The most significant barrier we see to good quality marketing is that businesses don’t know who their ideal customers are or understand what they want. Identifying your ideal customer helps to support your business goals and objectives better. Your marketing is more targeted, the budget is more focused, and results are more positive. We recommend that you start by creating customer profiles for all the groups of customers that you could serve with your products or services.
Creating customer profiles
- Group your customers and define them
When building customer profiles, consider your target market’s demographics, such as their age, gender, income level, and location. If you operate in a Business-to-Business market, you will need to think about the company size, industry, job title and responsibilities. It’s unusual for a business only to serve one group of people, so you should group potential customers based on characteristics like age or gender if it’s a Business to Consumer business or company size or industry if you’re dealing with Business to Business. The rule we follow is to split them into separate customer groups if their motivations differ enough that your messaging to engage them has to change, or you have to use a different channel to reach them.
- Analyse your customers’ motivations
But don’t stop there; it’s essential to analyse what motivates your customers in detail to create powerful messaging. What do they want to happen due to using your product or service? What problem are you solving? Has something happened to make them look for a solution? What are their concerns and objections to buying? What will help them to trust you? The answers to these questions will help you write engaging messaging across all marketing channels and help sales pages write themselves.
- Prioritise your potential customers
Now comes the critical step – identifying which customers are your IDEAL customers. To do this, take these groups and prioritise them according to the opportunity they present to support your business goals. This could be based on the following:
- Who can you sell the most extensive range of products and services to?
- Who do you understand the best? Suppose you found a customer group you really understood the motivations of in the previous step. In that case, it will make it easier to engage with them in your marketing materials and convince them that you can serve them.
- Who do you have most experience serving so already have great case studies and the know-how to serve efficiently?
- Who do you have the easiest access to via an existing network/connections, cheaper advertising options, your existing CRM/email database or similar?
- Who do you prefer working with? A profile can include elements like their attitude and communication style as well as their age or industry
- Where do you see an opportunity to serve? Is there is an industry or demographic that your competitors haven’t conquered?
- Who has the simplest or quickest onboarding processes? For example, larger companies may have bigger budgets, but they usually take longer to make a decision, involve more people in the process and will ask for more quotes.
We find that it’s only once you’ve been able to define the groups you COULD do business with that you can drill down to who you SHOULD spend your time and money trying to attract.
Prioritising also means you can design a marketing plan with activities that will attract your priority customer group at the top of the plan, and the other groups will follow.
Marketing that makes a difference
Now that you understand how to identify your ideal customers, it’s time to take action. We have some other posts on understanding your audience here. If you want help implementing these steps and building engaging messaging and a marketing plan, you could join our Customer Attraction Roadmap. Learn more by visiting this page or getting in contact.
MD & Head of Digital Marketing
Jessica has worked in digital marketing for over 10 years and has watched it evolve from an experimental marketing option to an essential tool for most businesses. She is driven to help businesses achieve their objectives using the best digital marketing resources available and recognises that each business is different. Jessica devours the latest news about digital marketing and is constantly learning in order to stay ahead of the trends for clients.
