How Do You Choose A Target Person?

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.