In this week’s episode of Content Marketing… Stripped! We explore the dangerous world of missing customers. Watch the show below:

Last time we created a thorough customer profile for our content marketing. Now that you have all these juicy details about your customer you can start piecing together 3 of the puzzle pieces in your content strategy.

These are:

• WHERE do you find your customers? 
• WHAT do you say to them when you find them?
• HOW do you say it?

To make sure that we’re keeping our approach to content marketing slow and steady, we’re just focusing on the first point, and we’ll look at the other 2 in the next episodes.

WHERE do you find your customers?

We saw in the pilot episode that content marketing is about leaving a trail for your customers to follow so that they find out about your business, get to like, know and trust you and then buy.

But how do you start setting a trail if you don’t know where your customers are?

Well that’s when we start playing detective. If you downloaded last week’s customer profile guide you’ll be aware that I used to be a detective. And by ‘used to be’ I mean ‘had a business card printed when I was 9’

So how do we start finding out likely locations for our missing customer?

Start with their interests, questions and problems

In the customer profile guide we looked at different aspects of our customer including:

• What their problem is
• What their lifestyle is like
• The reasons they want to solve their problem
• Their personality
• How they’re getting by today

Each one of these gives us clues about where we might find our customer.

Let’s say that you offer beauty therapies. You know your customers are interested in staying healthy, looking after their skin, and perhaps a high percentage of your customers are mothers. From there you would then…

Spend a day in their life

Imagine that you are your customer. Knowing what you know, what does their routine look like? Where do they go? What do they do?

[signup-form id=”12713″]Let’s think about the above example. A snippet of her daily routine might look like:

• Take kids to school
• Go to work
• Check Facebook on her break – search online for nearby hair salons
• Go to a nearby cafe for lunch, read a beauty magazine
• Pick up kids and go to a playgroup

You can play around with the situation as much as you like. Use your imagination to think about the things they do in their day. Depending on your business you’ll focus on different parts of their lifestyle. It might be their work life, their home life, their dating life. However, don’t just limit yourself to where you can help them, think about what else is going on in their lives.

Look online, offline and go social  

From there we can start to look for places where our customer might be. For example:

Online

What websites does your customer consult in their day to day life? If your customer is a business owner do they read Forbes? Or the Huffington Post?

If your customer is interested in fitness do they subscribe to any blogs, or podcasts related to health and fitness? Are they registered on any forums? Think about your own behaviour online and ask yourself what the equivalent might be for your customer.

Offline

When your customer is away from their computer, what real-live events and social circles do they move in?

Do they attend networking events? Do they meet up with friends at a regular dance class? Do they attend industry events? Do they go to local festivals?

These are all places that you may be able to start your content trail, or build relationships with other business owners who can help refer customers to you. In the case of our beauty therapist, she could team up with a local hairdressing salon and offer an incentive for every customer referred.

Go social

Okay – this technically falls under the ‘online’ section but social media is so vast it’s worth thinking about it as its own category. Social media gives you plenty of tools to find your customers. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have search capabilities where you can look for people who are interested in ‘health and beauty’ or ‘small business marketing.’ This gives you an opportunities to find direct groups, pages and lists of people who could just be perfect customers for you.

And what do you do when you find these people?

That’s exactly what we’ll be covering next time.

What about you? Knowing what you know about your customer, where could you start looking for them? Getting stuck? Pop your questions in the comments below and we’ll see if we can help you out!