Category: Step 1: Understanding Your Target Person

If you only listen to the words your clients say when you talk to them, you may be missing what’s really being said – the true meaning underlying the words. But if you look beyond their words to their actions and the way they say things, you can identify their wants, needs, fears, and frustrations – in other words, the problems that may be holding their business back.

When we engage with our clients at a deeper level, we develop a greater understanding of how we can support them and be better partners. Find out more about the power of non-verbal communication in this video.

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

In today’s video, I talk about some of the things that we don’t tend to consider when it comes to communication – such as the way we reveal the things we need through our actions. When we engage with our clients at a deeper level, we develop a greater understanding of how we can support them.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already please do – it will help me loads, and if you click the bell you’ll be notified when I release new videos.

Looking for Communication Clues

Communication is so much more than words. To illustrate, consider my friend’s dog. Just by listening to the sound of his dog’s whine, combined with the way he is behaving, he can tell whether his dog is hungry, needs to pee or is simply impatient for his walk. In another example, my boyfriend once told me that when he was a child he used to talk to his childhood dog and feel as if he was having a real conversation, even though his dog obviously couldn’t speak – but those conversations probably felt real because he had been communicating in some ways with his dog… maybe he picked up on his dog’s mood when he was happy (probably out for a walk or eating!) or sad (perhaps recovering from a trip to the vets)? In much the same way, a parent can gather clues from a baby’s cries as to whether they’re hungry, tired, or uncomfortable in some way.

We don’t always need words to communicate. Our brains gather so much information about the world around us from non-verbal cues (such as body language and behaviours) that help us to understand the people in our lives and to identify their needs. This kind of information isn’t structured into logical arguments or requests through our choices of words; instead, it can reveal a deeper layer of wants, needs, fears, or frustrations that may mean more than the words we say aloud.

Identifying Wants, Needs, Fears and Frustrations

In your business, the first thing you need to do is identify your target person and understand what you can do to help them. You need to understand who they are, looking beyond categories or demographics, and listening to more than just their words, so you can discover their wants, needs, fears, and frustrations – in other words, the problems they need to solve.

When you truly understand your clients’ wants, needs, fears, and frustrations, you can start communicating to them that you understand their requirements and you’re going to do all you can to satisfy those wants or needs or alleviate those fears or frustrations.

Communicating without Words (Non-Verbal Communication)

Communication is the key to understanding what a customer wants – but remember to take on board what your customer is really saying through their actions as well as their words. Many of these actions will be subconscious, revealing deeper concerns through the way people talk about things and the body language they exhibit.

This deeper layer of understanding works both ways, too. As you get to know your clients and to understand what they need, you’ll likely be revealing similar subconscious information to them, such as automatically communicating that you understand and you have solutions in mind that can help resolve their business concerns. As your professional relationship evolves, it will allow you to communicate beyond words and establish a partnership built on a foundation of trust and mutual understanding.

Finding the People You Want to Work With

You can discover a lot about people by listening beyond words – it helps you get to know the people you want to work with, identify the support they need or the worries they have, and develop a deeper sense of how you can work together most effectively.

If you want some help with identifying and getting to know your current or future clients, please do get in touch – I’ll be happy to share with you the ‘target person builder’ that I use.

Most people turn to marketing for “lead generation” – and they forget that it’s as important (if not more so) to focus on the customers you already have. Don’t be a business that just takes people’s money and then moves on to the next one. Nurture will create longer term gain for your business – and not to mention it’s actually easier to sell to the already converted!

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

Have you created a target person profile for your existing customers?

In this video I’m giving you a little reminder about why targeting your existing customers is way more important than targeting new ones.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already, please do. It will help me loads and if you click the bell you’ll get notified when I release new videos.

This is the First Step

The target person is the first step in this marketing strategy and I’m sure I’ve said this many times, in many different places, but it cannot be overstated. You need to be thinking about your existing customers and not just new customers.

When you create your target person profile the whole point of it is that you’re meant to be understanding them on a really deep, emotional level. You’re meant to be really getting down to why they’re motivated why they want to move forward and making sure you’re aligned with that target person, right?

Target Person Profiles for Your Existing Customers Too!

