How Should You EFFECTIVELY Target Your Target Audience! | Biz To Biz Podcast

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2BVault, the biz to biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Dick Buckets of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And we'll be providing you educational information about fintech, small business payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in the world today. And in today's podcast, we're going to be talking about how to target how to effectively target your target audience. You know, what is a target audience? You know, target markets, etc. There's a lot involved in that. We're going to condense it down quite a bit. Put it, put it in layman's terms, or, you know, easy digestible content for you. How you doing, sir?

Good. A little bit of a stressful week, but It's going well indeed. Yeah, so lots of stuff going on, lots of stuff going on in the world.

Yep, it's a sad time. Um, yeah, anyway, man, life's good. I'm here, I woke up. Hey, rest in peace to Dick Buckus. That's—

that was a tongue twister.

That was a tough— that's, that's a tough intro to make with, with, with Dick Buckus in there. A lot of syllables. You don't want to mispronounce the legend's name. Yeah. So, but yeah, man, rest in peace.

He was a great football player.

Did Buckus— I mean, obviously— He was very mean. I wasn't— I was still a thought when he was playing football.

But I think I was— I don't think he— I don't know if he was playing even when I was a little boy. Maybe he was, but I don't remember. But I just remember he was super tough.

Yeah, I was born in 1980.

No, I'm saying, but I remember he was super tough. He was one of those like super tough.

Oh, he was watching the highlights from him and, you know, from like the '70s, that guy was an animal.

Oh yeah, he was one of the premier—

that's when the Bears were good.

He was one of the premier middle linebackers.

Indeed, indeed.

Word.

So I got— I'm— I don't know, I'm kind of taking lead on this since I'm the marketing guy. Um, First off, what is a target audience? You know, I looked it up, I wanted to be like, you know, actual factual. So a target audience is a group of people that products, services, or marketing efforts are aimed at— products— a target audience is a group of people that produces services or marketing efforts and aimed toward typically defined by traits like age, gender, income, interests, challenges, and goals. Targeting the right audiences can help you reduce costs and increase conversions. So basically it's like, all right, you sell muffins and they're gluten-free and vegan, so your target audience is what?

People that have specific diets, right?

So that's, that's a, that's just real simple, you know, like a brief explanation of what a target audience is.

Yeah, you know, like Some businesses it's a lot easier to figure out your target audience, and some businesses it's not that easy to figure out your target audience. Like if you have a women's clothing store, you know, that's easy.

You aiming for women, right?

Right. And then you— and then what is— what's kind of the age range of the people who wear the style of clothing you wear?

Well, that's—

you sell—

that's even further into— no, but diving into the audience, right?

You've got to dive down. And whereas If you have a business like ours where we can service just about any type of business.

Now you're talking about a target market.

Right, then it makes it a little bit more difficult to figure that out.

So like a target market is an entire group of people who are interested in your, you know, products or services. So a target market for like you're talking about for like a high-end fashion brand, um, is like for, you know, what is it, bougie women, right?

Right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, 20 to 40.

But also like their family members who might buy them gifts, right? Because they know this is what she likes, right? You know what I mean?

Or they're gonna buy a gift card from that particular business, you know? And also like You know, if you just own like a business and your target— like when I had my restaurant, right, I remember I took this course from this guy called Guerrilla Marketing. It was really interesting. So they taught you like you're going to get your business from your first bit of customers, your bit of customers is going to come from 5 miles, and then your next range is like 10 miles, and then beyond 10 miles is much harder to, you know, to rank, you know, to bring those customers into your business beyond the 10-mile radius?

Yeah, I mean, being in marketing as long as I have, it's, it's for me, I, I've, I would always tell the business owner, focus on local first, you know, like be a local superhero first, right? Um, it just makes more sense on, on a marketing level, right? Like you want to— obviously every business wants to reach every, you know, target persona that they possibly can, you know, but it's not feasible. It's not logical.

It's too expensive.

And it'll be very expensive for the business owner to try and do that. So like you narrow your market down. Excuse me, you can really, really hyperfocus, your market and specific age groups, you know, gender, ethnicity, etc., etc. But we'll get into that, man, you know. But yeah, it's why, why should you find your target audience, do you think?

