Episode 4 – Attracting Customers with Martin Sully
Last week, we looked at repelling your non-ideal customers by standing for something, getting to know your ideal customer and setting them expectations.
This week we're focusing on working on who is your dream customer.
We'll cover:
[00:00:00]
Welcome back to the second part of our target market podcast. Last week, we focused on the art of repelling your customers. And this was standing for something, getting to know your ideal customer and then seeing them expectations from what they can expect. This week's a little bit different. So we're gonna be looking at how to attract your dream customers.
[00:00:26]
Now, one thing we learned from some of the, uh, the biggest brands that just get this really, really right, is to be absolutely laser focused when it comes to looking at who your customer is and understanding their needs. Why do I want you to be laser focused? Well, a laser focus is a faster, simpler way to sales. Having a broad spectrum so you are targeting lots of people makes it really hard because people have lots of different things that they love and makes it very dif difficult. So targeting a big, uh, demographic is gonna cost you a lot more money than it would be to focus on a little niche area.
[00:01:18]
When you find your niche and you dive into what they want deep down, uh, it's gonna be a lot easier to work out what they want to come away with and how they want to feel afterwards. It's gonna make it a lot simpler to talk to them like a real person and start building relationships with people. An example of this is a new, offline networking event I've put together called Chatterbox. It's about giving people access to a chance to catch up with people that are in a similar position to you.
[00:01:56]
So I work from home and there's a lots of other people that work from home on their businesses. And this was an opportunity for me to get out of my comfort zone and meet more people. But also share that experience with other people. From multiple conversations I had with people. It was just something that people were really keen on. So deep down people want connection. They want to end that isolation. So that's what they want to come away with, how they want to feel afterwards. They want to feel like they can reach out to other people and understand that's okay to feel that. If you're a Newcastle Australia, you should come along and check it out. It's free. You just have to grab a coffee or a piece of cake. We dot them around different venues around Newcastle and, and the Hunter valley. So I will put an link to that at the end of the show notes.
[00:02:56]
Okay back to it. So Seth Gordon has a really great quote. It kind of sums everything up for me. "Reach is almost always the wrong path. Being known by lots of people. Isn't really the goal. What you're really seeking is to be trusted, to be heard, to be talked about and to matter. And if we look at any brand that's succeeded, that is what they've done." If you speak to everyone, you actually speak to no one. Outlining a crystal clear target market is critical in the same way that recognizing who isn't your target market is critical.
[00:03:38]
So I guess we have to kind of move on to finding out who is your brands someone. Who is that person that you are speaking to. And there's a simple way to look at it. I touched on it a little bit last week, but I think we were gonna dive in a little bit deeper this week. Let's look at a brand's persona or buyer personas for a specific sector. And this is a good way to illustrate it. We've got a young two and a half year old, and naturally we care about what she eats. We want the best for her so that she can thrive. That thinking leads more to looking at organic baby food brands than it does not looking at them.
[00:04:25]
To outline possibilities for parents and possible personas or parents, because parents is very broad. You can have a couple of parents who love the idea of it. But, they can't afford it. So they want to see promotions about it. They want to see, they might flip and, you know, come back and then go off. And then they may sometimes make their own food for their baby. Alternatively, they'll be the parents that can afford it and don't have the time to do cooking. They will love it and preach about it. Once they become your dream customers that are simple. They're always, you know, just regularly making purchases or they could be a single parent. So obviously not always couples and they will have a completely different set of needs and wants that will affect your buyer personas.
[00:05:28]
So you need to think about generalizing the personas to start with before narrowing your focus further, your customers might believe in clean eating and are in a financial position to buy the premium option. They might consider making all the baby's food, but in reality, they may find it really challenging to do that every week. They are also maybe looking for a solution that is fresh, organic, transparent, relatable, and convenient to their lives. They may be modern minded. There may be part of the generation who Googles everything.
[00:06:20]
They might also be regular Amazon shoppers, who love the convenience of just having it come straight to the door. They might like to travel in between working hard and tend to make purchases from, you know, from different different companies. They may crave a seamless, um, customer experience, customer journey. They may just, yeah. From, you know, they more want to see quick, simple start to finish, you know, go on. They can buy it, plug in a little code. You know, they get their bits and pieces. Their previous orders are all ready for them to go and they can just literally just hit, go and. Series of things comes to their door.
