Grow Your Business with an Ideal Customer Profile
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him or her and sells itself.
— Peter Drucker
What is an ideal customer profile and why do you need to have one? One of the first and most important things you need to know is that you can’t be everything to everyone. You simply will not be able to market to everyone — nor should you want to. Understanding your ideal customer is critical if you want to grow your business in a truly substantial, sustainable way.
An ideal customer profile is exactly that— the type of person who needs and buys your product or service. According to Hubspot, you need to identify attributes of the customers you already have gained, then you can find attributes that’ll help you attract the customers you’d like to have in the future.
Some researchers have found that companies with a solid ideal customer profile experience higher conversion rates and a better lifetime value for their customers. But hat happens if you don’t have an ideal customer profile? Well, possibly nothing. But that’s not what you want for your business!
Targeting Marketing to Your Target Audience
Without knowing who you’re going after, you risk wasting valuable marketing dollars. Not knowing your ideal customer means you might be offering bland or even misdirected marketing efforts that may have no effect on your bottom line. Or, even worse, it could have a negative effect if your marketing team is really off target.
Another risk of aiming too broadly is that you’ll only solve a few problems for a few people. When you know what the pain points are for your customer, you’ll be able to solve g many problems for people who are more likely to buy your product or service.
Lower the Cost of Your Market Spend
Targeting your marketing can lower the cost of customer acquisition. When you know exactly who you are going after, you can spend less money and have a higher ROI.
To really grow your business, you need to evaluate whether the time and money you’respending on gaining customers is worth it. By using your market knowledge and targeting your ideal customers, you can spend those marketing dollars more efficiently.
Better Customer Service When You Know Them
When you know your audience well, you not only solve their problems more quickly, you also offer better customer service which is a key ingredient to building, and maintaining a loyal customer base..
When you really understand your customers, you can even anticipate future problems and delight them by offering solutions they didn’t even know they needed.
Some Information to Get Started
Creating an ideal customer profile isn’t super difficult… and it certainly isn’t etched in stone. Your customers can, and will, change as your business evolves. What’smost important is that you recognize these changes.
Most customer profiles have similar information, although you’ll definitely want to customize that profile for your own business.
Make sure to consider:
- Location. Where they live and how that affects your relationship with them. Customers that are several hundred miles away will require a different approach than the folks down the street. Also, customers in a large city may have different needs than rural or suburban customers.
- Demographic. What’s their age and gender? Different age groups respond differently to communication vehicles. Males and females may have different viewpoints, look at different marketing outlets, and may have different outlooks on work and life.
- Academic history. What’s their education level? That will tell you how to frame your offers and how to write the content for your marketing material.
- Barriers. What are their pain points? What problem does your business solve for them?
Other information, such as knowing their goals and values or even their lifestyles and hobbies may make a difference in your understanding of what motivates your customers.
To help get you started looking at who your target audience is, we’ve created an Ideal Customer Worksheet to get your thinking going. However, feel free to add any other attributes that you find are common among your customers.
We’d love to talk to you about how to find out more about your ideal customer, schedule a quick (and free) call with us.
Tomato Fish Is An Indianapolis Consulting Company Focused On Helping Small And Midsize Businesses Make Good Strategic Planning Decisions.