I think you need to have, you know, in your business, I think if you can figure out, you can really hone in on your target audience, then if you're going to go out on Facebook, and buy ads, it's going to be a lot less expensive and it's going to be more targeted and probably have a better chance of conversions. And also today, I think people need to really consider, you know, how they're doing their sales. And I still see so many businesses without a website with e-commerce, and I'm like, why are you not doing e-commerce? And they don't— they just think it's too complicated.

And I mean, most of the time the business owners are uneducated, and, and they— in my experience, um, with shop owners and, you know, them not having a website, 9 times out of 10 they had a website or they paid a guy to run their website and that guy ran off or never, you know. So web design, you know, it's it's especially e-commerce, you know, it's, it's, it sucks. It's not a fun gig to have, right? Okay, like I have firsthand experience, like running a shop is not the funnest thing to do. It is a lot of work. It requires you to be very detail-oriented. And if you miss something and you make a mistake, it can be very detrimental to that business, like, you know, not setting up the shipping correctly or adding in the taxes properly. Or there's just so many variables, which comes from people not having the, you know, the knowledge of how to operate an e-commerce store, you know, specifically large-scale shops, you know what I mean? Like, you know, if you got 2 products and you, and you use Shopify, Hey, you know, that's not a big deal, but if you're running stores and you got 100 products on your site, you know, it's, it's a big deal.

But there's a lot of interesting developments, like in the technology side, where let's say you have specific items that you think you could sell online. You can actually use several— we have several gateways we work with that offer like a pay button, right? So you can actually create a product put a picture, create the link, and then the— you could post it on your social media. You could even post it on your regular website, and you could use those links. And but someone can't like add up into a shopping cart a bunch of items. It's— you'd have to sell them singular, you know, a single item. But let's say you were selling like a cup or something like that, or it's, you know, some kind of a shirt right? You could put it on there. Oh, what kind of shirt do you want? You want this shirt? It comes in small, medium, large, extra large, right? But click a Buy Now button.

Yeah.

So you can create payment links and Pay Now buttons with a lot of different gateways, and you don't even have to have a whole website to accomplish, you know, doing e-com, which is interesting, right?

So I mean, I was, I was trying to Social selling, they call it. Yeah. So like, you know, like, how do you, you know, how do you find your target audience, right? So you're gonna, you're gonna want to do, um, a bunch of things, right? Like, you're gonna, you're gonna research your competitor, what they're doing, for sure. You're gonna, you're gonna do that, you know. You're gonna, you know, if, if I'm, if I'm a local business and I'm just opening a Sundae shop. I want to make sure that my— I'm not, you know, within arm's reach to another ice cream parlor.

Yeah. Who are your competitors in the ice cream business? What are they doing in their business and how are you going to differentiate your business from what everybody else is doing? It's not like when I was a kid, you went to, oh, it was Baskin-Robbins and Carvel. What was the difference? Baskin-Robbins had hard ice cream. And Carvel was the soft ice cream.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Carvel. It was like this ice cream that came out of the machine and swirly thing. No, no, but I'm just saying, like, but also, like, you know, are you putting— having some sort of experience? We did a podcast on the experience economy. What kind of experience are you having in your, in your business that's going to make the differentiator? You know, why are you going to come here, or even if they're at an auto repair shop, what's going to get people to come to Justin's Auto Repair versus Allen's Auto Repair?

Yeah, I mean, so you're gonna, you know, with that, right, like researching your competitors, there's a bunch of ways you could do that. Obviously, you know, they're the simple ways, just Google it, you know, see what's around your location, or what's, you know, if there's a bunch of businesses like yours in your city. Maybe it's not, right, uh that's not going to be your target market. You're going to want to search outside of that, right? Um, but then you're going to want to use your website. You know, your website, you can attach Google Analytics, and you know, there's a bunch of websites like SEMrush, Search Engine Journal, um, not Search Engine Journal, but SEMrush, uh, like the Moz Local. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But you're going to want to, you know, use that data as well to see where people are coming from to find your website. And then the same thing with your social media. You know, there's a lot of different tools inside of your social media that'll tell you like your, the demographics, this, you know, like what kind, how much money do they make? What types of brands and different things do they buy already? You know, their loyalty to certain groups and stuff like that. So you're going to want to use that for, you know, all the different data for you to collect to be able to really focus on the target market. And again, it's going to be different for every, every business and every, you know, you know, service, you know, just because you're a plumber, right? That doesn't make you, you know, ununique. Maybe you do something specific like What's the— when they put the video camera down?

