What is an ideal customer?
Your ideal customer is someone who gets their exact needs met by what you are offering. But also someone you most want to target with your marketing and promotions based on your current business situation.
They are someone who sees tons of value in your product or service and will champion your business because they got exactly what they wanted when buying from you.
Know Your Product or Service
Everything here needs to be targeted from your customer’s point of view.
A quick exercise would be to note down exactly what you offer to your customers. What problems do you solve for them or what challenges do you address? Why should people buy from you instead of your competitors? What sets you apart?
Who actually benefits the most from your product or service? When it comes to this question, you need to be honest with yourself. It’s not enough to determine who you want to benefit most—you need to identify who is or will really find value in your offerings right now.
Determine Your Goals
Once you’ve looked at your business through your customer’s eyes and identified who is currently, or who will be, buying from you, now is the time to determine what your goals are.
Are you happy with this current type of customer and, more importantly, are they happy with you?
This is the time to outline your goals. Determining what specifically you want to achieve will help you alter your strategies when it comes to your customers. Just think—if you have a goal of reaching a high income target your pricing probably won’t be the right fit for students.
Analyse Past Interactions
Did anything happen that really makes you cringe to this day? Go there briefly but long enough to work out what happened, did you say the wrong thing and can that be a learning curve for the future.
And never forget the successes. I always recommend reading through your customer testimonials where you’ll see major accomplishments. Are there any common threads here?
Build a Customer Profile
If you attended our January 2021 event on branding you will remember this process involves answering some important questions that cover everything from basic demographics to what influences their buying decisions. Finding out as much as you possibly can about your particular customer. The more you know, the stronger you’ll be.
If you are at startup stage, take some time to go back over why you started your business. Who you felt it would appeal to and why. This should lead you back nicely to a particular individual who will be your ideal customer profile.
Remember Your Hard Work
If your goal is to target those specific customers in order to continue improving your business, you need to always keep the information you gathered at the top of mind. It should influence every move and decision you make.
Simply saying you want to target those people isn’t enough—the act of defining your ideal customer won’t bring them to you. You need to take that information, put it into play, and get to work!
Final Thoughts
I know identifying your ideal customer can seem like an overwhelming and daunting task. However, it’s an important step in growing and improving your business, but the steps above will hopefully simplify it for you. Follow along and you’re well on your way to not only reaching new customers—but the right ones!