Once you’ve done lots of competitor and industry research, your product narrative should hopefully now be coming along quite nicely. 

Ideally, your product and marketing should revolve around your understanding of who your target audience is.

Essentially your vision and mission are all about solving your target audience’s problem.

So the better you understand your target audience, the better you’ll be able to come up with more effective ways of engaging them, whether that’s through how you go about building your product, or the messaging you use in your copy, or how you choose to strategically position your content marketing.


Using Exercise File 11 we’ve set out a series of questions to help you identify and better understand your target audience.


The first set of questions revolves around helping you build your product.

These questions include:

• What are the existing solutions to your customers' problem?
• What’s wrong with these solutions?
• What would your target customer like to see these existing products do differently?
• And finally, how will your solution address these problems?

When answering these questions we’d suggest your first approach is to answer them based on your own gut intuition and online research.

But you may also want to consider doing some qualitative customer research on this too.

Reach out to a handful of people who fit your target customer demographics with a private message. Introduce yourself as the product manager of your business and ask them for a few minutes of their time to complete a quick questionnaire using Survey Monkey.

We recommend you try talking to about five-ten people for this and then adding their insights into your research using Exercise File 11.

The second set of customer research questions you want to be thinking about revolves around helping you develop your messaging and marketing.

Firstly ask yourself, who is your ideal customer? And what demographic do they fall under?

The best approach to answering this is by developing your product first, and from there you can start to better define your target audience. You should already have a rough idea of who your audience is when you set out your vision, but you probably won’t have full clarity on who your target audience is until you've pretty much finished your product.

Once your product is finished, it should then be really clear as to who would most benefit from it.

We’d encourage you to take some time to review your product and ask yourself who is this going to be most valuable to?

We recommend you start with one target customer. But you might have two or three different audiences that you're going after.

It’s recommended to narrow your target market down to one specific type of individual in order for your brand to be meaningful.

This doesn’t mean people outside of your target market won't buy from you. They just may not be part of your brand's primary target audience. So don’t worry too much about doing this. You can always broaden your marketing initiatives later on, in which you may launch different communication campaigns that have different messaging in order to attract different audience groups.

So start sketching out now who your primary target audience should be for the brand that you are creating. This includes pinpointing things like their Gender, Age, Income level, Occupation, and Geographical location

Secondly, and this is the important part, is what are their psychographics? What are their interests? What hot topics are they passionate about? What brands and websites do they follow?

We suggest answering these questions by again simply using your own intuition, and modeling your target customer on either yourself or on a specific individual that you know quite well that closely fits the bill.

Another way of gathering this research is by monitoring your Twitter lists.

You should be able to find your target customers online as they should be following your industry influencers. So by monitoring your influencers on Twitter you can keep your finger on the pulse of the hot topics and trends that your customers are currently talking about.

A third way of getting this data is of course to add these questions to your Survey Monkey questionnaire.

When you combine these first 2 questions together, combining both demographics with psychographics, this should start to give you a really clear persona of who your ideal customer is, and you can then use this as a focal point when developing your sales funnel strategy later on.

Another useful tip to help you figure out your customer’s demographics and psychographics is to use the Insights tool built within Facebook.

This will not only give you an idea of how to start shaping your customer persona, but it will also give you a good idea of how big your market size is too.

To do this you’ll first need to set-up a Facebook business page. Don’t worry too much about doing it properly, you just want to get the basic stuff set-up in order to get access to Ad Centre.

Once you have your business page set-up, go to ‘Ad Centre’, and choose ‘Create Ad'. Then choose ‘Create new Ad’.

Here you will be able to choose your target audience by gender, age, and location.

Next, you’ll be able to choose ‘Detailed targeting’.

This offers you a massive range of options to help you refine your target audience. Typically you’ll want to just filter this based on interests for now.

Customer research is an important exercise you should be doing early on when building your product, but this will also most likely be an ongoing exercise that you come back to, particularly when it comes to creating your sales funnel strategy and crafting the different messaging approaches for your different audience groups.

Which we’ll be discussing in more detail in Exercise File 21.