How to Identify Your Target Market and Create Customer Personas: 3 Steps to Follow

How to Identify Your Target Market and Create Customer Personas:
3 Steps to Follow

Identifying and understanding your target market is really important. It will help you create customer personas and create a stronger relationship with your audience!

The products or services you are selling online should be focused and intended for a specific group of people. It doesn’t matter if your customers are busy stay-at-home moms, commuters, fashion bloggers, or children who require dental care, your products and services, your brand, and your business company appeals to a target audience. You may know who your potential customers are, but how well do you actually know them.

Creating customer personals can help you focus your marketing efforts and ensure all of your products or services are tailored to the needs of your customers. According to experts, the customer personas are known as fictional characters designed to represent various user types that might use a brand, website, product, or something else in a similar way. But how to identify the target market and create customer personas?

There are some business owners who use their gut feeling, but this is not recommendable unless you have psychic powers. We suggest to do your own research and then come up with customer personas that suit your business and brand. All you need to do is follow these 3 steps:

Interview your customers

The first thing you need to do is interview or survey your customers. This can help you gather an important feedback from your customers. One of the most effective interviews are one-on-one as they can provide the most in-depth details you can use to create customer personas. There are various survey services such as Survey Monkey which allow you to sample a larger group of people if you think that one-on-one interviews are simply not enough for you. When surveying or interviewing your customers, it is important to be prepared, meaning you have to ask the right questions. The questions you are going to ask will vary depending on your niche and business industry. Here are some common topics you can use when asking questions: How they found our business company? Why did they purchase from us? Their level of technical knowledge and experience? Demographic information, company information, location, what issue our product or service solves for them, what challenges they face, how our sale process was, and etc.

Dive into the information

Once you think you’ve gathered enough information and details from the surveys or interviews, it is time to dive into the information and bucket your data into different groupings. You will notice that certain characteristics will start to show up and your customer personals will automatically start to take shape.

Create the personas

For starters, you can begin with 3-5 customer personas. If you want, you can use templates (there are a lot of templates that can be found online and one of the best is Orange Bus). Find the one that suits you the most and fill in the blanks with your information. Once you are done, create a name and give your new customer persona a photo to bring it to life. That’s it. The template will help you create as many customer personas as possible.

These 3 steps will help you not only identify your target market, but set you on a course to better understanding your customer’s needs, challenges, motivations, and issues your business or brand helps solve for them. By creating customer profiles or personals you can ensure your product efforts and marketing campaigns are on point and strategically ready.

In other words, you can create marketing content that best serves your customers’ needs.

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