Understanding Your Customers
If you’re a frequent reader of our blog, you’re probably familiar with the benefits of digital marketing. For those of you who aren’t, digital marketing is amazing for targeting and understanding your customer base.
Through digital marketing, you’re able to track website usage, customer interests, search terms, and more which means you should know exactly what type of customers you’re dealing with. Once you’re familiar with your customer you can take it even further to find a niche!
High-Level Customer Understanding
The more high-level information should be known already. This includes demographics like age, gender, location, maybe even language. Understanding is very important for your more general marketing tactics and content.
Your social media posts are exactly where you would want to use this information. Writing a post that appeals to middle-aged women will not go over so well if your social audience is mostly younger males.
Finding your basic demographics is easy. Most analytics program has the basics of gender and age. This can give you a huge understanding of how you should shape your content.
Getting Google analytics set up on your website is crucial. It gives you more than just the gender and age, but also location and device. Now a local store may not find the location that useful if their customers are not going to travel far to visit their store. Online stores, on the other hand, can use this to target ads to specific regions to make more of an impact than a general campaign.
Understanding the device usage is another high-level customer characteristic that you should take note of. Mobile reading and desktop reading are totally different. People are much more willing to read longer articles on their desktop without distractions compared to mobile. If you’re like most websites, you’re probably seeing a shift towards mobile usage. This means you should try adding more videos and shorter content to your website.
There are quite a few ways to understand the basics of your audience. Once you have a firm grip on these its time to start getting a little more specific and find your niche!
Finding the Little Details
Time to dive deeper! While keeping all the high-level information in mind, its time to look at where your customers are going, what they’re searching for, where they’re coming from, and determine if there is a smaller audience that you could spend some time focusing on.
Maybe you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule (Pareto Rule) where 80% of effects come from 20% of the cause. To put this into a marketing perspective: 80% of your business is coming from 20% of your customers. Through this logic, it’s worth putting time into finding your niche and marketing directly to them instead of putting more money into the other “80%”.
Using Google Analytics is powerful for finding exactly which areas of your site are getting traffic. If you haven’t yet, go to the behavior section of Google Analytics and look at behavior flow or your site content. This shows you what type of content on your website people are drawn towards or looking for.
Here’s an example of how this could be useful:
You run a gym that offers memberships to use the equipment, private instruction, classes, etc. Your main goal has been getting people to get memberships to your gym. When you look at your behavior flow on google analytics you start seeing that a lot of your traffic is headed towards a yoga section of your website. Now instead of trying to market to these people with a gym membership, you can create an ad focused on the yoga classes that your gym offers. Maybe even give a discount on the classes if you buy a membership if you really want to push memberships.
Basically, with Google Analytics, you can see why customers are coming to your site and if it is for a reason you hadn’t given much thought to before. This can be incredibly useful for adding emphasis to a different part of your business. But Google Analytics is not the only way to find new areas.
Social media is another interesting way to get in touch with your customers. A lot of people just use social media as a one-sided platform, meaning they just post content to it and hope people react to it. A better way to use this is to interact with your followers by asking questions or starting conversations.
By starting that interaction with your customers you can find out information that otherwise you never would have known. There are a lot of uses for talking to your customers. They’ll have a lot to say and not all of it will be useful, but once you start seeing a trend make a move!
Finding your niche and understanding your audience can take time. It is very important for digital marketing success, however, so don’t abandon it.
If you need help understanding your audience, focusing on a certain group, or even marketing to different niche’s give us a call and we can help get you on track.
