and recruiting company

Goals: Gain more new clients, go deeper with current clients, increase recruiter productivity, improve candidate response rates, and be seen more and more as a resource to current and new clients

Challenges: Standing out from the competition in a highly competitive industry, getting candidates to respond, retaining core staff and attracting top talent

Demographics

Gender: Male
Age: 38-55 years old
Income: $200K- $400K
Location: Nationwide, largely urban

Psychographics:

Dominant personalities
Bottom-line thinkers convinced by revenue results
Attracted to productivity hacks
Tends to favor quick solutions that can be easily explained to his team and integrated within existing recruiting workflows

Sources of Industry information: Staffing Industry Analysts, StaffingHub, Inc, Forbes

Story: Steve has been in staffing and recruiting for 10+ years. He manages a large team of recruiters and works hard to adapt in a constantly changing and increasingly competitive industry. He has a core fan base of loyal candidates, and while the reputation of his company gets him far, the market for talented candidates is tight. He needs to break through the noise, as a talented candidate will receive 10+ email and voicemail messages each day. He wants a reliable, unique solution for getting candidate attention that will please his recruiters and speed sales.

Once you have this level of understanding of your ideal client, you can hone your marketing efforts, refine your value messaging and ensure your sales team is aligned on who you’re selling to.

Defining your ideal customer may seem like a daunting task but it’s well worth the effort. By aligning your team on who you want to provide solutions for, all of your sales team’s activity — from generating leads to closing deals — will be more targeted, efficient and fruitful.

Looking for more on defining your audience? Check out our target audience worksheet and video.

Reach the Right People by Defining Your Target Audience [VIDEO]

9/21/2018

To use your resources wisely and build a high-performing sales organization, you need a clear picture of your ideal client.

Check out the video above as Karl Becker from The Carruthers Group describes how to define and narrow in on your target audience.

3 SIgns You Might be Targeting the Wrong Audience - And How to fix it

How to Define Your Ideal Customer

Reach the Right People by Defining Your Target Audience [VIDEO]

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