When you’re trying to create marketing for your existing customers you should be thinking along these same lines as well. And it’s very likely that your target person profile for your existing customers is going to be very, very, very, similar to the target person profile for your new customers. But there will be nuance here that really should shape your marketing just a little bit more.

The Nuance of Targeting Existing Customers

And the nuance will be that you already know that this person has bought from you. You already know a little bit about them, and you can now go deeper. You can go deeper in your values, you can go deeper in your product, you can sell them a product that’s like an add-on to your product, you can sell up-sell them, you can cross-sell them in ways that are probably going to be way more effective than constantly grinding the stone to bring in new customers.

The One Thing to Take Away

It’s a really big thing. If there’s one thing you take away from this video it’s to spend a little bit more time on your existing customers than your new customers because you’ll get a bigger bang for your buck and you know that they’re already good customers. So, why would you not want to give them more value? Why would you not want to help them even more than you already do?

Obviously, this is a blanket statement that will not apply to every single business out there. But it will apply to most of them. And so, I implore you to take a look at your business check whether this makes sense to you because I can bet it probably will.

If you want to discuss this if you feel like you want to roll some ideas around, feel free to send me a message I’m happy to chat with anyone when I can give everyone a free one hour to talk through your business go through my questions and see whether I can help you or whether you are already set.

I ran a workshop a few weeks ago on marketing for hospitality businesses. One of the participants was telling the restaurants on the call that they should all be looking to build their own app. His reasoning made sense, in an old-school business sense.

I was grateful he had mentioned it because to me it highlighted a deeper and more important tool that business owners – especially those who want to practice their marketing ethically – should be keeping in the front of their mind.

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

What is the most important decision-making tool in your toolbox?

In this video, I’m talk about this really important mindset that you need to have when you’re making any decision in your business.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already please do it’ll help me you know get YouTube features and of course you’ll be notified when I release new videos as long as you click the little bell.

The Suggested Strategy That Prompted This Video

So, I was running a workshop recently for a bunch of hospitality businesses that ranged from large franchises down to a local social enterprise and there was a lot of peer sharing that went on rather than just me teaching and it was really great. What was interesting though was that one guy started speaking up about a strategy that he thought all the other restaurant owners on the call should be using.

His suggestion to everyone was that every restaurant should be building an app. That every single restaurant should be building an app because things like Deliveroo and Just Eat, they take a large chunk of your share every time someone orders food through them. And I found this interesting, and I probably disagreed with it a little bit.

Do This Because It “Affects the Bottom Line”

Now, his reasoning was that, you know, they’re taking a chunk of your (share) and what he kept saying was, “This is affecting your bottom line, this is affecting your bottom line.” And I was like…I was so uncomfortable with this, and if you’ve been following my videos you’ll you’ll realise I was immediately uncomfortable with this, but I also realised it was actually bad business sense.

Why Using the Bottom Line is Bad Business Sense

Now, rather old school, or perhaps simplistic, business logic is if it’s affecting your bottom line it is the first thing you need to do, it is the first thing that you need to take action on and it is where you start with making your business more profitable. While, I understand the logic there, I think there’s actually a stronger way to make your business better especially in the long run.

The Better Tool in Your Business Toolbox to Use

So, the most important question you’re asking yourself, the most important tool in your toolbox, is not “Is this affecting the bottom line?” but “Does my target person want this?” And what’s funny about this is that when you start building your business, when you start making all your decisions based on whether your customer actually wants it or not, you will impact your bottom line! It’s just a longer game. You just need to go beyond the numbers that you’re seeing in front of you on the sheet that you’re looking at and instead start thinking about, “Well, will this create long-term gain for my business?”

So, going back to the example of the app for the restaurants, now that might work for maybe a large, franchised business that has a large audience that might be eating quite frequently at their restaurants and people want to get it cheaper than if they go to Deliveroo. But it might not work so well for a small social enterprise with limited resources who need to do what’s most valuable to their customer right now. But it may also work for that small social enterprise if they know they’ve got a large loyal following that do want to have that sense of community, maybe an app makes sense.

But the important thing here is that decision should not be being made based on whether it affects the bottom line but based on whether the customer wants it.

So I hope that that mindset shift helps you just a little bit make your business a little bit better, makes your business serve your customer a little bit better.

