As an optical business owner, you know that knowing your target audience is essential to growing your business. If you want to stay ahead of the competition in the optical industry, knowing who you want to target is vital.
Continue reading for essential tips to finding your optical target audience.
Know Your Target Audience
One of the essential elements of any marketing plan is to figure out who you’re targeting. All it takes to turn your optical business around (and improve ROI) is to analyze who you’re marketing to and then adjust your messaging and overall approach.
Analyze Your Existing Customers
Understanding the characteristics and purchasing patterns of the people who currently buy your product or services can reveal a lot about your business.
- Take a close look at the data. Consider profiling and modeling your existing customer list to see geographic distributions, age ranges, lifestyle factors, and many other insights.
- Recall past successes. Identify campaigns and messaging that has worked in the past. Who were the prospects that responded, and how did the campaign influence their buying behavior?
Dig Deeper
Every audience demographic can be further segmented to be more specific. Don’t assume you understand your customers. Even if it’s “who you’ve always marketed to,” it’s worthwhile to take a critical look and reassess as your business evolves. This is where conducting a thorough marketing audit can be especially helpful.
- Compare your primary and secondary research findings against your initial assumptions about your target audience. Are there differences in demographics? Purchase motivation? Could your audience be further segmented to be more precise?
- Listen to your customers. Survey and interview your existing customers to understand their wants and needs better. Always go with what your customers are saying, even if it conflicts with your original assumptions.
Create Audience Personas
Documenting your target audience personas is essential for sharpening your thoughts and keeping everyone in your company focused on the same group. Customer personas should include both demographic and psychographic information and information about their lifestyle, roles and responsibilities, communication habits, and media usage.
Test Campaigns and Reassess Regularly
You may test just about everything, including landing pages, direct mail, and social media campaigns. You may learn not only which approach(s) works best but also which headlines, images, and calls to action are most appealing to your target audience by testing. Keep in mind that not every experiment is going to be successful.
With fast-changing technology and increasingly diverse audiences, it’s critical to re-evaluate your marketing techniques regularly. Avoid delivering old information and creativity because you’re running out of time, and don’t assume an idea or strategy will work simply because it has in the past.
- Update your audience profiles and customer personas as needed based on new information and campaign results.
- Consider how you might interact with your target audience in new ways. As your company matures, the methods customers want to communicate with you will also change.
Knowing your target market is essential for any successful optical marketing campaign. By analyzing your existing customers, you can understand who makes up your target audience and what motivates them to purchase. Once you have a good grasp of this information, it’s time to create some audience personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal customer that will help guide future decisions about your marketing strategy. After completing your personas, it’s time to test some campaigns and see how they perform. Be prepared to reassess regularly based on the data you collect; the needs and wants of consumers change over time, so your marketing strategy should too! Have you recently re-evaluated your target audience?
