Growth Marketer Academy: Episode 2 – Target the Right Customer: Audience Analysis

An audience analysis is key to targeting and prospecting.

Targeting and prospecting is figuring out who it is that you want to reach.

It’s the basis of any marketing campaign

Here are the 3 Core Steps to targeting and prospecting:

Audience Analysis

Fist figure out who you’re targeting

Isolate your vertical

What’s a vertical? A vertical is an industry!

Determine what kind of companies or businesses you want to go after.

Some industries have an inherent vertical

Example: If your business is selling dental billing software, you’ve got a defined vertical (dentist offices)

Other companies may have a wider base that their product can be relevant to.

Pick ONE to focus on with this campaign

Example: A digital marketing firm can sell services to a number of different businesses but one campaign won’t speak to everyone. What industry is this campaign directed at?

Once you’ve determined what kind of companies or vertical you want to go after, next you must determine what size company you want to go after.

What is their business like?

This defines who in that company you need to reach with your campaign

For example:

Usually between 1-10 employees.

There are generally 1-2 decision makers

50-200 employees

Several layers of managers

200+ employees

Who will influence the company’s buying decision?

The end user (the one who will be using your product or service) may not be the one purchasing it

Consider multiple people along the purchase chain and target each one of them separately

 

Multiple levels of management and multiple areas or offices

The larger the company is, the larger the task to reach the right people because the larger the company, the more people there are involved in the decision-making process

When targeting customers and creating personas, apply the “buyers journey” through the process:

Stages of the Buyers Journey:

Awareness Stage

Define a problem a customer may not even know they have

Example: late night 90s television infomercials. Who knew wrapping your garden hose could be such a nightmare?

The end user is usually the target of your awareness campaign.

 

Consideration

Show the user what it’s like to have the solution implemented

These campaigns are usually designed around the middle managers, the ones who are overseeing the end user

 

Decision Stage

Present why your product or service is the most logical choice

Make your case to whoever is signing the check

 

Get to know your target/potential lead

Once you’ve figured out who you’re targeting, it’s time to learn more about them and gather background information such as:

 

Figure out all this information for each person or level of management involved in the buying process

Once you have a nice feel for who the person is that you’re targeting, it gives you a better idea of how to target them.

Next, figure out who it is you need to start with to get to the decision maker

Collecting the Information

Start surveying your potential customers or prospects.

It’s a lot easier to get someone to respond to an email or over the phone when you aren’t asking them to buy something

Ask them a few questions about their job, what they do and how they do it

Tools to gather information:

Survey Monkey helps you quickly and easily generate surveys and collect trackable data

Google Forms is another useful platform for creating quick, trackable surveys

Interviews

If you get your prospect on the phone and you really want to sell to them, ask them questions to find out what motivates them. This will help you build your targeting campaign

 

Sample Questions:

 

Your prospects don’t need to be the ones who actually record the answers/data.

Have your sales team ask prospects these questions while they’re already on the phone.

 

Leverage your team

Your sales team is also a great place to get helpful information.

They handle objections all the time.

Have them write down the objections they get so you can have counter objections in place in the future.

 

The customer service department deals with the problems after the purchase.

Tell them note reasons customers cancel or ask for a refund

Identify most common reasons and focus on addressing those issues and then assure potential customers you have their issues in hand from here on out.

 

Quora is a great source of potential topics

What are people in your target demographic/niche searching for?

Let’s say you’re targeting parents of children whose kids attend Charter Schools:

This tells you pain points and or concerns that you can present your product as the answer to.

Organize Your Data: Creating Personas

Now you have a massive amount of information

Next, you need to make it easier to digest & use.

Do this by creating very personal personas.

Give your personas a name.

You want to be able to build your message in a way that you want that specific person respond.

Check out our Audience Analysis post for a detailed walkthrough of how to create a persona.

Use our Persona Builder Template to create a virtual bio of your potential lead.

Once you’ve got the basic information down, get to know them.

Where do they hanging out?

Where do they get their information?

Where do they find the next big thing that they are going to buy next?

You can get this information from social media (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter)

Use LinkedIn to get a job title for the type of person you are prospecting.

Plug the job title back into LinkedIn to come up a list of people with the same job title.

Search Facebook for the other names you found with the same job title

Look for people with public profiles

Now plug this list of prospects into Facebook Insights to find out information like:

This can clue you into industry events you may not know about

Identifying others that follow and/or attend industry events can help you identify other potential prospects in the vertical you’re targeting

Create an in-depth persona within an industry: where these people are, where they get their information, and how they make decisions.

Tools:

Facebook Insights

Twitter Audience Insight dashboard

Followerwonk Moz (specific to Twitter)

How are people are using Twitter, who are they following, etc.

Cross data you collect on one platform with other social media platforms to create a detailed picture.

Use a data scraper to get data at scale from LinkedIn

Sellhack

LinkedIn Lead Extractor

LeadFuze promises automated list building