If you want to talk about any of this kind of thing I’m happy to have an hour-long session with anyone I won’t be selling anything I will just be talking about what you need in your business and helping you especially if you’re doing something that’s helping to change the world.

Step 1 in the content-led marketing strategy I’m constantly touting is “Understanding Your Target Person”. Well, there’s another layer ABOVE Target Person that’s just as important to think about in order to refine your marketing messages.

In this video, I explain the difference between a target person (or target market) and your niche, and three ways that you use to think about what kind of niche(s) your business is serving!

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

How do you choose your niche?

In this video I explain the three ways that you can choose your niche and what that means for you, and how you should be shaping your marketing around it.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube Channel already, please do, it’ll help me loads and you’ll be notified when I release new videos.

So, Step One in the Content-Led Marketing Strategy that I take everyone through is Understanding Your Target Person. Your target person is slightly nuanced from what a niche is, and some people do get these two things confused.

Target Person vs Niche

So, just to clarify what the difference is, is that your target person is the individual who is going to be making the decision to buy your product or service. The niche is the segment of the market that you are serving.

Why this matters is because your marketing is actually more shaped by your niche than it is your target person. It’s shaped by both, obviously – understanding your target person is really important for some of those really fine details when it comes to discussing your product or service, but your niche matters on a much higher level, on a much broader scale.

The First Way to Choose Your Niche

So, how do you choose your niche? There are three ways: the first way is Industry. So, you might be choosing an industry like corporates, you might be choosing sustainable companies, you might be choosing schools, you might be choosing the hospitality industry. These are industries that you might want to niche your business into.

The Second Way to Choose Your Niche

The second way is Culture. And what I mean by this is community and people who have gathered together through shared interest. So, this might be something like hippies, this might be something like festivalgoers, this might be something like rock fans, it might be something like conservatives, it might be something like bird watchers. There’s lots and lots of different cultures and this is probably where most people end up niching.

The Third Way to Choose Your Niche

The third and final way that you can niche is by Product. And what I mean here is that you narrow your offering down into a more specific area of the thing you offer. So, an example here might be instead of a marketer you might be a brand storyteller or a copywriter. Or maybe instead of a healing practitioner, you’re a reiki specialist. Or instead of a corporate fashion company, you’re a corporate sustainable fashion company.

Does Choosing a Niche Alienate Your Other Markets?

There are a few little niggling details that I’m sure you’re wondering about here. A lot of people worry that when they’re targeting a niche, they’re going to alienate everybody else. And this is a fair concern.

Now, if you feel like your product can serve a particular niche, but it also serves a whole lot of other niches, then understand that, lay that out in front of you: what are the different niches that your business serves?

And then segment your marketing accordingly.

What Happens If You Don’t Niche?

This is really important because if you don’t niche, if you don’t understand your niche, if you don’t try to communicate within your niche’s jargon and their language, then your marketing is going to become watery.

As they say, if you’re trying to market to everyone, you’re going to end up selling to no one. So, really, try and understand some of your niches and put some marketing out there that’s targeting those niches.

It Is Ethical Marketing to Have Multiple Niches with Multiple Strategies

Now you don’t have to change your whole business and make it all centred around that one niche. You can have different marketing for different niches and that is fine, that is totally ethical. You’re not changing what you do, you’re not changing your offering or your prices, what you’re doing is you’re changing the way you communicate what you do so that they better understand it.

One of my first principles is that Marketing is Education and Not Deception, and this is where we start to walk that line.

And I want to be really clear here that you’re not trying to tell your niche that you do something that you don’t do. What you’re trying to do is understand your niche so that you can explain what you do in the words that they understand. And so you are educating them on what you do in a way that that they understand, that they respond to.

If you feel like you need any kind of clarification around your niche around your target person, you want to dig down deeper into that it’s something that I’m really enjoying doing with my clients and enjoy doing with people that aren’t even my clients. So, please get in touch I’ll be happy to help you dig down into that target person and refine your marketing a little bit deeper.

This concept may be one that you’ve already realised for yourself, but I’ve found that sometimes businesses with more complex target persons haven’t quite thought of their marketing in this way.

It’s really important to be considering who exactly is your target person, not just the person who has the problem your business is solving…

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

Your customer may not be your Target Person.

