The one thing every new solopreneur must stop doing is thinking their target market is everyone. This one thought makes your marketing more difficult. Define your target market and market to them specifically and your sales will be so much easier.  And you will end up selling to others as well because your target market will refer them.
Consider this you have a strong cup of coffee and your pour half of it out and add water back. Now you have diluted the flavor and aroma of the coffee and its appeal. That is what you do with your marketing message when you target everyone. It loses its impact to anyone by diluting your message.
Begin doing a better job with your marketing by developing a persona for your target market. This is the image or personality of your best prospects. Developing persona’s makes it easier for you to know how to reach them and to know what your message should be.

How do you develop a persona or profile for your target market?

If you are just starting your business you need to first define the problems and the goals your prospects experience. Understanding their challenges and goals allows you to provide the solution to help them. If you have been in business for a while you should already know this information.
Of course your ideal clients are not just one persona but more likely you will have 3 or 4 different persona’s.
Here is where you can start. Let’s say you are a coach who wants to work with working moms of young children. You should look deeper.

• Working moms that work from home
• Working moms with infants
• Toddlers or school age children
• Working single moms
• Working moms in management positions.

That is five different persona’s because they will each have different challenges and goals.
A great way to begin is to have the conversation and listen to the prospects problems. If you don’t have access to these moms a great way to find them is to check out forums. Like The Bump has a forum for working moms or Huggies forum for full time working moms. Read through the conversations, what kind of questions do they have, what challenges are they discussing? Look for Facebook groups that are for your target market, I found five for working moms. On Linkedin I found 162 groups dedicated to working moms. You will find forums and social media groups for just about any target market you want to investigate.
Gather demographic information from Google analytics if you have a website that is getting some traffic. You could also do short surveys and ask group members to take the survey. The more survey questions the fewer people will respond so keep it simple. If you have a WordPress website you can install a survey plugin and develop the survey right on your site. Or Zoho has a free survey tool where you can create an unlimited number of surveys.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
[tweet_dis]Developing detailed persona’s makes it easier for you to relate to your audience and better provide the solution to their problems.
Be careful to not re-write the personas to match your current beliefs. It is possible that your assumptions were incorrect. It may be advisable to have someone more objective to look at the data you have collected to assist in developing an accurate persona.
Now that you have collected the data needed begin to put the perfect picture of your buyers persona’s together. If you need a guide Hubspot has a great free one. Even though this may look like a lot of work it is an important step that in the long run will help you to be more successful in your business. Can you see how the information you have gathered will also help you with your content development strategy?
This Pinterest Board has several sample persona’s that you can view to get a clear picture of how to put together your businesses personas.
The end result you will develop marketing messages that resonate with your audience and turn them into clients.