Bitesized Branding: Define Your Audience

1. Introduction: Welcome to the second of these bite-sized branding classes. Visual classes are designed to act as refreshes or to help with certain areas of branding. They are great many classes to fit in during a lunch hour and happy at mid date business boost. They can be taken altogether or even alongside my main branding series, Branding Your Creative Business. Now that's series takes you through all the steps of branding. So do take a look at that if you think it will help you with your business and your brand. If you haven't taken any of my classes before, then hello, my name is [inaudible] Brown. Along with being a designer and animator, I also do a lot of online teaching and in the subjects of design, typography and branding. Some of you may have taken the first-class in these bite-sized branding classes where we looked in depth at your brand personality. Hopefully that got you thinking about your brand and business a little differently. When a bit refresh perspective. In this class, we're going to look in-depth at defining and finding your perfect customers or clients. By the end of the class, you should have a really clear idea of who your target market is and how to approach them with your products, services, and business. We're going to do three exercises to help you with this. There is a downloadable worksheet to help you with those. There will be four projects steps to complete and uploading them in the gallery. The final step will be writing a paragraph describing your target market. This will help you throughout your business, making sure that you always have those people in mind when you're communicating or doing any promotional work with your business and your brand. So in the first video, we will talk about the importance of figuring out who your target market is before moving on to the exercises. 2. Importance of figuring out your target market: You're perfect customers. So any of you who've taken my previous classes know, we can't be all things to all people. If we tried to sell our brands or our businesses to absolutely everyone, we aren't going to do ourselves any favors. We will be spreading ourselves too thin, and we won't be talking to the people who might be really interested in our products and what we have to sell. Let's take my Etsy shop MissPrintables as an example where I sell printable items for families. Like I usually say my target market is all parents, to buy these products for their kids. But not all parents are likely to be interested in my products, and to try and promote my shop to all parents, would be impossible. I need to really think about the type of parent who would likely be interested in buying my products. Once I figure that out, it will help me talk to them on their level. It will help me think about potential places to promote the shop, and what products this core group would like to see more of. Remember, having a Facebook group with a 100 followers who regularly check in and buy your products is much more valuable than a Facebook group of 10,000 people who have no interest in ever buying product from you. This is a basic premise of knowing your target market well, quality over quantity. Nurturing your relationships with those perfect clients will, in the long run, work out better for your brand. They will recommend you to like-minded friends and hopefully, you'll get repeat business from them. So don't underestimate the importance of really working out who your target market is. Also, you might find that you have two or three different target markets. So on the one hand from MissPrintables, I would be aiming at a certain type of parent. I might also want to think about teachers, as there are some products that they could use. So when doing these exercises, if you know you have completely likes a few different groups of potential customers, do each exercise for each group, and that's going to help you. 3. Exercise 1 - Customer specifics: Exercise one and I have called this your perfect customer specifics. For any of you who've taken the branding your crave series class, we touched upon this exercise in that first class but there's no harm in doing it again and actually doing it quite regularly can be quite helpful in case you find that you're perfect customer changes or becomes a little bit more specific as your business grows and develops. We're going to think about our perfect customer or client in our head and then really start thinking about them in a lot of detail. Use your worksheets and start filling in the details. Some of them might not be relevant to your business, for example, where they live. For me, I sell printables globally but I could think very generally, where I get most of my custom and that'll be the UK, the USA and Canada. For you, your business might be much more local or based in a certain area of the city. Don't worry if any of those questions just don't seem relevant, just leave them blank. Let's go through the list, pause the video as you need to have time to fill it in. Age, putting an age range might help you think about where to advertise or how to promote your business. Gender, some of your businesses might appeal to one gender more than the other, mine is probably more appealing to females. Job role and income, sometimes useful to think about what jobs your potential clients or customers have in their income. Are you aiming your products or services at the high end of the market or maybe it's more budget friendly? Thinking about their income might sound crude but it is very useful. Where do they live? As discussing, thinking about where you run your business will help you narrow down your marketing. Education, you might want to think about the level of education that your potential clients have depending on your product or service. Relationship status, this is obviously useful if you work in an industry that maybe relates to weddings or families or maybe you're setting up a dating service. This could be a very important question to consider. Children, this will be relevant to some of your businesses not others. The children's age might also be important so, take that all in to consideration. Pets, maybe of a product aimed at the animal kind so this would be important. That maybe you were also trying to relate to outdoorsy people who are maybe quite likely to have a dog as a little bit of a generalization. Leisure activities and interests. What do they like to do? Where do they like to hang out? For me and the Miss Printables shop, I would look at leaving flyers in local coffee shops or