0 min read
Understanding your customers is fundamental to planning and delivering any marketing activity. It will dictate what you want to say to your customers, when you communicate with them, and most importantly how best to communicate with them. You can group them into different types of customers, such as families or couples, which means you might speak to them in different ways. We call these target audiences.
There are a few key things to think about when defining your target audience. Remember to keep it simple. You don’t need to delve deeply into demographics and behavioural research. A great starting point is your current customer database. It will give you an idea about your current customer demographics.
Use knowledge about your current customers to identify similarities between them. You may even have a customer database to help you.
Where do your customers live?
What age bracket do they fall into?
Do they travel as a family, couple, groups or solo travellers?
You can also make use of monitoring and insights tools on social media channels to track your website traffic and social media audience.
How do your customers book? Are they booking directly with you, through an online travel agent or with another third party?
Check your social media activity and determine what content works and leads to strong engagement. Think of lots of likes, positive comments and shares.
You will be able to build a picture of:
It is always useful to carry out regular competitor analysis. This lets you understand what others are doing in the marketplace.
Understanding what your competitors are doing gives you the chance to identify gaps in the market. Use this to develop your product and messaging accordingly.
Think about your product:
Once you have completed your audience research it’s time to take all that information and build up a profile of who they are. For example, you could establish that for the most part your customers are:
Based in London and the north east of England
Couples
Aged 35 – 55
Mainly booking directly with you
Regular visitors to your Facebook page
Building up your customer profile allows you to tailor your marketing activities to resonate with this audience.
Once you have started to develop a profile of your audience, the next step is to build a story around them. This means talking to your audience. Ask them about your product in a way that you know will interest and inspire them.
Develop your messaging using your customer demographics, website, social media and competitor analytics.