Yeah, they do. Yeah, you do video camera if someone's got a leak, right?

So then you— so then, you know, that makes you very unique, and, and that's something that you want to just, you know, that's what you want to offer. That's the service that you want people to find you for. You know, that's a, that's a great way of making an introduction for you being able to be, uh, you know, uh someone that is respected and trustworthy in your industry, you know, okay, oh, this guy came, he, he video camera'd my problem. And you know, he was— we got into this next— I'm gonna hire this guy, you know what I mean? And then boom, boom, boom. So, you know, you don't always have to like go for the whole enchilada right off top. There's a bunch of ways that you can reach your target audience with the different services or just different unique selling points that your business has.

Yeah, you want to, you want to develop like, oh, we have like what, you know, like if you're selling to, you know, like air conditioning guys, like I get emails all the time, oh, we can service your air conditioner, you know. But, you know, recently I got one from a company that says, oh, when we come out and service your air conditioner, they listed everything they did and they also change out your UV light. Included in the service. And a lot of people putting these, especially since COVID everybody wanted to put UV light on their air conditioner because it kills germs. But whether or not that's true or just a big selling point, right?

I don't know. Nobody never heard of that in my life either.

The UV light on the AC units? No, but you gotta, you know, you have to figure out. Yeah, no, you have to figure out like, is that You know, if you're in a neighborhood that's maybe upscale, then people are going to have UV lights on their air conditioning. Or maybe you're in a neighborhood where there's big houses that you want to service and they have 2 air conditioners, right? So maybe you have a special price for homes that have 2 air conditioning units.

Man, I would not want a house that big. Not with the—

no, I'm just saying, if you have like a 5-bed, you know, some of these—

but there's a bunch of different ways how to find your— like, so you can also, you know, you can do— conduct surveys. Um, you know, we're kind of all over the place on how to find the target audience.

Yeah, you have to come up with different, like, do other ways.

You have to definitely, you know, figure it out, right? So you can do some surveys, um, you can ask questions, you can do webinars, um, you can do, uh, you know, go to local trade shows, contests. Trade shows, that type of way. And then, you know, then, then you figure out, alright, so my age group is 40 years old, they're business owners, they're— they live in the suburbs, their annual income is $42,000. And Well, they wouldn't live in the suburbs if they lived in— so let's say their annual income is $100,000 and they have 6 kids. Well, they have 6 kids. They have 2 kids, um, and they have 2 cars, etc., etc. So now you have all of this information about these people, right?

Yeah.

So How do you target them?

Yeah, you could get actually, like, if you go to, uh, I'm saying, I ask you a question, how do you target them? For like a local business, you can go to a company that sells mailing lists and you can actually go in there and give them that data and then say, here's the zip codes, how many people are in these zip codes that meet this criteria?

Believe it or not, and you can get that list. Mailers are coming back Yes. Because sending mail has gotten so cheap. So I shouldn't have said that, but yeah, that's a, that's something.

But you can get an email list too from, from those people, the mailing list people.

Well, that's a, yeah, the same thing. So now you have their information from your social media analytics, right?

Yeah.

And you know, hopefully you're tracking your analytics from your website. Right? Because that's what Google Analytics is for. So now you have all that information as well. Like, you have area— it's like person, place, a thing, you know? You have everywhere you need it. You have everything that you need.

But you can get like a lot of consumer data. There are websites— I don't want to give the secret website out, but there is a website you can get on for free, and you can put all that consumer— it's really good for consumer data. Yeah, because we've used it, we used it before when we had like, we had businesses that wanted to do mailers several years ago. We're doing a bunch of mailers for clients, and that's one of the things that they needed was they needed— we had them build out a profile and then we're able to go into the software and, you know, they wanted to go, you know, a 20-mile radius and then develop the list of all the way down. They wanted kids. They wanted to target people who had teenagers, preteens, because they wanted to focus in on bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras and sweet 16 parties. So that focus in on that, people who had kids. And they built a huge list, and then they bought, you know, then they started doing mailers.

