An audience analysis is key to targeting and prospecting.
Targeting and prospecting is figuring out who it is that you want to reach.
It’s the basis of any marketing campaign
Here are the 3 Core Steps to targeting and prospecting:
Audience Analysis
Fist figure out who you’re targeting
Isolate your vertical
What’s a vertical? A vertical is an industry!
Determine what kind of companies or businesses you want to go after.
Some industries have an inherent vertical
Example: If your business is selling dental billing software, you’ve got a defined vertical (dentist offices)
Other companies may have a wider base that their product can be relevant to.
Pick ONE to focus on with this campaign
Example: A digital marketing firm can sell services to a number of different businesses but one campaign won’t speak to everyone. What industry is this campaign directed at?
Once you’ve determined what kind of companies or vertical you want to go after, next you must determine what size company you want to go after.
What is their business like?
This defines who in that company you need to reach with your campaign
For example:
- Small Companies:
Usually between 1-10 employees.
There are generally 1-2 decision makers
- Medium size Companies:
50-200 employees
Several layers of managers
- Enterprise Level Companies:
200+ employees
Who will influence the company’s buying decision?
The end user (the one who will be using your product or service) may not be the one purchasing it
Consider multiple people along the purchase chain and target each one of them separately
Multiple levels of management and multiple areas or offices
The larger the company is, the larger the task to reach the right people because the larger the company, the more people there are involved in the decision-making process
When targeting customers and creating personas, apply the “buyers journey” through the process:
Stages of the Buyers Journey:
Awareness Stage
Define a problem a customer may not even know they have
Example: late night 90s television infomercials. Who knew wrapping your garden hose could be such a nightmare?
The end user is usually the target of your awareness campaign.
Consideration
Show the user what it’s like to have the solution implemented
These campaigns are usually designed around the middle managers, the ones who are overseeing the end user
Decision Stage
Present why your product or service is the most logical choice
Make your case to whoever is signing the check
Get to know your target/potential lead
Once you’ve figured out who you’re targeting, it’s time to learn more about them and gather background information such as:
- Demographics
- Personality traits
- What are their roles in the buying process
- What are their goals, motivations, challenges?
Figure out all this information for each person or level of management involved in the buying process
Once you have a nice feel for who the person is that you’re targeting, it gives you a better idea of how to target them.
Next, figure out who it is you need to start with to get to the decision maker
Collecting the Information
Start surveying your potential customers or prospects.
It’s a lot easier to get someone to respond to an email or over the phone when you aren’t asking them to buy something
Ask them a few questions about their job, what they do and how they do it
Tools to gather information:
Survey Monkey helps you quickly and easily generate surveys and collect trackable data
Google Forms is another useful platform for creating quick, trackable surveys
Interviews
If you get your prospect on the phone and you really want to sell to them, ask them questions to find out what motivates them. This will help you build your targeting campaign
Sample Questions:
- How would you define your industry in your own words?
- What does your typical day look like
- What is the most/least important thing you do daily
- What takes up most of your time?
- What would you do with your time if you can save some?
- How much would you pay for a solution for your problem
Your prospects don’t need to be the ones who actually record the answers/data.
Have your sales team ask prospects these questions while they’re already on the phone.
Leverage your team
Your sales team is also a great place to get helpful information.
They handle objections all the time.
Have them write down the objections they get so you can have counter objections in place in the future.
The customer service department deals with the problems after the purchase.
Tell them note reasons customers cancel or ask for a refund
Identify most common reasons and focus on addressing those issues and then assure potential customers you have their issues in hand from here on out.
Quora is a great source of potential topics
What are people in your target demographic/niche searching for?
Let’s say you’re targeting parents of children whose kids attend Charter Schools:
This tells you pain points and or concerns that you can present your product as the answer to.
Organize Your Data: Creating Personas
Now you have a massive amount of information
Next, you need to make it easier to digest & use.
Do this by creating very personal personas.
Give your personas a name.
You want to be able to build your message in a way that you want that specific person respond.
Check out our Audience Analysis post for a detailed walkthrough of how to create a persona.
Use our Persona Builder Template to create a virtual bio of your potential lead.
Once you’ve got the basic information down, get to know them.
Where do they hanging out?
Where do they get their information?
Where do they find the next big thing that they are going to buy next?
- Magazines?
- Trade publications?
- Blogs?
- The Kardashians?
You can get this information from social media (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter)
Use LinkedIn to get a job title for the type of person you are prospecting.
Plug the job title back into LinkedIn to come up a list of people with the same job title.
Search Facebook for the other names you found with the same job title
Look for people with public profiles
Now plug this list of prospects into Facebook Insights to find out information like:
- Demographics
- Their Page Likes
- Groups they are following
- Purchase activity
This can clue you into industry events you may not know about
Identifying others that follow and/or attend industry events can help you identify other potential prospects in the vertical you’re targeting
Create an in-depth persona within an industry: where these people are, where they get their information, and how they make decisions.
Tools:
Twitter Audience Insight dashboard
Followerwonk Moz (specific to Twitter)
How are people are using Twitter, who are they following, etc.
Cross data you collect on one platform with other social media platforms to create a detailed picture.
Use a data scraper to get data at scale from LinkedIn
LeadFuze promises automated list building