parent groups for instance but also have a certain type of parent in mind so, thinking about their leisure activities might help me engage in conversations or relate to them more. Magazines, books, blogs and favorite websites. This is not only useful to think about the type of person you're aiming your product at but also potential places to advertise or get a feature. Music, here's a fun exercise you could think about doing. Create a playlist for your perfect client and then listen to it when you're doing anything related to your business. Let's say your business is quite refined and classy, listening to classical instrumental music might help you get into the right mindset when working. For my Miss Printables shop, I like to do bright designs and often listen to happy dance music when coming up with new products. The other aspect of thinking about music in you're perfect customer might be to think about what music venues they might hang out at? Can you get involved with those venues in some way or leave flyers there? Social media, what social media platforms are your target market likely to use? Do some research and really think about this as it's huge. If you want to think about this in more detail, then please check out this class of mine too. Instagram is a master if you're targeting a young crowd. Facebook and Twitter are the other two main ones that you might want to consider. Think about new platforms like Periscope, if you're up for a little bit of live filming. Personality traits, this is a big one for me with Miss Printables. I really sat down to think about the personality traits someone would have who are likely to buy my products. These exercises should help you determine that also. Beliefs, a lot of students from my branding class have started businesses based around their faith and belief so this may be very important factor for you to consider. Spend some time on this or come back to it. Once you filled it out, I want you to read through it all and start highlighting words or phrases that repeat themselves or really stand out to you. Write those in the box at the bottom of the sheet and we will come back to them later. 4. Exercise 2 - Dinner date: Exercise 2, take your perfect client or customer out for a date. In one of my previous classes, I suggested to students that if they knew someone, like a friend or an existing client who they were very close to and they fit at that perfect customer profile, to take them out for coffee or for lunch. Just pick their brains and chat about their interests. Maybe something will come up in that conversation that could spark a trail of thought that you could then pursue. Maybe a place to advertise, a product to create; something that would make their lives easier somehow, which is the main point of most businesses, how to make your customers lives better. Recently I did a live master class on branding and decided to expand on this idea and got the audience to imagine their perfect client or customer and take them out for a virtual dinner date, and this proved quite a successful exercise to a lot of people, and help them think about their brand in a different way and their target market with a little bit more focus. So I want you to either do this for real or imagine taking someone out for a virtual dinner date. So if you're a wedding photographer, you might want to think about your perfect couple that you would like to photograph. Why don't you take them out for a drink or something? If you make jewelry, think about the type of person that you would love to see wearing your jewelry, maybe it's a celebrity. If you design T-shirts, think about the one person you would love to see wearing your designs. Then let's go through these questions. Again, write down your answers in the worksheet and pause video to write down your answers. Where will you take them? Maybe it's a nice cozy coffee shop or a high-end restaurant or a rustic cafe. Think about where they and where you would feel most comfortable. What do you choose from the drinks menu? Maybe you've gone to a health food place and you're both drinking [inaudible] juices or maybe you both fancy a casual beer or a hot chocolate. Think about the atmosphere you want to create. For me, with my design clients, I would probably go for a cold beer. I like to build friendly relationships with my clients that are very comfortable and not too business-like for instance. We will all be different. There's no right or wrong answers here. So just have a bit of fun with that. What do you talk about? Let's say you've chatted about your business and how your product or service can help them. What is the concession flow to after that? Do you talk about family, fashion, sport, politics, music? Are you happy talking about the subjects that they like to talk about or are you out of your comfort zone? If you are out of your comfort zone, think about whether this is really the right line of target market to follow. You need to feel at home and comfortable when talking to clients, and hen is the next date? Which is basically asking you, what is it about you and your brand that makes that customer want to come and work with you again. What has set you apart from someone else in a similar area of business? Again, look back at your answers and start making notes of the key words that keep appearing or phrases that you really like that could be used within your branding. Whereas this is a useful exercise to help you define your target market, it can also help you define your brand at the same time. So we have one more exercise to complete before collecting all of this together. In the next video, we're going to look at my favorite, which is mood boats. 