6 Useful Tips for Identifying Your Potential Customers
Before launching a new business venture or a product, you need to identify your potential customer base. In order to modify your product/service idea according to the needs of your prospective customers, you need to know them better. Defining the target market for your business will also help in efficient utilization of your marketing and advertising resources. Customer profiling works well for all sorts of businesses, it gives you a competitive edge to proactively communicate with your prospects and serve them in the best possible manner. Here are a few smart tips that you can make use of while identifying your potential customers!
Get Familiar with Demographics
The first and most important step towards defining your target market is creating a demographic profile of your customers. The age group, gender, location, marital status, occupation and annual income are the basics to start with. For example, a clothing brand launching a funky clothing line would identify its customers as young girls and women aged 15-25, a beverage brand launching an energy drink would define its target customers as men aged 18-30 plus.
Evaluating the Psychographics
After you have familiarized yourself with the demographics of your prospects, you need to evaluate their psychographics which include personality traits, social norms, values, interests and lifestyle. In order to make your product/service launch a success, you need to evaluate how your product/service can make a difference to the lifestyle of your potential buyers. For example, a tech savvy person would love a gadget with innovative and latest features; a coffee lover would definitely buy Mocha flavored biscuits, a social person would check out a new speedy and less pricey internet service.
Do Research on Successful Competitor Brands
The simplest way to identify your prospective customers is to do research on your successful competitor brands. However, you should not limit your business to a mass market(if you find it as a trend in most of your competitor brands), niche marketing is much more promising, so do have a look at your competitor’s target market but search for niche markets that you can pitch to. For example, cost efficient field software might not be required by Top Notch businesses but medium, small and startup businesses would be interested in buying it.
Analyze your Product to see who will buy from you
Another insightful tip to know your prospects is to do a product analysis. Define the benefits of your product and then analyze who would want to buy such a product. For example, let us consider that your product is a massage chair which relaxes the muscles and works best for people with muscle and joint pains. Keeping these benefits in mind you can evaluate your customer base as people with back pain or injuries, the age group would be 20-50 plus. Being an expensive item, people interested in buying it will be particular about the fine details of the product.
Read Industry Blogs and Forums
You can conveniently search for your potential consumers online by reading the relevant industry blogs and forums. In the current digital era, customers love to comment on blog posts and forums, you can visit top rated websites of your industry and see what kind of customers are commenting on their blog posts and participating in the forum discussions. You can use social media as well to identify your prospects. Although time consuming, online search would save you a lot of money and in the current era it is easier to build relationships with customers online.
Use Unique and Unconventional Communication Approach
Instead of using the traditional cold calling and other communication approaches to reach out to your potential clients, make use of innovative and interactive portals like live chat. Integrating a live chat support service on your business website would help you identify and connect with your potential customers in a more convenient manner; you can find out about the demographics and psychographics of the visitors landing on your webpage. Marketing your products and tailoring your customer service according to their preferences would be much easier with the help of live chat service.