The internet has changed how business owners typically find new customers. Finding your target audience online can be a challenging endeavor. I’ll walk you through the steps I’m using at Veracity Technologies and share a worksheet with you that I developed.
Is Your Website Ready?
My assumption is that your website is already technically SEO-optimized. The Veracity site has been around since 1997, and I still have a lot of old posts to optimize. My focus lately has been on the static pages of the site. When I use the term “technically SEO-optimized” I’m referring to the structure of the web page itself. Does it have the proper headings, keywords, descriptions, etc.?
Quick SEO Check
If you’d like to pause right now and do a quick check of your site. I recommend that you head over to Neil Patel’s site to conduct a free analysis of your website. Once you register for your free account, open the tool, and click on the SEO Analyzer section (on the left) and choose Site Audit.
Next, enter your website address in the orange bar at the top of the page and click on Search. Give it some time and you’ll get a quick report of everything that’s wrong (and right) with your website.
If you have critical errors to correct, make an action plan for yourself to get those fixed as soon as possible. If you need assistance or would like my recommendations, give us a shout.
Who Is Your Ideal Customer?
If you are new in business, you may not fully understand your target audience as of yet. If you have had a few sales, you may have an idea of who prefers your products or services. If you are a writer, you probably already know who will buy your book. I’m going to share with you my Ideal Customer Worksheet. It’s a culmination of several articles I’ve read and seminars I’ve attended. For this exercise, we’ll pretend that my business is a drive-thru only coffee and bakeshop. Even though I’m just off the interstate at a traffic light, I’d like to have more customers. I fill out the worksheet one evening and the next day, I ask some customers how they would like to get updates from me. Based on their responses, I need to work on my email campaigns and look at text-messaging options.
Sign up for Veracity’s newsletter and we’ll send you a link to download a copy of this worksheet (and all of our other available worksheets) for yourself.
Once you have a picture of your ideal customer, take a look at where your competition markets themselves and what social media outlets your customers tend to frequent.
Checking Out The Competition
Are your competitors advertising online, on the radio, or on social media? It’s easy to search online for your competitors and relatively easy to search on various social media outlets. Searching traditional media is more difficult as I’ve found that most traditional media outlets won’t reveal who their advertisers are.
Social Media Outlets
I find myself often referring to Sprout Social’s Social Media Demographics reports. I highly recommend subscribing to their newsletter to educate yourself. Based on that report and our hypothetical ideal customer, it may benefit our drive-thru coffee shop to have a presence on Facebook and Instagram.
Finding My Ideal Audience
In closing, the key to success is two-fold. One, make sure your web presence is optimized and two, define your customers, and how best to reach them. I hope you found this article useful and the worksheet valuable to your business building efforts. I’d like to have your feedback, so please leave a comment.
“Finding Your Audience doesn’t have to be difficult.” #SmallBusinessTechTips 
Ideal Customer Worksheet License
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