The most important step in creating a marketing plan is defining your target market. The first thing to do is to sit down and think about who your ideal buyer is. Is your ideal buyer male or female? How much education do they have? What age bracket are they in? What would their hobbies be? How do they vote? Do they go to religious services? Writing all of this information down can help you get a very good idea of who you are marketing to. A business that says its ideal buyer is “everyone” is not being honest. We all have an ideal client or buyer. We have to figure out who that is so we can market to them properly. We want to narrow down our ideal buyer as much as possible. This will help us to create content and will also show our buyer that we know what they are about and what kind of lifestyle they have.
Lets use an example: say you sell skateboards. You are not going to market to 35 year old housewives. That would be a waste of time and money. You want the 18-25 year old male crowd. What are they doing? What do they like? Think about what else they might be doing with their time besides skateboarding. What music do they listen to? What websites are they on? Make that picture as complete as possible. Then you can move on to really seeing what they are doing online. Some may even want to draw a picture of what their ideal client looks like and even give them a name.
Use listening tools – Your company should be using Google Analytics to see where leads are coming from and should also be using Google Alerts to listen for their brand being talked about online. Once you determine what is being said, you can also determine where they are saying it. Are people blogging about your product? Are they on Twitter? A group on Facebook? Find out where they are. This will also help refine your strategy and trim the fat. You do not need to always be everywhere. What you do need is to be listening, and aware of what your target audience is saying about you good and bad.
Once you have determined who your target audience is, what they like, how they spend their time and most important – where they are online, it is time for the last step. Be where they are. Talk to them. Don’t sell every minute of every day, but be where they are so that they see and think of your brand first. If your brand has been listening properly, and is targeting the right audience, then you can cast your net much easier. Facebook and Twitter are huge, but if our buyer is not there, we do not need to be there. We need to be where our buyers are, and then be useful in a non-spammy way. This keeps us in front of our ideal buyer so that when they are ready to buy they are coming to us and not your competition.
Tags: ideal buyer, marketing plan, target market
