Find Your Target Customer

I believe we always need to be targeting the end consumer.  Whether you are a retail specific brand or direct to consumer, your marketing needs to be focused on the person that will be using your product.  

That being said, how do you find out exactly who your customer is so you can run your targeted campaigns?  For established brands with years’ worth of online sales data, it’s easy. Simply export the list of email address from your sales segment and upload it into Facebook.  Facebook can then identify your customer.

For new brands or brands without online sales history you need to start the process of collecting data through content marketing.  Now you should already have a general sense of who your customer is by the product you offer. For example, if you have a women’s line, you already know you’ll be targeting women but with something more general you’ll want to establish some basic parameters. 

• Age
• Sex
• Interests
• Location

If you can identify these four items, you will be ahead of the curve.  

Next, create some brand specific content, blog articles that associate what your brand offers with an educational piece that will interest someone as a reader and as a potential customer.  An example like “4 Ways to Gain Weight for Your Sport” would be a great idea for a blog post for a brand that offers sports performance products.

What we do next is post this article on our site and create campaigns on Facebook specific to our target market group.  To better understand our target market, we create duplicate campaigns with slight variations (A/B testing) to see which gets more activity.  

The most important piece of data we collect is not the type of person that clicks to read the article (although that is good information) but it’s the person that clicks the article that also ends up buying your product.  Through retargeting and tracking we can specifically follow up with the person that reads the article with some sort of promotional ad and if they end up buying, we have another clue as to who our target is.

The end goal is to be able to export a list of email addresses from people that purchased so we can create look alike audiences to serve our ads to.  For best results having a list of at least 500 people can optimize Facebooks function to identify who your customer truly is. As you can tell, for startups, this could take some time.  Trust the process and don’t start this unless you are committed to it.