[00:07:10]
It just makes it really easy. So there's, there's, you know, uh, bits and pieces like generalized ideas before you can kind of really start to narrow down things. And when I run a branding workshop, uh, I actually look at yeah, putting together three to four, uh, particular personas for that product or service. I'm gonna actually dive into some of my bits and pieces that I've worked on in the past to give you a bit of an idea of, a good demographic or a good psychographic that has broken down all those little questions that we have. So like where do they live? What are their values? What do they like and dislike?
[00:07:57]
You can also build customer personas that are closely aligned to customers you are already working with or customer that are perfect for your business. I'm gonna read out a persona from a workshop that I did, but just pay really close attention to how real they seem as I bring them to life.
[00:08:21]
This is a mock persona for a company or a brand that I would love to work with in the future. This is Brian, the Explorer. Brian's 28 and has an older brother-in-law, John. John loves the finer things in life. And, introduced Brian to the world of craft beer. Being the Explorer that he is. Brian loves discovering different flavors, different new things. Every time his favorite breweries drop another release. He gets a rush blood and rushes straight to the bottle shop to buy the beer. While he is there, he picks up five other craft beers. Brian, isn't motivated by the alcohol content. But the flavor exploration leads him to drink some pretty radical concoctions, but he doesn't care as it's something to chat about with friends.
[00:09:16]
So with people in similar communities. He gets online and chats to them about, you know, different, different he's different beers. And meanwhile, his girlfriend can't understand why it takes him 30 minutes in the bottle shop to pick up six beers. He reads the can label of every beer he picks up and is drawn to different can designs and will most likely put the empty on a shelf like a badge of honor. He has built up trust in four or five standout breweries that he knows will always give him a good beer, no matter how odd. He wonders though, if becoming a head brewer would be a bit fun. But he is concerned he would drink too much.
[00:10:06]
His favorite Instagram accounts are Range Brewing and Mountain Culture, and he watches how to brew tutorials on YouTube.
[00:10:16]
So there you go. That's one distinctive persona. Now, obviously we could go way further and we could also do a persona for the girlfriend as well. Um, you know, and that, you know, she wants to go in and buy him something for his birthday, but doesn't know which direction to go, so needs help. So there's, there's so many little ways we can start breaking down what the customer personas are.
[00:10:46]
Now, hopefully by looking at the brand's persona and the customer personas, we can start to build a bigger picture of what the, uh, brand's aesthetics could look like and how it can be influenced by different factors. How many things can we glean from the Instagram accounts that this person follows? All these little things, builder, build possibilities and build information that we can use to pick out brand aesthetics, colors, fonts, logos, you know, things that they can align with. And, we also give ourselves space to dive into how they're feeling.
[00:11:23]
Now I'm just gonna run you through a few little questions that are gonna start making you think about one persona. Now you can apply this to a few. Okay.
[00:11:36]
What does the person need? What would make their lives better? What's their biggest challenge. What are the defining characteristics of their personality? Now there's a lot of stuff in there. What do they desire in customer service? What do they value most in life? Ooh, that's a big one. That's a big juicy one. What's their age? What's their stage of life?
[00:12:03]
What's their life stage? What's their gender? What does the family unit look like? What's their job title and industry? There's a lot of questions you can ask yourself about your customers, where do they live? What do they value? What we're trying to achieve by diving deeper into our customers.
[00:12:35]
Now, all of that leads to finding out a little bit more about how to laser focus your messaging, to relate to your people without sounding like a robot.
[00:12:47] The last thing I want you to do is to have a think about real world issues that may be affecting your customers. How are they currently feeling? Obviously in the last two years we've had the pandemic, are your psychographics that you are kind of picking out? Are they, are they relevant still or do you need to adjust them?
[00:13:08] That is it for today's episode, we looked at how to attract and define your target market by looking at personas. If you wanna know a little bit more information, feel free to reach out and connect up and start making you think about, you know, building out your own characters. See you on the next episode.