5. Exercise 3 - Visual moodboards: Exercise 3, almost the final one, we're going to create a mood board for our perfect customer or client. Now this is another exercise we looked a little in the final business class. We created a mood board that represented our perfect customer. We thought about the fashion they might be interested in, the music, art they would hang on their wall, places they would hang out, now I recommend using Pinterest mainly because it's just so easy but if you are more tactile person then create a physical mood board to do this as well. There's two main points why I think this is such an important yet fun exercise. I know that a lot of your businesses will be based around something visual. Whether you're a designer, photographer, fashion designer, illustrator, maybe you work in the food business, a lot of us relate to visuals better than words sometimes, so creating a mood board can help us really envisage our perfect customer. Here's two opposing mood boards. One for a boho hat designer, and you can get a sense of the style, personality traits, and interests of this person and here's a mood board for high-end fashion photographer who would love to do a Burberry photo shoot. We get a completely different feeling from each mood board. The photographer needs to think about how to speak and use his visual brand to attract the interest of Burberry. The boho hat designer needs to think about how to communicate on a level with the types of people who'd be wearing their hats. The other secondary plus point for doing this especially when using Pinterest, is that it can open up other ideas of potential promotional routes. Let's take a look at a mood board I created for a wedding photographer trying to encapsulate their style and personality. We can also look at the links of some of the imagery that comes from these pins, so you've got Wedding Chicks or Rock My Wedding blogs, and you can start to think about potential places where you would love to get a feature. When you're happy with your mood board, why not print out a screenshot and hang it on a pin board that you can easily refer to so that you can keep looking at it and look at your target market when you do work. This will help you keep everything in line with that person. You might also get inspired from some pins you find for maybe a potential logo design. There's a lot of benefits to doing this exercise. Now on your worksheets, write down a few key words again, describing the style and feel of your mood board. The people in your mood board too describe them. You will now be getting a lot of crossover with the previous exercises. A lot of words will probably be repeating themselves, and that's totally cool, and in fact that's where we want to be. If you're finding your answers all over the place, then please ask for some guidance in the project gallery. I tried to check out your projects very regularly, so I really encourage you to upload your projects, just take a photo of your worksheets or scan it in and upload it. Even if you're totally happy with them and not necessarily looking for any advice or feedback, I love seeing what you do and fellow students might also get inspired by some of you, which is great as that's what skill share is all about. In the next video, we will be creating all of this info together to put it into a more coherent paragraph and we can work with that throughout our businesses. 6. Final deliverable and next steps: Next step, so now you hopefully have a much clearer idea about your target market, whether that's a group of people you want to attract, or a certain type of person, or maybe you have two or three potential markets to look into. It's a good idea to now collect all of this into a simple paragraph or two, similar to what we did in the brand personality class. So start looking at the keywords and phrases that come out throughout each exercise. All those words that just really excited you or enlightened you in some way and try to now wrap that all into a paragraph describing your perfect customer. Give them a name too because often that going to help to make you feel a bit more connected to them. Again, do this two or three times if you have a couple of different target groups. So if we take a look at mine for the misprintable shop, the keywords I got out of most exercises were family, children, crafts, creativity, design aware, friendly, fun, play, and imagination. I then wrote this paragraph. Again, remember you don't have to show this to anyone except just in the project gallery, of course, but here is mine. Emily is in her mid-30s with two young children under the age of eight. She works part-time in a professional job. She loves playing games with the kids and encouraging imaginative play. Emily has always had a good eye for design and loves decorating her home with artwork, especially the kids' rooms. In her free time, she likes to keep fit, eat well, enjoy time with her friends, and travel. I could write more but I'm keeping it quite short for now. This is the start of me figuring out my perfect customer. I just want to go over some of the main points again as to why working out your target market is so important to your business and brand. Number one, appeal to your target market. Your business is nothing without customers or clients and you want to appeal to them and stand out. When you work out who your target market is, however specific a niche that is, this will help you communicate with them and shape your brand around them. When we start talking about your visual branding, knowing your target market will be a huge help in designing your visual brand around what would appeal to them. Number two, promotion and advertising. When you really sit down, and work out who you are aiming your products or services at, you can then build a strategy for marketing to these people, which magazines or blogs to reach out to and what key target groups to aim a Facebook ad to, for example. Number three, build relationships. Once you've appealed to your target market and started selling to or working with them, you can start building real relationships with them, and then they will start recommending you or coming back for more of your products or services. Number four, keep on track. If you always have your target market at the forefront of your mind, that will help you stay on track with your business in brand. You can question if this is a product that will appeal to them or a Facebook post that will resonate with them. It can adapt. Your target market might change a little over time. It might become more focused or maybe it'll become a bit more widened. So come back to these exercises and do them again if you need to. Also, you might have a few strings to a bow and misprintables is not my only source of income. I do a lot of design and animation, and for that, my target market is a lot different to misprintables. So when doing these exercises, be specific to an area of your business you want to work on and develop or do the exercises separately if you have a few different businesses that you work on at the same time. Okay. I hope you've enjoyed this class and found it useful, there will be more branding bite-sized classes, so please do check them out as and when they come out. If you've got any areas of your brand that you would like to have a class on, then just let me know and get in touch or start a conversation in the discussions on Skillshare. I hope to see you in another class soon. Bye.