Last weekend I went to the mall to do my monthly shopping for my house. One of the retail stores had a man at the door wearing a clown costume, a bell in hand, clowning and calling out to passersby to get their attention, and possibly get a few to walk into the store and maybe purchase an item. This got me thinking about how important it is knowing your ideal customers
Most businesses advertise a general sales message with the hopes that a customer will take notice and purchase their product. It’s not an effective approach, yet businesses do it all the time. You need to identify who in the market place needs the product the most, who will your product help quickly and effectively solve a problem.
Who is an ideal customer?
There’s a few things to look out for as you work towards identifying your ideal customers. Your ideal customer will:
- Value your product/ service.
- Help you make a profit.
- Refer you to other potential customers.
Start with the smallest market possible and identify a reliable group of very focused potential customers that have the highest degree of success with your product or service. You will gain credibility faster and be able to expand your customer base. How do you do this?
Ideal customer qualities
- Ready
- Fact: do they have a problem that needs solving?
- Awareness: are they aware of the problem?
- Motivation: do they want /need to solve the problem urgently?
- Willing
- Timing: are they looking to solve the problem? Today? When?
- Searching; are they currently looking for solutions?
- Able
- Money: do they have the money or a budget to solve the problem?
- Authority: do they have the approval or authority to solve the problem?
You will need to make customer profiles or personas to identify these customers. Here’s the information they contain.
Customer personas.
- Ideal industry: that your best potential customer is in.
- Ideal title experience: that your potential ideal customer has.
- Buying cycle: are they willing and able to buy the product when you need them to?
- Ideal location: is your product or solution geographically aligned to where your best customer is located?
To build effective customer personas easily you need to build them around you best current customers. This is because if you have customers that greatly value and appreciate your product, you will need to clone them. If this information is unknown to you, consult with your marketing team and they should be able to provide you with this type of profiles. If you are a small business or a startup and there’s no marketing department yet, you can do the research yourself or hire a market research company to cover this for you.
Remember the main aim is to identify and start with a small group of clients with whom you can connect with and then you can expand from there.
