In developing a marketing strategy for your consulting business, you must understand who will be the target audience for your brand.
WHAT IS MEANT BY THE TARGET AUDIENCE?
The target audience is the specific group of people you want to reach with your consulting brand’s marketing to increase your sales.
People who are the target audience are usually groups who are really interested in your content and services.
You can determine your target audience based on age, gender, income, location, interests, or certain factors.
By knowing your target audience, you can develop the right marketing strategy. So, it will be easier for you to reach potential customers.
TARGET AUDIENCE BENEFITS
1. Improving Marketing Performance
By knowing who your target audience is, you can make your marketing performance much more effective. Why is that?
This is because identifying the target audience can provide a clear focus on who you will serve.
Your brand can reach potential customers more easily, thus increasing sales as well as business income.
2. Optimizing Resources
Determining the target audience can also help you optimize existing resources.
Audience targeting will allow you to evaluate which audiences engage with your ad and ultimately convert.
So, you can prioritize people who will actually use your service.
3. Save on Marketing Costs
You can also save on marketing costs because you already know who will be the target audience for your brand marketing.
That way, you will only send offering content to a number of people who are really interested in your consulting business. So, you won’t spend a lot of money unnecessarily.
Besides saving expenses, you also won’t waste time and energy on things that are not needed. Everything will be more efficient with clear targets.
4. Increase Customer Satisfaction
For those of you who want to increase customer satisfaction, you can try to determine who will be the target audience for your consulting brand.
Those of you who know the target audience can create personalized offering content.
Launching the Adweek page, as many as 80% of clients say they are more likely to do business with consulting brands that offer personalized interactions.
Customers expect personalized interactions and unique experiences. Therefore, it is important for your brand to show that your business understands them.
HOW TO DETERMINE TARGET AUDIENCE?
So, how do you determine the target audience for your consulting business? There are several things you can do to find out who is the target market for your business, including:
1. Current Customer Base Analysis
One way to determine your target audience is to analyze your current customer base.
Try to segment existing customers by sharing based on certain specifications. For example grouping them based on age, place of residence, and interests.
Apart from that, you can conduct interviews with customers. That way, you can have deeper customer insights.
In fact, it gets emotional information and helps you understand why customers engage with your brand.
In this case, you can also conduct customer surveys. The results of customer surveys will provide quite extensive information about people who like your services.
2. Conduct Market Research and Identify Consulting Industry Trends
Another way to determine the target audience that you can do is through market research.
With market research, you can also have a better picture of who your brand’s competitors are. You will also find out how well your consulting business is positioned in the market.
In addition, you can find out what forms of threats might attack your business. So, you can develop a better business strategy to deal with it.
This can be a great way to find gaps or weaknesses in competitors so that your brand is far superior to competitors.
3. See who your business followers are on social media
Through social media, you can find some specific information about who is your brand’s audience.
This is because you can create polls on social media such as Twitter or Instagram by asking a few questions. For example their gender, age, or domicile.
The poll results can be important information that can help you see who is most interested in your brand.
Now, most social media are also equipped with analytics so you can see reports on the performance of posted content.
With the help of these analytics, you can find out who views your business’ social media profiles. You can also find out what content is successful and not.
According to a HubSpot report, every social media has a different audience. For example, Twitter tends to have an older audience, while Facebook tends to have younger audience.
On Twitter, you can upload short-form content. Meanwhile, on Facebook, you can post long content and videos.
While Instagram is a visual-based social media platform, graphically stunning content will thrive on this channel.
Based on this social media insight, you can get to know your target audience further as well as develop the right content creation strategy.
4. Use Google Analytics
Another tool that you can use to determine your consulting brand’s target audience is by using Google Analytics if you have your business website.
Google Analytics is a tool that can provide you with important information to find your target audience.
With Google Analytics, you can get information about the audience from the business website, which consists of gender, age, and location.
This important information is usually marked with various labels on the Google Analytics dashboard.
Through these tools, you can also find out who visited your business website and whether the content provided is relevant to them.
HOW TO REACH TARGET AUDIENCE?
After you know what the benefits are and how to determine the target audience, also see tips for reaching them.
1. Take a Personalized Approach
To be able to attract the attention of your target audience, try to do a personal approach. This is because every customer is a different individual.
Personalization provides a personalized experience based on previously analyzed client behavior, for example from purchase history, demographics, and more.
So, you have to adapt the message of the offer to the target audience so that every customer feels special and appreciated by the brand.
In this way, you can reach your target market more easily. This has also been supported by a 2018 study conducted by Epsilon. It states that 80% of customers tend to buy from brands that provide a personalized experience.
2. Take advantage of Various Social Media
Another way that you can use to reach your target audience is by using various social platforms media for promotion.
Moreover, the number of social media users today is very large. So, you can also expand your market reach.
Brand presence on social media can be a reference for customers in terms of credibility. Today, most customers will check if the consulting brand whose services they want to buy is present on social media.
Because of this, many customers are using social media to browse new products, leave reviews, and share their favorite brand recommendations with their friends.
3. Create Interesting Content
Not only focus on brand visibility online on social media, but you also need to create and share interesting content to reach your target audience.
Quoted from the Business page, presenting relevant content can help a brand connect with its target audience.
Even though the ultimate goal of your business is selling a service, too much focus on sales doesn’t always produce anything good.
So, establish a good relationship with your audience so they want to listen to you when making an offer.