In this video I have explained a very simple concept – one that most people get straight away. It’s that the target person that I talk about in Step One: Understand Your Target Person may not be the person you’re actually selling your product or service to.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel please do it will help me loads and it will mean that you get notified when I release new videos.

This is a really, really simple concept and most people are a bit like, “Of course!” as soon as they hear it, but sometimes people haven’t quite thought of it this way.

Make Sure Your Target Person is Defined Correctly

The first step in the Content-Led Marketing Strategy, which is how everything is structured on this blog and on my YouTube channel, the first step is Understanding Your Target Person. And a lot of the time the Target Person is a customer, you know the person that they’re serving, the problem that they’re solving, but sometimes it’s not.

The fundamental thing you need to understand here is that your Target Person is the person who decides to buy your product or service, not the person who benefits from your product and service.

And this is a really important distinction, especially in service industries. The person who’s benefiting from your service is quite often not the person who’s going to open the wallet and decide to pay you for the thing you do.

An Example: Grow To School

Let me illustrate it with an example. One of my clients, Grow to School, serves schools. They go into schools, they teach teachers how to take their regular curriculum classes and do them outside, in any outside space. And this isn’t like PE outside, it’s doing history or geography or whatever outside.

Now, they have multiple people that are important in their business. The first, the obvious one is the children, right. And understanding the wants, needs and fears and frustrations of the children is really important in their business. But the teachers are the ones who are going to have to be doing this thing – so they’re quite important because, while they care about what the children’s wants and needs and fears and frustrations are, they have their own wants, needs, fears and frustrations in relation to that.

Neither the teacher nor the children are the target person in this case.

The target person for Grow to School, is the headmaster or the business manager in the school. The person who makes the decision to employ them to help the school do these things.

They obviously need to speak to the teachers, they need to make sure that how they’re communicating makes teachers inspired to take them on and feel that they have this, you know, enormous amount of experience in doing this, so that they can genuinely help them. But the target person that’s really important for their marketing activity is that headmaster, the one who is making the decision.

This is the case in a lot of businesses so it’s really not quite as simple often as the person your product is solving the problem for is not always the person that you’re targeting your marketing to. It is important to make that distinction.

I hope this has helped you understand that distinction and maybe considered whether you need to refine your Target Person and refine your content a little bit more so that it’s a little bit stronger in selling your product.

If you need any help with it at all if you just want to be a sounding board or if you need any actual help with strategising and creating this Target Person profile, feel free to get in touch. I can send you templates, I can walk you through them, just let me know and I’ll see how I can help you.

When planning your marketing strategy, it important to understand your target PERSON – and not a target AUDIENCE or MARKET – so that you get really deep and specific.

But for many business owners, this causes confusion when their product or service has wider appeal, or if they have more than one product, which serves different people.

So let me clarify what I mean about understanding your ideal target person, and why it’s very possible to have more than one target person.

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

Can you have more than one target person?

In today’s video I’m going to talk to you about having more than one target person as a part of your marketing strategy.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel, please do. It will help me out with, you know, YouTube credibility and it will also mean that you get notified if I release new videos.

Lots of People Benefit From Your Product

Today I want to talk about how you can have more than one target person. It’s a challenge that comes up a lot when I start talking about your ideal target person and how you need to choose a person and not a market.

People are like, “Well… but there’s lots of different people that can benefit from my product…”

This is not a problem.

Ideal Target Person Doesn’t Mean Only Target Person

When you create your marketing strategy, you need to make sure your realise you’re working with the concept of ideal target person, right. It’s an ideal; it doesn’t mean that no one else is served by you. It means this is the best kind of person for your product.

And that means that your marketing is shaped around the best sort of person for your product.

The people who are adjacent to those people will probably still respond to your marketing when it’s designed for the ideal target person.

How You Can Have More Than 1 Target Person

The second thing is that you can have multiple target persons. Especially if you’ve got different products, or if your product has different features that matter to different kinds of people, you actively want to separate out your marketing for those different type of people.

And that’s the key thing. This is why it is important to think about targeting individuals and not a demographic.

When you target individuals, you have to naturally segment your marketing according to those different individuals. And when you segment your market to those different individual target person profiles, you’ll then have much clearer marketing and your marketing will be received much better by the people because you’re targeting them so specifically.

