How to Engage with Your Target Customer to 10x Your Business

How to Engage with Your Target Customer to 10x Your Business

Whether you blog to inform, to entertain, to persuade or to provoke controversy,  to have a successful blog you must identify your target audience and Let Your Audience’s Interests Guide Your Content Strategy.

target audience

Visitors who find what they came for in your blog become subscribers, who will share links to posts with like-minded friends. The increase in traffic will send your stats on an upward climb.

Looking high quality similar sites is an important step to becoming a better blogger. But It’s also logical to assume that those who read your blog now are among your target audience.

The key to success in eCommerce (and other industries) is being able to engage with your target customer. You need to know the group that your business is aimed at and then find ways to reach and connect with this group – this will help you to attract and retain customers, build a positive reputation for your brand and increase sales.

As many in eCommerce find, this is easier said than done, particularly when your target customer has such great availability at their fingertips. With this in mind, here are a few tips for reaching and engaging with your target customer that should drive further success.

Create & Share High-Quality Content

The best step to take is to start creating content that is high-quality and aimed at your target audience. This is effective because it shows your expertise, allows you to have value to your target customer, and allows you to promote your brand and products. If you have a health and fitness eCommerce store, for example, then you could create content such as:

  • Home workout videos
  • Guides on achieving your goals
  • Interviews with fitness experts
  • Infographics
  • Slideshows

Engage on Social Media

Following this, you should also make sure that you are actually engaging with followers on social media, as simply having a presence is not enough. You should be responding to comments and messages, humanizing your brand and showing your expertise in the field. Ideally, your social media channels will not just be a tool for promoting your company and instead will become a digital community. It is where your target customer can engage in dialogue with like minded people, feel supported, have fun, and learn.

Build Your Brand Identity

Branding is vital for standing out from the crowd and engaging with your target customer. When you can determine how your target customer feels and thinks about your brand, it will allow you to form a connection and develop an association with specific characteristics. Developing a brand identity is challenging and will take some time to build, but a few key steps to consider include:

  1. Identifying the wants, needs, dislikes, and characteristics of your target customer
  2. Smart brand name and logo design
  3. Determining a USP that separates you from the competition
  4. Being consistent
  5. Developing a story for your company and humanizing the company

Get Others to Promote Your Brand

It is much easier to engage with your target customers and impress them if you can get others to promote your brand.

This is why influencer marketing has become important in recent years as it builds authenticity and allows you to reach a much larger group.

Still, you can also achieve these results by forming a strategic alliance with another business that targets a similar group but is not a competitor. Additionally, using customer reviews on the website is crucial for social proof and showing that you are a reliable company.

You must be able to reach and engage with your target customer as an eCommerce business, but this is a challenge due to how saturated the market is. The above strategies should allow you to start doing this and to start building a positive reputation that will drive further success.

The need of Identifying your Target Customer?

Identifying who your target audience is, what they already know, what they need to know, and the best way to deliver your message is critical to success.

Investing some time into creating brief character profiles of the kinds readers you want to locate your blog and subscribe to it will provide clarity.

Ken McArthur published The Top 10 Ways to Find Your Audience that provides guidelines for starting your research.

Put yourself in the shoes of the reader you want to attract.

Consider demographics, hobbies, professions, needs, wants, issues, knowledge, perceptions, and common goals. How old are they, where do they work and live, what are their preferences, attitudes and lifestyles?

Where can your Buyers be found?

Consider where your target audience can be found online and how can you connect with them there.  Then check out social networks, online groups, newsletters, chat rooms, forums, etc.

In Social Strategy: How to understand your social media target market, Kimbe MacMaster explains identifying who your target audience the first step, and the next step is understanding four main areas about your target audience before you develop a social networking strategy.

  • What they use: What platforms does your target frequent?
  • How they use it: What methods does the target use to access social?
  • When they use it: What time of day does the target visit?
  • Why they use it: What is the purpose of these social platforms?

Is your audience on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIN, Google Plus, YouTube, or other social media sites?

Who influences your target customers? 

“Influence is the ability to take action, such as sharing an image that collect comments and likes easily, or tweeting something about a great restaurant.

group of peopleYou can use Klout, Kred,EdgeRank Checker, Hubspot’s Marketing Grader and/or Peer Index or one of the other social media engagement measuring tools to determine who influences your target audience.

Digital Natives are people who helps you to connect naturally online communication. They can come from any of the generations. … You really have to pay attention to Digital Natives as they’re the biggest influencers today.

Do You Even Know Where Your Digital Natives Are From?

What does your target audience want and need to know?

Connecting with your current readers and putting yourself in the place of your target audience will help you determine:

  • what your target audience writes about
  • where your common ground is found
  • how and where they engage with their audience.

Using tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool will give you a better understanding of words and phrases that your target audience searches for.

Polling or giving surveys to your existing readers, by using SurveyMonkey or JotForm surveys, you can understand their needs and can provide useful information to help your target audience.

Make social media sharing easy.

The best way to get your message across is to define it clearly and structure your posts to hold reader interest from the beginning to the end. The best way to get your message out is to have your friends promote it.   Insuring your WordPress.com blog’s accessibility and share-ability can be easily done in several ways.

“On one hand, in-depth knowledge of the topic you are writing on will make your blogging easier. On the other, no matter how much knowledge you have muddling along without expressing your blog’s purpose can lead reader confusion and blogger burn-out. From the outset you need to be able to describe  your blog’s purpose by expressing what you intend to blog about in as few words as possible.” — Creating and effective blog Description

A research shows that young adults are more likely than others to use major social media. At the same time, some other groups are also interested in different sites and services.

Internet users under 50 are particularly likely to use a social networking site of any kind, and those 18-29 are the most likely of any demographic cohort to do so (83%).

Women are more likely than men to be online on these sites. Those living in urban areas are also significantly more likely than those rural internet users to use social networking. To view a breakdown of social networking site use by age group, over time, please visit the social networking summary page.

In the July 2013, Internet & American Life Project report said6% of Online Adults are reddit Users  it’s reported that young men are especially likely to visit the front page of the internet. Some 15% of male internet users whose ages are from 18-29 say that they use reddit, compared with 5% of those women in the same age range and 8% of total men ages 30-49.

An another research titled 72% of Online Adults are Social Networking Site Users the researchers also studied online adults’ use of Twitter. The percentage of internet users who are on Twitter has more than doubled since November 2010, currently at 18%. Internet users whose ages are from 18-29 are the most likely to use Twitter—30% of them now do so.

This research found that both teens and adults use Facebook the most of all social networking sites — 94 percent of teens and 67 percent of adults. However, it’s adults that are more active on Pinterest and Instragram, while teens are more active on Twitter.

In Social Media: Do You Know Where Your Target Audience Is?

Heidi Cohen provides an overview of social media user data. Just over half of Twitter users are 35 or older, nearly 80% of LinkedIn users are 35 or older. Facebook and Twitter have more female users as only 40% are male, and 80% of Pinterest users are female.

Conclusion

Your primary focus as a blogger is publishing original content targeted to appeal to a specific audience and presenting it in a manner that makes it readily and easily available through search engines.

If you don’t have a clear vision of who you are blogging for and where you want your blog to be, then it won’t be a success and you can never take your blog to the next level. That’s why knowing who your target audience is and knowing what your purpose is, are key to your blog’s success.

Write for your readers.  Know who your audience is and what they want to know, then give them what they want.

I hope guys this post is helped you to identify your target audience. Feel free to share it with your friends.

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