How to identify your ideal customer.

“Focus on the people you want to attract to your business and they will come” - Christine Joy

Hey. Matt here. So, we’ve recently covered customer service. We’ve also explored coming up with business ideas that have the potential to succeed. However, all of your efforts may result in nothing unless you’re able to target the right person to sell to: your ideal customer.

You might have done the right research, picked the right industry or niche, and even talked to the right people. But is what you’re doing reaching the person that’ll value what you have to offer?

That’s what we’re going to cover today. Feel free to take notes. Let’s dive in.

So, your ideal customer.

This is the person who cares for your offer, whether it’s a service or a product. Your offer solves their pain points, excels where others were lacking, and fulfills their requirements.

"Well, Matt, there are so many people who could potentially be my ideal customer."

?So, how do you figure out who’s the right person to focus on?

Well, you can do two things:

1. If you currently have customers, study them and identify those you think are the best. Then, focus on targeting similar people in future marketing and outreach campaigns.
2. If you don’t have much to go off of, start from scratch, do market research, and go from there.

So, if you’ve got enough customers already, simply study them.

How? Look for specific traits and behaviors. Analyze the data.

Your ideal customer values your offer, at your price point.

Out of everyone in your CRM system, they’re the ones that need the least convincing. If you’ve got higher prices compared to your competitors, you might send out promotions and discounts to convince people to convert. However, your ideal customer doesn’t need convincing.

They’ll buy from you, regardless of if you’ve recently revised your prices upwards or if your competitors have a sale going on. You won’t need to give them constant reminders or send abandoned cart emails to get them to come back. So, they’re not just repeat buyers, but they buy at your price point.

They’ll also act as unofficial brand ambassadors.

Maybe they’ll talk about you amongst their friends and family. They might send you emails about how they liked your product. They might even show up on social media, with an appreciation post or a supporting comment on your content.

They’ll also engage with you.

You probably send out email sequences. They’ll be amongst the people who reply, take part in quizzes, fill in forms, and express their appreciation.

Those are the people you want.

Analyze who they are and target similar people. Repeat this process and over time, as you refine your process, you’ll be able to find and target more people that are more likely to connect with you and genuinely appreciate what you’ve got to offer.

However, if you’re not at a point where you can effectively do that yet…

There’s another thing you can do: Start from scratch. There are 3 steps to this:

1. Start with an internal reflection of your company. Figuring out your USP, why someone would buy etc.
2. Then, look at who could POTENTIALLY be your audience.
3. Put everything together to have a profile of your ideal customer.

So, what do I mean by an internal reflection?

Study your USP. Your unique selling point. Why would someone buy from you? What differentiates you from the rest of the competition? This is what sets you apart from the rest of the market.?

Also, what are you currently doing? How have past customer interactions been? What are your sales goals? Knowing this will help you better figure out who you should focus on targeting.

Then, there’s customer research.

After figuring out everything about what you’ve got to offer, now you’ve got to understand your potential customer. That way, when you get around to crafting your offer, your marketing campaigns, your ads or even writing your website copy…

You know how to appeal to whom, what language to use, and what pain points to target.

Find out who your competitors are targeting. How are they doing it? What specific demographics, age groups, and types of people do their products appeal to? These are the people that could potentially be your customers.

What do they do? What are their goals, pain points, problems, and needs? Why do they buy from your competitors? The more questions you ask, the more focused your final profile becomes.

Done? Now put everything together.

As you do your research and put things side by side, you’ll be able to figure out if you need to change who you’re focusing on, or if you need to tweak your offer to target the pain points that keep your customers up at night.

This is important because you’re going to do everything according to this. Whether it’s your email outreach campaigns or your content planning, your positioning, or how you promote your offers, you need to be sure you’ve got your offer and targeting right.

However, you don’t have to stop here.

Market and user research is simply where you get started. Is this enough to be successful? Yes. Can you do more than this? Definitely.

You can always further refine your targeting and who you’re trying to attract. Your ICP simply guides you, but it’s not set in stone. Maybe asking more questions during research meant that you uncovered behaviors and patterns you didn’t know about before. Maybe you could break your current ICP into two parts, to make it more focused.

You might get new insights from your analytics. It’s possible you tried targeting different pain points in your copy and got varying results. Maybe you tried personalizing the customer experience and got better results than simply having a ‘one-size fits all’ strategy.

And there’s more.

From collecting psychographic data to studying how they browse your website, there are just so many more things you can do to further niche down and target a potentially more optimized group of people.

However, whatever you do, remember to always do these three things:

1. Identify your best customers, or who would be your best customer.
2. Learn more about them. Demographics, behaviors, pain points, etc.
3. Build a profile.

That way, whatever data you collect, whatever angles you choose to target in your copy, or whatever multi-channel outreach strategies you implement, there’s going to be a good chance that you'll get to the person that'll value what you have to offer.

That’s it from me today.

If there’s any way I can help, or if you’ve got any questions, feel free to let me know and we’ll see what we can work out.

Until next time, keep building,