Having a clear idea of who you’re talking to (ideal customer) – and how to reach them – is the stuff successful marketing campaigns are made of. Jump straight in without doing your research and you could find yourself spending thousands of pounds on activity that never yields results.
To help you avoid this top marketing faux pas, we’ve put together this handy checklist detailing how to identify your ideal customer.
How to identify your ideal customer
From where they shop and what they watch to how they spend their money, getting to know your ideal customer is a deep diving expedition.
Finding out what motivates them, what they value, and how they behave, will all prove valuable in determining whether or not they’re likely to buy into your business. Here’s how you can narrow down who’s likely to become your brand’s biggest fan.
1. Consider your business from a consumers’ perspective
Thinking about the benefits and features of the product or service you’re offering is a great place to start when trying to pin down your ideal customer. Ask yourself what value does your product deliver? What needs does it meet? What problems does it solve? Establishing the answers to these questions (and others) can help you to narrow down who might actually need or want what you’re selling.
2. Drill down to the details
Now you have an idea of the type of person likely to become a consumer of your business it’s time to get to know them more intimately. Doing this will help to establish how you speak to them (your brand voice), your content strategy (what you’ll say to them) and also how you connect with them (your marketing activity).
Think about the age of your ideal customer and what their life might be like. Are they employed, a stay at home parent, or a self-made entrepreneur? Do they have a partner and children? What social media platforms do they engage with? How often do they travel? What do they do in their spare time? What issues concern them?
Getting to understand your customer at this deeper level will really help to inform where you spend your marketing budget to deliver the best return on investment.
3. Take geography into account
Whether your business offers its services locally, nationally, or internationally is also a defining factor when it comes to identifying your ideal customer. A local shop, for instance, will have a vastly different customer profile than a global brand with worldwide stores.
Knowing where your customers are based has a huge bearing on how you engage with them. If your business only provides its services within a defined radius, your ideal customer literally lives on your doorstep. Conversely, if your businesses ships internationally, the world is your oyster!
4. Look for patterns in your current customer base
Our final tip for determining your ideal customer is to study who’s been buying your products or services to date. Existing customers are such an incredible untapped information pool when it comes to building a picture of who’s most likely to love and use your business, so we can’t advocate exploring this avenue enough.
The value in looking at who’s purchased your products or invested in your business thus far is that you’re really getting to the heart of who your customer truly is – not just who you think they are or who they should be.
You might have designed your product or service with a particular user in mind, but maybe you’re proving popular with an entirely different demographic than you anticipated? Any info about who’s already buying into your business (and who isn’t) is gold dust when it comes to identifying your ideal customer.
Attracting your ideal customer
Once you’ve identified your ideal customer the next step is making sure your business branding resonates with them. As a professional branding agency this happens to be our forte, so if your brand could do with a magic touch, give us a shout.
