So, the real question is: Who is your audience? And if I was to ask a second question it might be: Why is that important?

First - the audience. When you start a business, you will have a product or service. You will want someone with money to buy. To pay money is in return for the product or service. BUT… who is that someone and are there more someones, as not all customers are alike.

The point is that you need a customer (an audience) and knowing what they ‘look like’ means you can target your approach to gain customers more effectively and efficiently. It is worth remembering something that our friends at the Rebel Business School coach: If you are trying to sell to everyone you are not selling to your audience.

Let me give you a service example: There are many lawn mowing small businesses. Often they operate from home, are one-man bands. They may be part of a franchise but let’s look at the potential customer audience.

They may be:

• retired,
• young professional,
• property managers,
• a council with reserves (maybe).

They may not be:

• couples in their own property,
• people living in apartment buildings.

Now we can define our audience and lets just select the retired customer segment. What is their persona; how do they behave? They:

• may be infirm or not as mobile as they used to be,
• are likely to be 50-60 years of age or more,
• are embarrassed when their lawns and gardens look unruly,
• are likely to be settled for sometime where they now reside,
• may be any gender.

I could go on but already we are seeing why knowing our audience is important. This is where we answer question 2. If you know your audience you can target your marketing communications with greater effectiveness. For example:

• are retirees, are they likely to answer a Facebook ad, a referral, newspaper advert or a letterbox flyer for example.

Each marketing channel is valid, but which ones apply most to your market / customer segment. You need to test and test the hypothesis of your assumptions. Validation is KEY. Do surveys? Find out what your customers really think about your product or service? It is not so much about the audience’s communications but rather, how they would like to be reached and given that, how do you speak to them? What is your tone, your style of communication? This is important because the young professional or a council like to be talked to (read approached) in a different way to retirees?

And in this you become effective and efficient with your marketing and greatly enhance capturing good sales leads for your business.

To circle back to the beginning; who is your customer. Clearly define their persona and from that insight, validate your assumptions and then trigger your marketing strategy towards that audience, based on how they behave – oh and BTW, measure and test that response; then refine again.

This blog will be a series focused on elements of business driven through seemingly obvious and maybe innocuous questions. In reality though they are essential elements and also best practice for building sustainable businesses.

For help in understanding your market segments go to bizeziapp.com.