So I hope that was helpful just a short bit about clarifying that bit on how you can have more than 1 target person.

If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below, email me at dj@rainbowdragon.digital – or join the Marketing for the Many Facebook Group where I will always respond.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel please do, again it will help me with my YouTube credibility otherwise please have a great day and I’ll see you in another video.

A lot of people know about defining their ‘target audience’. And usually it’s all about demographics and looking at the market’s behaviour, buying patterns and so on.
All of that is useful, but it’s not really what I’m talking about when I tell my clients that they need to learn to truly understand their target person…

Choosing your target person is a creative exercise and not so much about doing market research.

In this video, I’m going to talk to you about why the target person is the first step that you need to take in creating your content-led marketing strategy and why it’s less of a research task and more of a creative task.

Please remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel so that you can get updates on when I have new videos.

Why Do You Need To Choose Your Target Person?

Most entrepreneurs, when thinking that they need new leads, they start their marketing by thinking about “Should I be on Facebook?” or “Should I be on Instagram?”. But where they should really start is understanding this target person first.

Once you understand this person and the way that they interact with the world, then you can then choose where your marketing needs to go.

So, in later videos, I’ll explain more about choosing the channels and all of that, but in this video I want to explain to you why choosing the target person matters.

You Already Know Who Your Target Person Is

Now when you’re choosing your target person there are some really interesting developments that I’ve realised after talking to a few people and seeing the light bulbs go off in in people’s heads. I’s usually that you do know who the person is, you just haven’t really thought about it in the right way.

The 4 Things You Need to Understand About Your Target Person

The structure that I give to people is look at four things to do with the person.

You want to look at their wants – so their desires, the things that they want in life. They don’t necessarily need them but it would make them happy if they had them.

Then you want their needs – so these are things that they really have to have in order to survive. If they don’t do it their life starts falling apart.

Then you need to understand their fears. These are the imagined problems that they have and these are quite easy for you to then solve because they’re imagined problems and your product can mitigate against those imagined problems.

And then you’ve got frustrations, and these are the things that are actively causing a problem in their lives right now and maybe your product can fix.

It’s Not Just About Your Product/Service

When you’re doing this do not look at those four things as things directly associated with your product. What you need to do is understand the wider fears and frustrations and their wants and desires – more as they relate to their entire lifetime, not just their interaction with you.

Because when you can understand them better as a whole person, you’ll be able to communicate better with them in a way that they relate to. If you can talk about their fears and frustrations that are not directly related to your product, then they feel that you understand them better. And, the truth is, you do understand them better if you’ve really thought about these things.

Why Understanding Your Target Person is a Creative Exercise

I also say that this is a more creative exercise than a research exercise. The research part of it helps, it helps you understand the wider market and the bits that you don’t understand.

But the truth is most entrepreneurs, when they’ve gone into a business, it’s usually because they’re either super involved in that business or in that industry, and so they really understand it well. They’ve got extreme expertise in the thing that they’re offering.

So, usually, they do understand the person emotionally – the wants and needs and fears and frustrations – these are things that they get. The entrepreneur has that inside their heads but they haven’t really articulated it properly, so they probably haven’t explored their understanding. It’s more of an instinctual understanding.

A big part of creating a more concerted content-led marketing strategy is pulling out that instinctive knowledge from inside your head and putting it down on paper. Not only for yourself so that you can explore it but also so that your team or anyone you’re working with – if you hire a copywriter, you hire a graphic designer – you can chuck this one page sheet at them so they can immediately get a better understanding of who it is that you’re targeting.

Once you’ve got this sheet where you’ve got these needs fears and frustrations of your target person on a sheet then you’ll be able to head forward into creating your USP, creating your channels, creating your content – each of these will massively benefit by you being really clear on how this all relates to the target person.

I will be covering more techniques and advice on the other steps to creating a content-led marketing strategy in other videos. They’ll be organized in playlists on my channel.

If you sign up to my mailing list (in the footer) then you’ll get an email whenever I’ve released a new video which will be hopefully helpful to you if you are trying to grow your business in an ethical and sustainable way.

Please do get in touch using the form below if you want any kind of marketing advice if you are doing something sustainable and ethical, I want to talk to you even if you cannot afford any kind of marketing coaching or anything at the moment, I want to help.