Yeah, man. So, I mean, I was I was just reading about that last week about just what people are doing in this down economy and like new, not untraditional, but like new, just reinventing the wheel, I guess you could say. And yeah, I was surprised, but it made sense right away to me 'cause everything is print paper, everything is cheaper. I mean, I get mailing it to people is cheaper. Like the mail, the real reason that people stopped using mailers is 'cause it was so expensive.

Yeah, the price of— for some mailers are still kind of expensive, but I think—

but nothing of like it was 5 years ago.

No, but I think when you compare it to social, how much you could spend on social media, I think it's pretty equal. It's pretty equal. And you're— in the case of a mailer, you're actually getting something in somebody's mailbox, right?

So that's kind of leading what I was going to talk about next is How do you— so now you, you know, you know, you have all this data, you know, these, you know, that your persona, the, the, you know, the buyer persona that you want, the target persona, the audience, etc., etc. Now the business owner's job is to reach them, right? So how do you reach them? You know, you, you, you do blogs, um, you do social media posting, um, You, you know, you might want to start a podcast. You definitely, you definitely start a YouTube channel.

Yeah.

Um, you know, you know, you don't have to control social media in a sense that you are, you're, you know, like you're a business owner. Maybe you're really good at TikToking, or maybe you're really good at, um, you know, you really, you really like enjoy Twitter and, you know, that's where your target audience is because they're, you know, like, 34 to 43 years old, you know, I love Twitter, my age group, we love Twitter. Well, it's X, whatever. It's gonna be Twitter forever.

Change that.

Like, until I see no more birds, man. I don't know, dude. Yeah, but like, I'm just saying, like, so like, you don't have to, you know, be super great at all of them. But, you know, pick one that you're really good at, or, you know, you think that that's your— where your target audience is, and Pound the pavement.

You also want to try to see, like, you know, depending on how your business is, if it's, you know, do you want to put yourself out there as the owner, right? And, and show people who is the owner of the business when you're doing— when you're a small business, because that's what people want to know.

Well, they want to know who— yeah, they want to trust, right? Like, yeah, I talked to Allen Kopelman all the time about trustworthiness, and our website needs more content about, you know, this is what I've done for 20 years. You know, they— people want to feel like, hey, this guy, one, he's trustworthy. Two, he knows what he's talking about. He's got quality products. You know, he— the POS system never goes down, etc. You know, if there is a problem, he answers the phone. So, you know, those types of selling points will separate you from 99% of the businesses like I love to go to, you know, small businesses and actually have the opportunity to shake the hand of the business owner or hear the story of, you know, what they accomplished to open their business. It's awesome to see that type of stuff, you know. But I mean, there's— you can still do— you can do ads on paper, you can do PPC ads, pay-per-click ads, you know, it's going to cost you money. I don't know if a lot of small businesses can afford to do that right now. Um, but the number one, like, way to, to that I try to convince the, the business owners to, to do is, you know, use their website. The website is a tool. Yeah. And Google, Google knows that you're a business only to a point. Like, if you're not using Google My Business and, you know, you don't have it verified through them and you're not claiming all your different listings through directories. Again, that, that takes away from your trustworthiness, and you know, they're going to pick someone else that is.

I think if you look at it and you go, hey, what can I do on a shoestring budget, right? You can set up your Google My Business page, which is free, set up your Facebook page, which is free for your business. You know, you can, you can put— make sure you have a, you know, depending if you're doing business to business, have a LinkedIn.

I disagree with setting up the Facebook page And don't set up a Facebook page and not put pictures or, you know, just claiming the page isn't doing nothing for your business.

No, you gotta post on it. You gotta put a couple of posts every week on there.

Yeah, man, you gotta do the knowledge, know what it is, like know the—

You have to make a commitment.

The dimensions of all the other stuff, you know, like the featured image, the profile picture, have a bunch of product pictures ready to upload so that you don't, you know, and then you can, you know, be done, walk away with it for a while. But I highly suggest not to just go and, you know, create a Facebook page and leave it. I hate finding businesses that have still the grayed out profile picture, no, no nothing.

Yeah, 'cause people, like, if they're gonna make their first trip, like, to your business, they're gonna usually go to Google. They're gonna Google your business.

