Hiiiii!!!!
I am Dezzi Pixels and I help Artists find their audience and build businesses online!
In today’s post we are going to get really specific about who you are talking to in your niche and how that work can be used to hone in on your target audience!
Learning outcomes
Not knowing your target audience is the main reason I see most artists not succeed online. As creatives we have a habit of getting into our projects for personal enjoyment rather than making something with a specific person in mind. This is what leads you to work 10+ hours on a single piece of art to only receive 5 likes and a “It looks cool” comment. You have to know who you are making art for before you spend the time and resources on a project that frankly only you care about.
To remedy this issue today you will learn how to answer the following questions….
Who is your ideal customer?
What are their psychographics? (Hobbies, Interests, Routines)
What needs do they have that are not being met?
Once we answer all these questions we will put this information together into an audience persona that we will use to craft your brand’s messaging and Identifiers such as logos and websites.
Who is your Ideal Client?
For this part you will need to flex your empathy and imagination skills. You have to think of the services you can provide and who would best benefit from them.
For example, if your niche is painting dog portraits you need to figure out what type of person gets pictures painted of their dog. Where do they shop, what tv shows do they like, what do they eat for dinner on Thursdays when they don’t feel like cooking.
The more you know about your ideal client the more you can cater to their specific needs.
Now, you are probably asking ”How the heck am I supposed to figure that all out?”. CALM DOWN! We just so happen to be getting to that right aboooouuuut…
What are your Ideal Clients Psychographics?
Now! Psychographics is a nice fancy name for classifications of people based on their attitudes, aspirations, and psychological criteria. We want to find out our ideal clients preferences, habits, and routines so we can figure out how to best tailor our service and messages to them .
There are many different ways to go about researching your audience psychographics. These ways range from expensive paid services to good old fashion self conducted research. I suggest that for new business owners you take the time to do the legwork yourself because purchasing the data from a company could cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.
A good place to start researching is looking for books that cater to your niche and read the reviews.
Take notes on the type of people you see commenting. Try to keep track of their age, the concerns they voice, and the way they communicate with each other. You can repeat the same process by looking at videos that help people in your niche well.
Once we have enough information we can move on to finding out...
What unmet needs does your Ideal client have?
The reason why most artists fail is because their work doesn’t fulfill any needs beyond the artist's own need to create. This is the definition of a hobby and is not a business.
With that said your client can have any number of different needs and your job to focus on the one that you are able to help them with.
Fulfilling your ideal client’s unmet needs IS YOUR BUSINESS. If you are not fulfilling a need you are irrelevant.
A good place to start is familiarizing yourself with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The TLDR version is humans have 5 tiers of needs that need to be met in order to proceed to the next one. These tiers of needs are…
Physiological needs (Food, watterm sleep,)
Safety needs (Security, shelter, protection)
The need to belong ( Relationships, friends, social activity)
Self Esteem (Prestige, Feeling of accomplishment)
Self-Actualization (Achieving one’s full potential)
These needs are fundamental to the human experience and should be referenced any time you create a new product, service, or message. This is the main reason why we take the time to understand our Ideal clients psychographics. With that information you will be able to deduce what your ideal clients needs are. If you cannot, it's time to go back to the research stage.
Now what to do after all this research and critical thinking?
Once we have done all this work and research you want to organize this information into an Audience persona.
An Audience persona is a document that details out a fictional person with the characteristics of your Ideal client.
This person is who you will keep in mind when you are creating your businesses branding, iconography, and digital marketing. Anytime you make a decision about your business you should look at that Audience Persona and think about if that is something that person would respond too.
For example, if your ideal client is a 25 year old female anime fan that works 2 part time jobs and lives in detroit you wouldn’t want to make content about retirement homes in Florida. This may be an extreme example but is exactly what most artists might as well be doing when they post their 5th painting of their original character to their facebook page of 50 year old family members and cousins who never even heard of an “OC”. This is the Keystone of your branding and is worth putting as much time and effort as you can into it.
Once you are done you will know who your target audience is and will be able to move forward with the rest of your brand building process.
For Next Week!
Be sure to subscribe for next week when we will use our Audience Persona to identify our competitors and see how we can position ourselves differently to grab our audience’s attention!
Feel free to click here to download your free Audience Discovery worksheet. It has a bunch of questions to get you started in finding your Niche and Identifying your target audience.
Thanks for reading and this has been your girl Dezzi Pixel and I’m out byeeeeeee!