Reaching out to a new business demographic can be exciting and also nerve wracking. What if you pick the wrong demographic? What if your marketing efforts don’t connect with them? What if you accidentally forget your current customers? But things don’t have to be this way. If you play your cards right, going after a new business demographic can be a huge win for your business. Here are nine tips to help you go after new customer bases:
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Table of Contents
Evaluate your current customers.
Before choosing a new demographic to pursue, you want to look at your existing demographics in order to identify potential gaps. Pull out your customer data and see how it matches up against your potential markets. For instance, maybe your branded merchandise theoretically appeals to women 18 to 49 years old, but most of your current customers are in the 25 to 35 year old range. That means that you have opportunities to appeal to both younger and older consumers than those currently buying your product. Looking at your current customer data will help you identify these opportunities.
Look at your competition.
Your competition can give you inspiration for new demographics to pursue — and help you preemptively determine if competition over a particular demographic is already too stiff to make it worth your while. Do some good old competitor analysis to see what demographics your fellow companies are going after and how successfully they have been able to capture these demographics. You might find that some of your competitors are doing a bad job of wooing certain demographics, giving you the perfect opportunity to swoop in.
Identify some potential demographics.
After you’ve evaluated your current customers and your competition, it’s time to start identifying some new customer demographics that you would potentially like to appeal to. Some factors that you’ll want to consider include age, gender, geographical location, income, education level, occupation, hobbies, and marital status. Make sure that your potential demographics are distinct from each other; if you notice a lot of overlapping characteristics, you might need to merge those two categories.
Do research and collect data.
Now it’s time to delve deep into the data on your potential demographics. Really crunch the numbers to determine which one aligns with your current brand personality and has a lot of potential for growth. Remember that you are going to be asking for a lot of money behind your push for a new customer demographic, so you will need rock-solid numbers to back up your proposal. In many cases, the analytics will make it clear which customer demographic you should pursue next.
Build their customer persona.
At this point, you are ready to choose which customer demographic you will pursue and start building their buyer personas. (If you have a couple demographics that are neck and neck and really seem to both have a lot of potential, you can choose to pursue both of them at once if you have the budget to do so.) Your buyer persona(s) should be far more in-depth than just the bare bones of their defining characteristics. Really delve deep into their psyches and figure out what would make them buy your product or service specifically.
Set aside a marketing budget.
Like we alluded to earlier, going after a new customer demographic takes money — and the further this new demographic is from your current ones, the more spend it is likely to take. If you haven’t already, allocate a significant chunk of your marketing budget to promoting your product or service to this new demographic via social media ads, paid partnerships with content creators, corporate gifts for clients, and more. This money should be separate from the budget that you use to target your current customers; they still need to be marketed to as well, after all!
Craft separate promotional campaigns.
Speaking of your current customers, you don’t want to lose ground with established markets while you go after new ones. You also don’t want to lower your chances of success with the new customers because you re-used marketing materials that weren’t specifically designed for them. Thus, you should design promotional campaigns that are tailored to each separate demographic so that you can increase your chances of making the sale and winning over a new customer.
Explore new channels.
The same marketing channels that you used to reach your existing customers might not cut it for the new-buyer personas that you’re trying to reach. And even if your new target customers do frequent the same channels, they might be looking for totally different content. Don’t be afraid to explore new marketing channels that you’re not already using, such as TikTok or promotional products, or to use your current channels in a totally new way that allows you to connect directly with the customers you are trying to win over.
Don’t forget about your existing customers.
Going after a new customer demographic can be all-consuming, and it’s easy to let your existing customer demographics fall by the wayside. Unfortunately, this creates a prime situation for your competitors to come in and chip away at the demographics where you used to have a strong presence. That’s why it’s imperative to keep marketing to your current demographics even while you’re going full steam ahead on your new buyer personas. If you don’t, you could lose all the ground you fought so hard to gain with your existing customers, and you might basically break even on sales (or even fall behind).
Have you had success going after new business demographics? Do you have expert advice to share or mistakes that you wish you hadn’t made? Drop them in the comments below so we can all learn from each other!