When we want to grow our business online, it is essential to identify our potential customers. Our process of planning a good online strategy must definitely start there. Of course, it does not make sense to try to attract everyone; we should not waste resources (time and money) that are not well focused on our potential clients. Focusing our resources on a specific part of the people who may be interested in our products or services will allow us to communicate and establish a direct relationship with that segment and will produce more conversions and therefore greater benefits. Here are 5 tips to keep in mind while identifying potential customers:
1. Review the Business Strategy
We must evaluate the objectives that we have established and analyze the products or services that we offer. We must reflect on how our products or services meet a need or solve a problem for a potential customer. It is also convenient to analyze how we differ from other companies in our sector and what makes us stand out. Finally landing on the benefits that a potential buyer will have when choosing our products (or services).
Understanding our product and the needs for which customers come to it is the first step in identifying our target audience and in this payment form very important part.
After this initial analysis, we will begin to focus on what we need to know about our potential customers in order to reach them.
Based on all this data, we will adapt our business plan, but the fundamental key is to change the mentality and not think about what we want to sell if not about what the people who buy from us are looking for.
2. Start Investigating
We live in the world of information, we have at our disposal a large number of sources of information about our sector, the competition and the data of our potential clients that others have already analyzed and the best of all is that most of the information it is on the net and it will not cost us anything, although in contrast we will also find a high number of information that will not serve us and we must gradually discard. We can classify these types of inquiries as third-party-based research.
It is possible that if we do not find what we need in this way, we should do a first-hand investigation, obtaining the data ourselves and doing a subsequent analysis, through interviews, surveys, etc. Of course the results will be much more specific but the cost will be higher.
3. Generate an Ideal Customer Profile
After having done our research, we must move on to the next step, which is to develop the profile of our ideal client. It tries to expose in depth the demographic and behavioral information of the prospective buyer.
We will collect relative to demographic information data on age, gender, location, work, average income.About his behavior we will talk about interests, values, lifestyle, attitudes, and concerns.
The demographic information will help us to know what type of person buys our services, while the second, while the “psychological” or behavioral information will give us the clue as to why they are going to buy from us.
4. Identify what Locations our Audience is in
In addition to defining who our target audience is, we must be clear about where it is in the online environment in order to be able to focus our efforts there to reach them.
We must be able to answer questions such as what kinds of places do they visit on the internet? What pages or blogs do they regularly visit? What social networks do they frequent? Do they often use email? How do they use technology?
5. Analyze, Evaluate and Review
We won’t finish our job simply by identifying our potential customers once. We must continue investigating on a regular basis, knowing how the market and our competition are evolving.
We must analyze the results and see how our current clients and potential clients that we reach with our online marketing efforts evolve, to later evaluate the strategies we have put into practice and review them and adapt the profile of our ideal buyer based on all data collected.
These five tips are a key part of a good inbound marketing process, which in our opinion is the most reliable method to have results today when it comes to boosting our business in the online market. The success of our strategy depends on having a solid foundation and that knows our ideal client in depth.