Finding Your Target Audience: Identify & Connect with Who Needs Your Message

Are you ready to discover the ultimate secret to finding those who are eagerly seeking what you have to offer?

In this video, we're about to unveil the essential steps to finding your target audience—the key that unlocks your ability to connect with people who are actively looking for the solutions you provide.

We will guide you through the transformative process of  defining your niche, conducting market research, and creating a customer avatar that represents your ideal audience to perfection.

This is your chance to make an impact like never before. Let’s go…

We help digital mentors just like you succeed turning their knowledge into a profitable digital business. That feat can only happen when you begin reaching the right audience with your message and offers.

Biggest Challenges With Starting a Knowledge Based Business

One of the biggest challenges we see with people starting out in the knowledge industry or those who have hit a plateau in their knowledge-based business is when they are not being crystal clear on who they are serving.

But with a little time and research, we can figure out exactly who would want what we have to offer and how we can tailor our offerings to better meet our ideal clients' needs.

Let’s start with defining your niche.

Defining Your Niche

Many people believe they have to serve and help everyone, but that's an impossible task and muddies up your message.

The truth is, the more specific you are, the more impact you can make.

  If you are trying to speak to everyone, you are speaking to no one.

This is why we want to define our niche.

Defining your niche is a critical step in finding your target audience. It involves identifying the specific area within your industry where you can offer your unique value, your unique voice.

By narrowing down your focus, you can position yourself as an expert in a specific niche and attract an audience that aligns perfectly with your message.

Let me give you an example...

Maybe you’re in the health and wellness industry. Its probably pretty difficult to market to every single person that wants to be ‘healthy’ - but what if we focused on people that wanted to lose weight.

That’s still a massive amount of people.

But what if we narrowed it down to busy professionals?

Even further, what if we narrowed it down specifically to busy professionals who want to adopt a plant-based diet for improved health and vitality.

Now we have someone specific in mind, and now ALL of our marketing efforts - our social media posts, our emails, our content, our courses, everything can be targeted to that specific niche. 

Getting Crystal Clear on Your Target Audience

Once we’ve determined our niche, we want to get crystal clear on who is part of this niche.

We want to nail down who our target audience is.

When building a digital mentorship business, identifying your target audience is crucial to success.

Your content, services, and marketing strategies all rely on this foundation. Understanding your target audience is like talking to a friend - you know their preferences, challenges, and goals.

This familiarity builds trust, which is essential for successful mentorship.

One effective way to identify your target audience and effectively communicate with them is by creating a Customer Avatar.

Creating Your Customer Avatar

A customer avatar is a fictional representation of your ideal customer—the person you want to attract, serve, and connect with through your digital mentor business.

Think of a customer avatar as a detailed profile that goes beyond basic demographics like age and gender.

It encompasses their interests, values, goals, challenges, and aspirations.

Creating a customer avatar allows you to get inside the mind of your ideal customer and understand their motivations, desires, and pain points on a deeper level.

Creating a customer avatar involves dissecting two essential elements: demographics and psychographics.

These components provide you with a comprehensive picture of your audience and they enable you to tailor your services to meet their specific needs and desires.

So, grab a sheet of paper or open a google doc and lets do some brainstorming.

We’ll start with demographics. 

1. Demographics

Demographics are the statistical data that describe the outward characteristics of a population. It‘s the basic information about your audience, and it‘s essential for segmenting and targeting. 

Here is what you want to get clear on with your demographics.

• Age: What is the age range of the individuals you want to serve?
• Gender: Does your content resonate more with a particular gender or is it gender-neutral?
• Education Level: What level of education does your audience possess? Does your content cater to a particular educational background?
• Income Level: What is the average income level of your target audience? How does this affect their buying power for your services?
• Occupation: Are you targeting professionals in a specific field?

2. Psychographics

Once we’ve figured out the demographics of your target audience, we’ll move on to another critical piece of information - the ‘psychographics’ of your avatar.

These are their inner characteristics, such as personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. This information helps you understand why they make the choices they do.

These might take a little longer for you to nail down, but DO NOT skip this part.

Sit with it for a while if you have to as you brainstorm these attributes.

Values & Beliefs: Values represent the core beliefs and principles that guide someones decisions and behaviors.

Understanding your customer avatar's values helps you align your messaging and offerings with what they hold important.

For example, if your audience values sustainability, you can emphasize eco-friendly aspects of your products or services.

With the avatar of a busy professional looking to adopt a plant based lifestyle, they probably value convenience and time-efficiency.

We can emphasize the streamlined and efficient aspects of your products or services.

Showcase how your offerings save time and simplify processes, and make their lives easier, allowing them to focus on what matters most to them.

• Lifestyle: Lifestyle refers to the way people live their lives, including their habits, interests, and daily routines. By understanding your customer avatar's lifestyle, you can tailor your content and offerings to align with their preferences. If your audience values a healthy and active lifestyle, you can create content that promotes fitness or provide meal plans that cater to their dietary choices.
• Goals and Aspirations: Knowing your customer avatar's goals and aspirations allows you to position your products or services as the way to help them achieve those desired outcomes. If your audience aspires to become financially independent, you can offer courses or coaching programs that teach them how to build a successful online business.
• Pain Points and Challenges: Identifying the pain points and challenges your customer avatar faces helps you develop solutions that address their specific needs. By understanding their frustrations and obstacles, you can create content that provides guidance, support, and practical strategies to overcome those challenges.

Once you've nailed down these attributes, give your avatar a name.

This avatar will be the driving force behind everything you create—from your content to your marketing efforts.

Remember, the more you understand your customer avatar, the better you can tailor your messaging and offerings to meet their specific needs.

CASE STUDY: Lululemon's  "Ocean"

Let me give you an example of how this made a massive impact for what is now a household brand. Lululemon. 

Instead of going in the gauntlet with other sports tech behemoths like Nike or Adidas, Lululemon decided to niche down within that massive space, combining the functionality of workout clothing and premium look and feel of a streetwear.

So, Lululemon created ‘Ocean’ - their ideal client customer avatar.

Ocean is a 32-year-old professional single woman who makes $100,000 a year. She’s engaged, has her own condo, loves traveling, is fashionable, and has an hour and a half to work out a day.

Everything they created was built for Ocean.

This allowed them to skyrocket their sales and brand awareness, as they could serve this niche, this ‘ocean’ better than anyone.

For those of you that are still wanting to help and serve everyone, here’s something else to think about.

Just by marketing to Ocean, Lululemon was able to serve an even broader audience.

Because, as Lululemon founder ‘Chip Wilson’ explained,

Dive Deeper into Your Ideal Customer Avatar

Once you’ve created this avatar, you can dive even deeper in to the conversation they are having by leveraging social media, finding groups and areas where they hang out online.

Join forums and look at websites like Quora to see what types of questions they have, what kind of problems they are facing.

What is the conversation going on within this niche?

This is where you can find even more opportunities to serve your audience and create valuable offers that would solve their specific problems. 

Creating a customer avatar is so critical when building a digital business that it's the first step in our framework here at DigitalMentors.

In fact, we've trained our internal AI assistant Jax to help with this process, and the results our clients have seen are tremendous.

So, as you go through this process, consider leveraging AI to generate ideas and uncover attributes you've never even thought of before.

Remember, understanding and connecting with your target audience is the foundation of a successful digital mentorship business.

By defining your niche, creating a customer avatar, and immersing yourself in their world, you'll be on the path to making a powerful impact.

Until Next Time

Leave a comment below sharing your thoughts and experiences with creating your own customer avatar. And as always, keep sharing your knowledge and making a difference in the world.

See you in the next time!