So after you know what your target market is and what the potential of the business is, it is time to get to the most important part of it – identifying who your customer is.

You might have a slight idea of who that is, however this is not enough. In order to be successful you need to know in much detail not only who they are but also what their habits are, how they solve the problem at the moment, what they read, what they do in their spare time etc.

Basically you need to step into their shoes to find out about your customers. If you do this exercise in the beginning it will be much easier to target them and sell your product or service.

So where do you start? Basically the starting point should be to identify the largest group of your customers are and start to narrow it down. In the beginning it is much more effective to concentrate on just one customer group with a clear need and target them specifically rather than trying to target everyone or several groups at the same time.

So lets say your target group are women. How old are they? What level of education do they have? What is their marital status? What do they do in their free time? Start by answering this questions and narrowing down the group. For example, to women between 20-25 who love fashion and travelling, who work in creative jobs, have a boyfriend, live in a flat next to the city centre, read online blogs and Women’s Magazines etc.

When you have one or several groups, in the beginning I would concentrate on one or maximum three.

Start developing Buyer Personas. What are buyer personas – they are a generalised representations of your customers. The strongest buyer personas are based on talking to your potential customers. You can start off by talking to your friends (if they fall into your target group), talking to people at events or online.

So imagine Kilye is your ideal customer. Find a fitting picture for her and write up bullet points for each of the following points: Background (Job? Family? Career path?) Demographics (Age? Male or Female? Income? Locations?) Identifiers (Communication preferences?) Her/his goals, challenges, how can you help? Real quotes about the goals and challenges, real objections why they wouldn’t use your service. You round up with a Marketing message and an elevator pitch.

It is a lot of work, but I promise you that this work will pay off when you will start targeting your customers. You will be much better prepared and you have much higher chances that your message will appeal to your customer and they make a decision to try out your service or a product.
To conclude I would like to tell you my experience and how I learned the importance of knowing your target group. I have started KTO with a very general group – office workers, I had no clue who would need an office space. We have spent really a lot of effort writing general email and messages to EVERYONE – going in the dark. We have spent a lot of money on marketing – which brought absolutely nothing, because no one felt particularly target. FAIL

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