Use This Analysis to Attract Your ‘Ideal Customers’

How would you describe your “ideal customers” — people who are willing and able to buy what your business sells at the prices and frequency you want to sell it?

Would you mention their age? Gender? Socioeconomic status? Perhaps where they live or work?

Demographics are important, don’t get me wrong, but often times I see businesspeople, marketers, advertisers, et cetera start and stop with a demographic analysis of their target customers. In fact, when I started my digital marketing consultancy, I made the same mistake.

Nowadays, I understand that high-level marketing — marketing that consistently attracts “ideal customers” — is about so much more than demographics. It’s also about psychographics and behaviors.

Psychographics are people’s beliefs, attitudes, interests, passions, hopes, aspirations, problems, challenges, concerns and motivations related (directly and indirectly) to your products, services and industry. Once you’ve done a thorough psychographic analysis of your ideal customers, you can determine the themes that will resonate with them.

For example, American Express determined that their small business customers are primarily interested in and concerned about four main themes: Planning for Growth, Managing Money, Getting Customers and Building Your Team. Therefore, the company created this blog to share content that hones in on their customers’ psychographics.

Notice how none of these themes have to do with credit cards, lines of credit, et cetera? Because these products and services are simply a means to their customers’ end (like my products and services, and yours).

By focusing on the “end” — Planning for Growth, Managing Money, Getting Customers and Building Your Team — American Express is able to cultivate an image in the minds of their customers, which creates the perception that the company is a trusted partner in their customers’ lives.

The second type of analysis that often gets ignored or overlooked is behavior — digital behavior — since the average adult spends more than five hours on the Internet each day. Therefore, it’s important to be active on the online mediums and platforms your ideal customers frequently use. (Newsflash!)

Being active, however, isn’t nearly enough. Instead, the most successful businesses understand:

1. How their ideal customers consume content on the Internet, and
2. How these people prefer to engage and interact with such content

Do your ideal customers prefer to read content? Watch videos? Browse photos? Listen to podcasts?

How do they browse the Internet? On a computer? Phone? Tablet? Which types of content do they prefer to consume on a computer versus a phone or tablet?

The businesses that contemplate the psychographics and behaviors of their “ideal customers,” and implement a digital marketing strategy that hones in on these analyses, are the ones that tend to attract “ideal customers” — people who are willing and able to buy what your business sells at the prices and frequency you want to sell it.

About the Author

Josh Hoffman inspires, motivates and helps forward-thinking people fulfill their inherent potential through personal branding, digital marketing and freelancing.

Get his 90-second case study about how he generated 82 leads per month for a client.