Research To Uncover Your Small Business Audience Avatar

As a small business owner, the avatar is the description of your ideal customers. Their gender, age, interests, family status and other demographics gives your business a fighting chance of targeting the correct audience and grow it over time.

Targeting the right audience reaps rich rewards

This is a very crucial step that most business owners ignore. Failure to do solid research to know your business audience will result in your spending time and hence money to target the wrong group leaving you frustrated, an easily avoidable one at that.

Once you have established your ideal audience, producing the right type of content is so easy. You can focus on the problems faced by your audience and provide solutions. Your audience will love your insights that alleviate their problems.

You become a subject authority in the eyes of your audience. This results in increased trust reposed in you that translates into more paying customers for your products/services.

Importance of existing data

If you have access to customer data, both past and present, in your business domain, that is very handy to gain knowledge on the traits of your target audience.

An alternative is to have web analytics tracking installed on your site. The best web analytics software for small businesses that is free is undoubtedly Google Analytics. Over time, your site aggregates valuable data (first party), of which, user demographics is a vital subset. You can analyze their ages, gender and their likes and dislikes (not at personal but at an aggregate level) that gives you a head start in refining your audience targeting.

If you are just starting your business, do not panic. Although you may not have access to existing audience data, you can still be an out of the box thinker and with some notions of what your target audience might look like, you can collect data from the real world.

Collecting real world audience data

• • Conducting Surveys

Surveys are a great way to gather real world data. You can conduct either online surveys or offline surveys. Offline surveys requires that you identify prospects in the real world and ask them questions. With the internet so all pervasive in our lives, online surveys is a surefire way of getting rich audience data.

You can find here a list of great free online survey tools.

Again, using the tool is free. But you cannot expect users to answer surveys for free. Often, it works best when you incentivize users to complete an online survey.

• • Researching your competition

As a small business owner, you have a pulse on the nature of your competition, be they online or offline. Going to your competitors’ sites and looking at their messaging on their blogs reveals the user demographics they are targeting. Even the spiel under About section of the site gives an idea of their vision and the types of audience they cater to.

• • Monitoring social media

As a business owner, it is plain common sense to have an active business social media profile on the big kahunas like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to name a few.

Be tuned into the comments made by users on social media. They are often the first point of contact with prospects. Look at the trending topics in your area of business. Check on users’ profiles to get a handle on what content they are consuming, their likes, dislikes etc. All these give you a great idea of your target audience demographics.

• • Buying second party and third party data

Second party data forms the first party data of another company in your domain, that you buy from them. The quality of such data is high and is very close to your target audience. But you may run into privacy issues, data ownership and technical integration problems.

Third party data is aggregated targeted audience data that is readily available to buy from several vendors in the marketplace. You can scale your marketing operations rapidly but the quality of data is suspect. It is collected by third parties and touted as audience matching your audience characteristics. It can fall short of your expectations.

Here at Traffic Alignment, we are experienced in building first party data with good quality content and aided by a modest advertising budget to target the right audience ideally suited to your small business. Learn more about our content marketing services to build target audiences for your small business.