Welcome to our multiple part series on inbound marketing for small business. In this series we will go over the different parts of inbound marketing and how it fits into your current marketing strategy. This week we will go over how to find your target audience and how this fits into your overall Inbound Marketing Strategy.
Why Is This Important
Your business is for the customer, plain and simple; without customers your business goes away. If you want to succeed, you need to be customer centric. While to most people this may be common sense, less do anything about it. But how does one make their business customer centric? The key is understanding who your current customers are, their pain points, and why they are searching for content.
So Who Is Your Target Audience
It is important to look at every one of your products or services and find your target audience for each of them. No one knows your customers like you do. You know who has purchased your product or service in the past and hopefully why they did. For each product or service, think a customer that has been the most excited about your company. Are they a consumer or from a business? If they were from a business, what industry and what was their role in the company? Were they buying for themselves or a friend or family member? What was their income level (estimate) or business size? Questions like these can give you a good picture of who your target audience is and let you find their pain points.
What Are Their Pain Points
Pain points are the reasons that they are searching for a solution on the internet. It’s the “what brings you in today?” of the interaction and hopefully you are the solution. When you decided to offer a product or service, you most likely saw a problem in the world that didn’t have an adequate solution. But sometimes your solution ended up fixing another problem that you hadn’t even imagined. What pain points do your current customers come to you to fix? What other types of pain points or problems would these same customers have?
Why Are They Searching For Content
Now that you know who your target audience is and what kinds of problems they are having, the next step is to understand why they are searching for content. The three common reasons are that they know they have a problem and are actively choosing a solution, they know what their problem is but they don’t know what solutions are available, or they know they have a problem but they don’t know exactly what it is. Depending on what their reason is, they will choose different content based on what research they are performing.
An article titled “Why Your Business Is Failing” would be great for someone who knows their business is having problems but they don’t know what they are, but wouldn’t be interesting to someone who is already looking for project management software. A “Top 10 Accounting Software for 2017” review would be great for someone who is looking for which service best fits the solution for their business, but maybe not for someone who knows they need accounting help but haven’t decided if they want to hire a bookkeeper or manage it themselves online.
How Does This Fit Into Your Marketing Strategy
When deciding what kind of content to create, make sure that you have content for people with any of these reasons for searching and for each of their pain points. You should also try to figure out what the best kind of content is for that pain point/reason. Video may be best for some tutorials. Top 10 lists may be the best for finding solutions. When it comes to internet marketing, content is king. Every small business should have a content strategy. Does yours?
If you need help with finding your target market or creating content that your market will love, Star Fox Marketing offers consulting services that can help drive traffic to your website and increase your bottom line.
