Finding the right people is the first step to capturing their attention and converting your target demographic into loyal, paying customers.

Identify your Target Demographic

Your target demographic is the people for whom you are solving a problem. Here are some questions to ask about your audience that will help define this for your:

• What’s their big pain point?
• What solutions have they tried so far, and why didn’t those solutions work?
• What does your target person do in the morning? Do they head straight for the TV, check their emails, scroll through LinkedIn, or post a TikTok?
• What do they do before bed? Do they check Facebook or look at Instagram?
• What are their favorite brands? What do they like about those brands?
• What drives them? Are they driven by their family, wealth? Maybe they want to move country, or want to get married. How can you help them feel closer to those goals?
• Where do they go when they have a question? Reddit, Facebook groups, or do they read articles? If they read articles for information, which media channels do they use?
• Where are they in the world right now?

The answers to these questions will help you define your target market. For example, if your target person wakes up at 5 am and checks their Instagram stories, you should be posting Instagram stories at 4:30 am every day. If your persona (or ideal customer) is about 50 years old, has a house worth £500,000, and a job that pays $50,000 a year, you now have the demographics you should target in your paid social ad campaigns on Facebook.

Ask Questions

Use the analytics you already have available to you to define your audience further, but also, don’t forget to ask your customers for the answers you need. Who currently buys from you? How did they find you? What do they like about you? What don’t they like? Your current customers should impact how you market in the future.

Research Agencies

Research companies can sometimes provide the answers to many of your questions through various means. One of the most common ways of sourcing answers is by performing surveys either digitally or over the phone. Depending on the agency, the people they survey could be senior executives they already know, or they could be cold calling a list of people that might fit your target market.

Costs vary. The prices I’ve come across range from $4000 for a one-off project where they provide the answers to ten of your most pressing questions up to $100,000 a year for access to their research library.

Research agencies can provide a great way to get a unique insight into your buyer persona. Many are familiar with buyer personas and work closely with marketing teams. Others specialize in FinTech and in more drilled-down areas, such as payments or retail banking. They can often help you build out your persona as well as help you understand what your audience is looking for from both a product and marketing perspective.

Another benefit many research agencies offer is the ability to double up the research they do for you as unique insights to include in your content. Using the analysis you’ve commissioned as content can be a powerful tool in your marketing, particularly for B2B FinTechs – think “a survey conducted by.”

When displaying your research, you might like to put it together as an infographic. Infographics can be commissioned from freelancers on popular platforms like Fiverr or Upwork, or the research agency might offer it as a side product on occasion. You could try your hand at Canva. Watch a few videos to get to grips with how to use Canva, type infographics into the Canva templates, and make sure to use your brand colors, fonts, and logos.