With more businesses moving online and the ever-expanding vastness of the Internet, it’s becoming a cluttered space where eyeballs and attention are the biggest commodities. The most effective way to stand out is to start by carefully defining audience personas for your online store.
The key thing to bear in mind here is that if you’re not defining your ideal customer and targeting your messaging accordingly, it means you’re speaking to everyone, which in this case, frankly, amounts to no one at all.
Below we share the most important reasons why you need to map out audience personas for your online business.
Pause for reflection
As an entrepreneur, it’s not often that you get the chance to really reflect on your business and the broader decisions you’ve taken. You may always be moving, but sometimes the direction isn’t very clearly defined. Mapping your audience persona gives you an opportunity to think seriously about your business and why it exists. You’d be amazed at how thinking about your audience will spark ideas, highlight inconsistencies, and reveal better ways of doing things.
Understanding your customers
When we say understand your customers, we mean really drilling down into getting to know everything about your ideal customer.
Once this is established, you will find that it informs everything your business does, and you’ll wonder how you were operating before. Defining your ideal customer includes identifying their challenges and aspirations, buying and lifestyle habits, what makes them tick, as well as the demographics you have access to.
Targeted messaging
In every sense of the word. Audience mapping aims to enable your business to speak to the right people at the right time, with the right content. You can only achieve this by knowing your audience. The alternative? Putting content out into the abyss and relying on luck and a sprinkle of magical fairy dust to ensure you reach your prospects.
Increased brand awareness and recall
By targeting your messaging to a specific subset of your business’s market, you’re increasing your chances of being seen by the right people, which builds brand awareness. The emphasis here should be that it’s brand awareness within the right market. And that’s really all you want.
A consistent thread running through your business
What your audience wants is like a holy grail for your business. Once you have this pinned down, it means you have a consistent thread informing all parts of your business. This can include everything from company culture to product innovation and then some. The best part is that customers will recognise this too, and in that recognition is an acknowledgement of being valued. A customer that feels valued is more likely to convert – repeatedly.
At this point, we should add a caveat to say that mapping an audience persona will require some work from your end as the entrepreneur. We know well that time is never on the side of the all-juggling entrepreneur, so we do recommend hiring some help to assist with this task.
It’s exactly the kind of thing a virtual marketing assistant would be able to help with. Outsourcery provides world-class virtual marketing assistants who are up to the task of mapping your audience personas and so much more. The best part is that you don’t have to fret about maintaining a full-time employee, as our packages are flexible, affordable and tailored to your needs. Give it a shot with a free trial.
