To maximise the success of your marketing you need to understand your customers and the problems they are looking to solve, or the goals they want to achieve.
The fact is the better you know your buyer the more impactful your marketing message will become.
By knowing who your ideal customer is it helps you to:
- Create messages that appeal to your buyer
- Identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities across your client base
- Have greater clarity about the best media to use to target your buyer
- Develop new products and services to meet your buyers’ needs
Building a great marketing message starts with getting a clear picture of who your ideal client is; this means creating a profile of the person you are wanting to attract.
Building a Profile of Your Ideal Client
In your customer profile survey, questions to ask include:
- How old are they?
- Where do they live? (town, city, state)
- How do they find information about products or services such as yours?
- Which other providers do they use for products or services such as yours?
- What media do they consume? (What newspapers do they read? Which websites do they visit?)
- How do customers find out about your business?
- What motivates them to buy from you?
- How do they buy from you? (if you have more than one purchase channel)
Segment your customers
“Segmenting customers is important because it helps you to identify the different needs of particular groups.”
The next step is to divide your customers into groups (or segments) that have similar needs. There are different ways of segmenting your customers.
You could segment based on things such as:
Demographics – age, income or family make up.
Geographic’s – city, state, country or regional or urban areas.
Psychographics – Travellers, animal lovers, foodies, fitness fanatics
Buying habits – what products or services they buy and what channels they purchase through.
Experience – Are they new to the concept i.e. start-up or a seasoned pro.
If your customers are other businesses, then you can use Firmographics to segment them. This involves sorting by company size, by the nature of their decision-making process or how often they buy from you.
Segmenting customers is important because it helps you to identify the different needs of the various groups you serve.
For example, let’s say you have two very distinct age segments such as the 25–40 bracket and people aged 50+. You may find that each age group reads very different publications or has very different needs when it comes to purchase channels; therefore you will need very different MESSAGING to target each group.
If your customer base isn’t large enough to segment, it is still important to profile your customers to understand their needs and motivations.
By profiling your customers, you can direct your marketing budget into strategies you know are going to effectively reach your target market and create a message you know will resonate with them.
Why people don’t build a profile?
The number one reason why some entrepreneurs are relucent to build a client profile is they are worried that it may limit the number of prospects they will attract if they focus their marketing around one buying persona.
The fact is nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that while it may feel counter-productive to zero in your message, this is the key to attracting more of your ideal buyer.
When you keep your messages broad and general in the hope of appealing to a larger group of people, what you actually do is reduce the impact of your message.
The bottom line is the more general a message the less like it is to be seen. When you try and tell everybody about everything, no one hears anything you say. Your message simply becomes invisible.
If you want to penetrate the noise and grab the attention of your ideal buyer, you need to ensure you are building messages that are built just for them. That means creating a clearly defined client avatar.
The clearer your picture of them the easy you will find it to attract them into your world.
Like to connect with some ideal clients?
If you’re looking for the chance to network with hundreds of savvy entrepreneurs and build connections with your ideal clients don’t miss you chance to be part of the 360° Lead Summit in Melbourne on May 4th – Full details HERE.