I'm Googling your business.

And then they're gonna go look and see who's in the area, if there's any reviews. I don't really— I'm not a review person because I think certain businesses get a lot of reviews and other businesses don't get a lot of reviews. Yeah, I mean, so like restaurants tend to get tons of reviews.

Like I said, it's going to be different, you know. You're once— like, especially if you have a niche, like a niche market, you know, like some very specific, like, uh, cotton socks or something, you know what I mean? I don't know, like, what's something that I'm—

no, like, there's a guy in my area, he has something niche, man. He does. He has a gluten-free bakery. So the guy's really smart and he gets on there and he, he does— he usually posts like some videos of like what's in the bakery, you know, and then people know, like, if you're looking for gluten-free, you're definitely—

that's not even so niche anymore though. That's, that's very popular. I'm not—

yeah, it's popular, but there's not many bakeries where it's only—

that's not true.

They have gluten-free stuff. Oh, okay.

Well, out by— there's a bunch of bakeries that's gluten-free, everything's, you know, like vegan, gluten— yeah. So I don't know, like a couple years ago that was very niche, right? You know, gluten-free.

Well, that's what I mean. Things become very niche and then it becomes— then all of a sudden it gets saturated market. Or let's say maybe you may, you know, you make cookies. Oh well, it's what kind of special cookie do you make that everybody wants to buy your cookies, you know?

Yeah.

Or let's say you sell only sell children's clothing. You know, then you got to be in an area where there's a lot of children. We had a client, they were selling that children's clothing store and it was packed. But then as the area changed and aged up, you know, right, they switched to a women's clothing store because the— a lot of the people in the area, their kids were already older, past, you know, teens and above now. And they weren't going to move, you know, not going to move the store. So, you know, now, you know, not enough, not enough small children in the area. So you have to remember like where, you know, where what you're doing for your business. Same thing, like, you know, people like organic food or fresh-caught fish or, you know, whatever you have in your business, that's what you got to focus in on. You know, those things were, oh, we, you know, we did a podcast, we talked about in the podcast price, quality, and service.

Yeah, right.

So you got to focus in. Are you going to, you know, can you try to deliver all three? Most of the time you can do two out of the three.

Yeah, but your target audience has nothing to do with what he's talking about.

No, no, I understand that. But when you're advertising— Rockies doesn't like that.

I know.

But what I'm saying is, is when you're going out and targeting your audience, those are things to focus on is your price, quality, service, things like that. That's going to help bring people in.

It's going to decide whether people are going to come in or not, right?

That's what I'm saying.

Your target— after you target your audience, you better worry about what he's talking about. Um, that's a fact. Uh, you know, price, quality, and what's the other one?

Service.

Service.

So, and people want to have personal service. I just wrote an article about— yeah, what do people want? Do they want a chatbot or they want to talk to somebody? What do they really want? How, if you know, do they want You know, how do they want— I saw another article where Walmart's actually thinking about ripping out self-checkout. It's not working for them.

Well, so, so your target audience, what is it? You know, only you can really find out what that is. There's a bunch of different, you know, every— like I said a thousand times, every business is different. Every, you know, the person that you want to buy your stuff is different from what I want to buy my stuff. You know, so, you know, you can use what you're going to use your social media, you're going to use your website, you're going to use, you could use surveys, good questionnaires, newsletters, etc., to try and narrow that down. And once you have the exact, you know, the persona of or demographic that you're going to aim towards, you know, figure out if it's going to be local or is it nationwide.. And then from there, you know, you create your campaign, you set up your website, make sure you have your, your blogs ready, you know, set up your social media campaign, master whatever platform it is that you want to, you know, run with, do that very well. Create the content beforehand. So you're not trying to catch up and, you know, you feel too pressured all the time. Use some email marketing. Um, that's great. And yeah, man, have touch points with your customers.

That's it. You gotta have touch points, however that's going to be, with text, email, things like that.

Yep, indeed. Well, if you have any questions or, you know, if you thought that, you know, we missed anything, please let us know. Follow us and subscribe to the YouTube channel B2B Vault. The Biz to Biz Podcast. Like and subscribe, smash those buttons for you— for me, for the one time, man. We'll see you next week.

All right, peace out. Carpe diem.