What is a brand without customers? Well, nothing. They are the ones who utilize your service, sometimes review said service and ultimately determine your success.
Trying to work out your ideal customer is therefore easily the most important thing when starting your brand.
So, if you are not doing everything possible to fully understand them, on the deepest possible level, then you quickly need to change your priorities.
If you want to truly stand out and offer something your customers will value, you have to do just that, it is what’s called: good positioning.
But how do you go about it?
Well there are three levels in which you have to understand your audience. Once you accustom yourself with these, you will find yourself in a much better position.
Here they are:
Demographics
This is by far and away the most straightforward of the three, it is essentially the profile of your audience.
This includes things as general as their gender, age and ethnicity, as well as more specific details such as income and location.
These are mostly easy to work with details as they are all objective and factual. However, it can also be easy to fall into the stereotype trap with these factors. So be careful.
Yes, many elderly people may shy away from tech, and a lot of girls love their self-care products, but do not be quick to target so rigidly. Stereotypes such as these are consistently broken.
Psychographics
This is what your audience is attracted to. So, it is their hobbies, interests, socials, types of car, weekend activities and favourite apps.
Unlike most of the demographics, psychographics is always at risk of changing. People’s interests, unlike their date of birth, are always shifting from one thing to another.
However, at the same time they are also things that have been chosen by your audience, therefore making them more personal.
Your audience has made an active decision to enjoy, say, cycling, whereas they have no say over what their ethnicity is.
These are important to know as it helps give a sense of what your audience is attracted to and where you can get your inspiration from. And once you have identified this, applying this to your brand will enable it to become much more successful.
Personality
This is, as suggested by the name, the most personal of the three. Knowing your audience’s personality is knowing their characteristics, fears, desires and traits.
Perhaps the hardest thing to wean out of your audience, but once unlocked gives you the deepest possible understanding of the people who will make or break your brand.
Knowing customers’ personality is crucial to know how to appeal to them. Emotional branding is very important to create a deep, human connection.
Audience personality has been very hard to figure out in the past. However, social media offers an express route to just that location, as interacting with them over your platforms is an easy way to gauge the type of people you are selling to.
