It may come as no surprise to realise that most aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners aim to acquire the world and everything in it when building a new brand. When looking at major brands, even the most successful brands they have one thing in common... they don’t appeal to everyone. Nike, McDonalds, Porsche to name a few, are all major players in their market. However, they also face vast competition from new and aspiring products and services. One major factor which elevates these brands above their competition is the ability to match their products and services to the right target market.

Defining your target market is an exercise that most businesses need to uphold and take seriously. It doesn’t make sense to try and please everyone, as your time and money are much better spent investing into a target audience.

In this article we attempt to explain the key components successful businesses need to follow in order to define the target audience for your personal brand.

Building Key Relationships

Focusing your efforts on establishing a sense of empathy with your audience allows a gateway in helping solve problems they may have. Either in person, or via the comments section in your videos, these are great online methods where creating the initial first step is vital moving forward. If this isn’t handled well, you risk the chance of losing potential custom and future engagement.

When a business is aware of its audience, it is feasible to entice engagement with an offer based on the position you wish to take within an industry. We know how blogging and email marketing can be effective, offering the market something of value would be reflected in a new blog post, allowing to create newsletters to entice custom further and supply an opt-in form including the email sequence and blog posts that will follow. Factors like these helps guide people to the product or service your providing.

Improving traffic and conversion to your website is of paramount importance and expanding what is already working adds more traffic sources, allowing you to introduce more offers, and run analytic tests to help improve results.

Building your personal brand allows you to focus on what you can do to help yourself and your businesses image. Building relationships are a crucial aid in this process and will help significantly maximise your reach.

The Person who Will Pay You

We’ve split this into three sections highlighting the people who match your personal brands target audience...

• The Person who Pays You
• The Person which Influences the Person who Pays You
• Your Supporter

Here the main focus is obviously the person who pays you and should be your main goal and target moving forward. This is likely to be your employer, new employer, target customer or your current business.

Understanding your target market will allow you to have a solid idea of the person who will pay you and assist you to get to your goal. Refining your target audience makes your brand implementation more effective, a necessary process of that we will discuss in this article.

Identify who Determines your Advancements

This could be a boss, an investor a client, or even a bank. If you’re looking to reach a higher level within a company, then the person who will aid this decision is your list of bosses/ management along the way.

Develop A Complete Description

Marketers and business entrepreneurs do this consistently with their customers, creating this information gives you explicit detail of the precise person their employees will refer to when making important decisions in the business.

Obtain the key information that segregates them in the market, their Name, Age, Gender, Job Description, Hobbies Etc. The more details you can include the easier it will be for you to target this person as you implement your personal brand strategy.

Identify the Person’s Motivations

The idea of building the profile of your target audience is essentially getting into the minds of the people you are targeting and conclude what their motivations are. When you understand the person’s motivations the more likely you are to help them achieve their goals whilst achieving your own. Your client’s motivation is growing their business, which ultimately means more sales and profits. If you’re in the position to help your client achieve those goals, they’ll be happy to pay you for your products and services, which in return helps you achieve your goals.

Identify Potential Opportunities

When you know what motivates your target audience, you’re then ready to formulate ways to help them achieve their goals. A sure-fire way to find opportunities is to go to your target audience and engage with them.

The Person That Influences the Person That Pays You

The person that will pay you being your employer, investor, client, etc is the number one person that you’re targeting with your personal brand. It is important to note that this isn’t the only person who is in your target audience. The second person on your target list is the person that influences the person who pays you.

Influencers like this are often include any person that holds another person’s attention in some way. Whether a mentor, client or investor, these people are able to hold the attention and influence the decisions that your number one target audience makes. Should you earn their trust, then you can convince them to influence the person that pays you.

Identify the Influencer

Today it comes as no surprise to realise you need to look at the social media profiles of your target. You’ll be sure to identify a variety of people that match your credentials as youll be looking at the people this person is following or connected with. Instagram is a great example for this especially if your target is active on Instagram. The people they follow are people that occupy their attention. LinkedIn is a great source to acquire this information on connections and followers. These are just two of the several social networks commonly associated with professionals.

It is common for professionals to have industry related magazines and websites they follow and subscribe to. Here we can see the writers on these sites hold great influencing power over your target, it also crucial to pay close attention to the people mentioned in these articles.

Create Descriptions

Making a description of each of the crucial connections on social media combined with the people involved in the publications, will aid you gain a batter understanding of the people you wish to target.

Plan Contact

When you are aware of who the influencers are and what their behaviours are like online allows you to develop the idea of planning contact. This is the opportunity to connect with the potential influencer and assist them with the variables that motivate them.

To start would be to connect on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram. Following blogs that the people write or contribute to are also great ways of encouraging contact as you will be in sight for the potential influencer. When these baby steps have been conquered it is then time to become more aggressive with the ways you reach out to make connections with the potential influencers. By being aggressive we mean using emails and contact forms to reach out and connect. The goal is to develop a relationship with the influencers so you can be prioritised in their minds when they’re influencing the person that you want to pay you. It is vital that you understand what motivates these influencers in order to obtain them.

Your Support Network

It is vital we remember the support team. These are the people and the key components that support you in your effort to achieve your brand vision. Supporters can be anyone from family members, friends, co-workers, colleagues, or anyone that can offer support as you work your way to your brand vision.

Having a successful team is crucial to anyone’s dreams and visions, as these are the people who can guide you, be there for you and contribute to your overall vision.

Identify Your Support Team

Chances are good that most of the people you reach out to will be interested and honest about your professional goals and they’ll be keen to help you. Ensuring they are aware that you’ll need feedback and support that will last indefinitely.

Let Them Know Your Vision

Should you be in the position where you have acquired your necessary support team, make them join your vision and see your goals. By sharing your plan and ideas allows them to see potential and areas for development or improvement moving forward, asking for feedback allows a collaboration of ideas and engagement.

Provide Consistent Updates

Should it be monthly, quarterly or annually informing your supporters is good practice to get into to keep your support alive and active. Information on the progress of your vision allows them to give you feedback and encouragement, which will be extremely vital to you as you like anyone will encounter setbacks and struggles along the way.

Asking Questions and Giving Back To Your Supporters

People who are in your support network will want to help you they may also have goals for their professional life allowing the possibilities of working together to help each other reach their goals and aspirations. A trusted individual can offer you advice and constructive criticism in an effort to challenge and evoke the very best out of each other.

Today we see a lot of Groups encouraging engagement in online platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter, by observing and monitoring these groups you can see the behaviours of your targets and observe how they check-in with other and report on any progress, as well as see them ask for opinions or strategy advice.

Should you have any questions or would like help on any matters relating to this article we would love to hear from you. Either fill out our online contact form, email or give us a ring.