You have a product but do you know who you are selling to? If your target audience is not defined you can end up having a product that you think no-one wants, when in fact, you just aren’t selling to the right people.
Finding out who your target audience is, means more than knowing who you are selling to, it starts to motivate the why and how, you sell. When you begin to sell your products in an informed way, you are able to sell more intentionally, this means targeting the right people and getting more customers.
Inside we share some interesting facts and information about how to find your target audience and who your real customers are. These are key tidbits for any business owner to have, here are some key takeaways.
Everyone is selling to someone. Which means we all need to create a customer avatar or customer persona right wrong. My name is Ryan Toth, I’m the CEO of clear brand. I’m a StoryBrand certified guide. And in this video, I’m going to walk you through why the customer persona that most marketing companies are telling you to create is wrong and what you should do instead. Let’s jump in.
Now if your privy to some common marketing advice. One of the first things that most companies tell you is, you’ve got to create a persona, you’ve got to know exactly who you’re selling to. In fact, we want to know how they take their coffee. We want to know what magazines they’re reading. We want to know what they’re doing in their free time. Let me tell you what I mean. Let’s look at Harley Davidson. They are one of the clearest companies who has a defined customer persona. These big tattooed, maybe they’ve got beards, they’ve got their leather biker jackets. These folks obviously make up most of Harley Davidson sales, right? No. They only make up 3.5% of Harley Davidson sales. The other 96.5% of Harley Davidson buyers don’t care which motorcycle they drive. They don’t have the tattoos and the leather jacket and the beards and the deep grub voice and get in fights.
If Harley Davidson’s customer persona isn’t actually who buys their products, chances are yours isn’t either. The typical customer persona is going to go through, okay, what is your product? What is the benefit of your product? How does it help your customer solve their problems? That’s all right. And good. The problem is when we start going beyond that, we start looking at values. Oh, is my customer a liberal or a conservative, Republican or Democrat? Does my customer read the New York times or Fox news? Does my customer drink black coffee? Or do they put a lot of creamer into it? Now the problem with all of these questions is that they don’t actually help you sell your product. In fact, they confuse your message. When you go to write an ad, if you’ve got this extensive customer persona, even named them and picked a gender and an age and all those things, you’re writing this ad and now you’re trying to bring in, okay, I’m selling running shoes, but my customer drinks their coffee black. So am I supposed to write an ad that targets people who drink black coffee? No, because that doesn’t matter to your story. It doesn’t matter to your products. All that does is dilute your message, make it more confusing for you and make it harder for you to do your job of marketing, to the people who will buy your product. But let me tell you an easier way and a more effective way to go about creating your customer persona or your target audience in a way that actually works. The first thing I recommend is to go through the StoryBrand framework, either buy the book, building a StoryBrand or go through business, made simple university. You can find links below this video. So once you’ve gone through your StoryBrand framework and you have a brand script, I want you to focus on the first two sections.
The first section, there is the character and what they want, more specifically, though that’s reallt what we’re getting at in that section is the motivation. What is motivating them on their journey toward your product. So the answer to what is your character want, is not your product. It’s actually what is motivating them to buy your products. So if you sell running shoes, maybe they want to run faster, or they want shoes that lasts longer, or they want shoes that are lighter so that they don’t feel like they’re dragging so much weight, those are motivations. And these things matter. If you are selling running shoes for the person who wants lightweight shoes, that is something that you are going to want to include in an ad or on your sales page. That matters. Now the second thing that matters also comes from your BrandScript. And that is this.
What is the problem that your customers have, that your product solves, uh, that also has a huge impact on who your customer is. If a person has a problem that you help solve, they are 100% your customer. Remember you are inviting your customers into a story. In fact, more specifically, you are trying to identify the story that your customer is living, but there’s a misconception with that sentence. And that is this not going back to the beginning of your customer story, because that doesn’t matter on the buying journey. What matters is, do they have a motivation that will lead them to your product or do they have a problem that you solve? That is the beginning of this story that we’re talking about. So when you focus in your target audience and you use your brand script more specifically, those first two sections the character, and the problem on your brand script to create your target audience, suddenly everything you’re saying applies to the content that you’re creating, the ads that you’re writing, the social media posts. I want you to pull out your brandscript, set it in front of you when you’re writing an ad or when you’re writing a Facebook post and every single thing that you write should come directly from your brandscript. I will say that there’s one caveat and that is if you are a political party or you are a coffee company, then yeah, sure. It matters what political parties your customers affiliate with, or it matters how your customers take your coffee. But that’s only because that information is on your brandscript. If you’re selling black coffee, you’re only selling the people who want to buy coffee. You’re never going to sell to a non-coffee drinker unless potentially they’re buying a gift for a friend, but they’re never going to buy that for themselves if they don’t drink coffee. A lot of times when I’m working with a client, they’re focusing on the front of the story and they’re trying to figure out, okay, all of these people who have not yet bought, how do we get them to buy? I want you to reverse that thinking. I want you to go to the end of the story. I want you to think in these terms, your customers are the people who buy your product. At the end of the story, every single person who calls himself a customer has purchased your product. So the idea is not to identify all of these people out there who might it is to look at those who did buy and to say, okay, what defines them? Well, they wanted something that I sold. They had a motivation that brought them towards my product, or they had a problem that I helped them solve.
Those are the pieces that matter when you are identifying your target audience, the easiest way to do that is to go through the StoryBrand framework and then pull out those first two sections to really zoom in on your customer. When you do that, now you can say, oh, this is who my customer is. This is how I’m going to write a Facebook post that really targets them. Or this is how I’m going to write an ad that really gets their attention. It doesn’t need to be more confusing than that. Your customers are going to come from a number of different demographics. They’re going to have a number of different values, maybe be affiliated with different political parties, be different age groups. And that’s fine. In fact, when you focus in on people who want what you sell and people who have a problem that you solve, suddenly you’ve expanded your customer, your target audience, and you’ve also made it easier for them to engage with you because they see that you understand them, which makes them want to buy more. If you like this video, click subscribe, turn on notifications. So you find out the next time I release a video like this one about the grow your business. And I’ll see you the next video.
