In 2017, digital ad spend has surpassed television ad spend. Brands are switching their ad spend focus from TV, radio and print to digital.

If we want to get our message in front of the right audience, entrepreneurs and businesses have to course correct their marketing strategy to include digital. Facebook now has over 2 billion users worldwide and 81% of millennials check Twitter at least once per day. Businesses need to find their target market where that market is currently spending time – on social media.

Before we can get to disseminating our content and our message on these social media platforms, businesses need to be clear about the “who.” If you don’t know who your ideal target market is, no matter how funny your video might be or how moving your copy is, it’s not going to be effective because you’re not going to be getting to your ideal target market.

In my book, Win New Customers, one of my chapters covers how to identify your ideal target market. I have developed the Three-Point Customer Profile Blueprint. When identifying your ideal target market, be sure to rely on data and not on hunches or guesses. If you are not sure who is your current target, survey your current customers. You will get a wealth of information from your surveys.

Starting off with point one of the Customer Profile Blueprint, we want to identify the demographic details. What is their age, gender, geo-location and household income? These will narrow down our target market, but we don’t stop there. In point two, we need to get into the psychographics of our target market. What are the pain points? Frustrations? Challenges? The more you as the business owner can understand their pain points, the better you can address those pain points with your product or service. And point three is to identify where your ideal target market is hanging out. Which social media platform are they using? Are they reading blogs? Do they attend certain events? Follow specific gurus or personalities? Once you have collected as much data as you can from the Three-Point Customer Profile Blueprint you can use that to craft your messaging and content.

Once you have identified your target market, use the messaging to create content. Content is where you get your message across to your prospects. It’s a way to engage with your prospects so they get to know, like and eventually trust your brand. Look at your customer avatar, create content that addresses their pain points and frustrations and put it in a format that you think your audiences would like. Nowadays, you can use video on your mobile phone. It’s a lot easier for busy professionals to interact with video. As a business, you get a lot more engagement with users when they’re interacting with your video versus with images because the user has a much better glimpse of the personality of the person behind the brand. But besides videos, businesses should also consider other types of content based on their audiences such as articles, blog posts, podcasts, case studies or white papers.

Ideally, as a business, you want to create multiple pieces of content to engage with your prospect. And we also need to think of how the user interacts with the content as they flow through the funnel. A funnel is just a simple way to visualize how a prospect interacts with a business. The top of the funnel is wide open with numerous prospects. This is the awareness and consideration stage. As users go through the funnel, they identify if your product or service is the best solution for them from the content that the business provides to these users. The middle of the funnel, the engagement stage, now gets narrower. Some users have fallen off and decided to pursue other brands. And the bottom of the funnel is the conversion phase. At this point, the user is now going from prospect to customer. Your prospects get to know, like and trust your brand. And when it comes time for the sale, it isn’t out of the blue. It’s just the logical next step in the process.

Entrepreneurs and businesses often have a product and they want to push the sale too quickly. You want to ascend your prospects through a funnel, through a series of interactions and touch points. If the sale request appears too quickly then the prospect might feel distrustful of the brand and be turned off. Right then, you just lost a potential customer.

The ideal target market, content development and customer lifecycle funnel are the building blocks of a superior digital marketing strategy. Once these concepts are solidified by your business, the next step is to use social media, paid media or retargeting to get the attention of your target audience and bring them into your brand’s fold.

This post is an excerpt from Win New Customers: How to Attract, Connect and Convert more Prospects into Customers in 60 Days Using Digital Marketing Strategies by Jean Ginzburg. Copyright Jean Ginzburg, 2017