Defining ideal customers to target your marketing

Easily the most important first step in establishing any type of business is to define your customers so that you have the information you need to attract the right audience. Understanding your customers and what makes them tick is the key to any successful business.

One of the most practical ways of defining your customers is by building customer profiles that represent the typical types of ideal customers. As a result, you'll be able to hone in on a more specific target audience, communicate with your audience in a more relevant and personalized manner, and ultimately, generate more revenue.

Every business caters to a specific demographic, and while some audiences might be extremely broad, it is still essential from a marketing perspective that you know your customers and how to reach out to them. You'll need to understand your own product or service, seek out feedback, learn about your customers' habits and interests and maintain a consistent and targeted marketing campaign.

Know Your Brand

Whether you're a solopreneur or you're planning to start a small business with multiple employees or partners, you'll need to define your mission and come to fully understand your products and services. You simply cannot hope to accurately profile your customers if you do not have the utmost familiarity with what you are trying to sell to them. You'll need to pay attention to every detail before putting yourself in the shoes of your customers. When you know your brand, and it has a clearly defined mission, you'll be ready to start profiling your customers and tweaking your approach to marketing as necessary.

Seek Feedback

Seeking feedback is a critical ongoing process, but you should also start by doing plenty of research before you can even hope to get your marketing strategy off the ground. Your business will inevitably need to adapt over time to the needs and desires of its customers, not least because the customer has far more control these days than ever before by way of things like social media and online reviews.

Seek out feedback from your customers at every opportunity, but make sure that you don't end up being intrusive and don't bombard people with too much information or too many questions. There are some effective ways of encouraging your customers to leave feedback, such as offering incentives like promotional codes and other discounts for completing a short survey or answering a few questions about their own preferences and habits.

Feedback doesn't always need to come from customers directly. You can gain invaluable insights, albeit not quite as accurate, by reviewing reports on your industry.

Create Your Customer Personas

Create a profile of your perfect customer. If your business has a particularly broad reach, then you'll want to segment your target audience and create personas for each customer category. Map out the behaviors and interests of your customers based on important factors such as demographics, buying habits, geographical location and more. You can even name these imaginary customers if you like, since this may help you to imagine them in a more practical light.

When defining your customer profiles, be sure to seek answers to the following questions:

Every day, millions of people turn to Google to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems or simply something to entertain them. What sort of queries does your business offer solutions for? By knowing your customers' problems, curiosities, and interests, you'll be able to tailor your content, your marketing strategy, and your product itself to better suit your customers wants and needs.

Avoid basing your customer personas on a real customer, since no single individual can completely represent your target audience. Instead, a customer persona should be reasonably broad and it should characterize your perfect customer.

Conclusion

With your customer profiles in place, you'll be able to match each area of your marketing strategy to the individual characteristics of your customers. By targeting smaller and more specific audiences, you should be able to increase the percentage of paying customers and valuable leads instead of wasting time and money on targeting the wrong people. Ultimately, don't forget that it's not about getting more prospects, it's about getting more people that go on to become paying customers.