As a business owner, you’re looking for ways to increase your profit margin. And while selling your product or service to anyone who will buy it might seem like a good idea, you may be selling yourself short.
To get the best return on your marketing investment, you need to channel your marketing efforts toward your ideal customer. Doing this successfully will help you get more leads and turn those leads into sales because you’ll be reaching the right consumers — people who are looking for a product or service just like yours.
What Is an Ideal Customer?
Think of your ideal customer as your dream customer. This is the type of person you want to market and sell to. If you own a construction company, you want to market to people who need to have a building built. You’d be wasting your time marketing to people who recently finished a project or who are years away from needing new construction.
You may have even had poor customer interactions in the past, dealing with consumers who give you more trouble than you’d like to experience in your sales process. Marketing to your ideal customer ensures you’re selling to people who you actually look forward to working with, because you’ve aligned your marketing efforts with their wants, needs, goals, and fears.
5 Steps to Marketing to Your Ideal Customer
The good news is that your ideal customer exists. You just need to determine who they are. And although this is a challenging process for every business, the rewards you will receive at the end are worth the effort upfront.
Here are five steps for discovering your ideal client and marketing to them.
1. Study Your Current Clientele
You already have a client base, and chances are high that your ideal customer exists in there somewhere. Analyze your existing customers to find trends. What percentage are male or female? Are they local or abroad? What ages or income levels are represented?
Use discernment and think about your sales experiences to know which customers you’ve enjoyed working with and which customers have been a headache. Are some demographics slow to make a buying decision? Are others buying your product or service at a faster rate? Answering these questions will help you lay the foundation for figuring out who you’ll love marketing and selling to.
2. Get More Information About Your Customers and Leads
Now that you’ve identified who you love selling to, you need to become the type of company people love buying from. To do this, you need to offer what they want. Selling products and services that people are not asking for is a recipe for falling short of your sales goals, so you need to find out what will make your target audience tick.
The answer is simple — ask them. You can do this in a variety of ways:
- Email newsletters: If you have an email list that receives monthly newsletters from you, use it to your advantage. Ask your subscribers to fill out a survey or answer questions about themselves, their needs, and their desires. Let them know that their answers will help you better serve them.
- Landing page forms: Set up a link to use in your marketing strategy that takes people to a specific landing page on your website. Use this landing page to have a customer fill out a form with some of their information in return for a discount, ebook, or other type of incentive. As a bonus, you can give them the option to join your email newsletter.
- Social media interactions: Today’s buyers use social media to learn more about companies and feel connected to them. Part of a successful social media marketing campaign includes interacting with your followers, so consider asking direct questions about their needs and wants on your social media posts.
You may be surprised at what you learn about the people who are interested in your products and services. This information will help you shape your approach going forward.
3. Make a List of Your Ideal Customer’s Goals and Fears
Reaching your ideal customer has two aspects — tapping into their goals as well as their fears.
Every potential buyer has goals, from the local band buying custom shirts to sell at shows to the medical corporation building a new hospital. The local rock band wants shirts with vibrant colors and quality materials at a price that fits their budget. The medical corporation may want a healthcare facility that contains all the modern amenities needed in a hospital. If either of these were your ideal customer, you should portray yourself as the solution that will help them reach those goals.
But both of these buyer examples will also have fears, and you can tap into those, too. The local band may fear that they lack the right merchandise to set themselves apart from other bands. The medical corporation may worry that they’ll be unable to find a reputable contractor to build the new hospital in a timely manner. Set yourself up as the answer to these fears, giving them more peace of mind.
Being the solution to both goals and fears is an essential part of marketing to your ideal customer. But you need to know what these goals and fears are. Using the information-gathering techniques listed above, you can discover this information and use it to inform what type of solutions will attract your ideal customer.
4. Create Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is essentially a fictional character that you market to, but this character captures all the major aspects of your ideal customers that actually exist. It’s as if you boiled down all the information you’ve gathered so far and used this knowledge to make someone who feels real, like someone you actually know who needs the help of your business.
You can check out our blog on the value and process of building buyer personas for more in-depth information. Having a buyer persona (or two or three) to market toward will open up the floodgates for you to reach your ideal customer.
5. Start Marketing
If you’ve followed the above steps, then you’ve made great progress on marketing to your ideal customer. It’s going to take some trial and error, and that’s okay. Over time, you’ll streamline the process and get closer toward finding those high-value leads you’re looking for.
So use the information you’ve gathered as the center of a refreshed marketing campaign. You’ll enjoy attracting the right customers, and as more of your target audience learns about you, you may even see your business’s profits grow to new heights.
Choose The Coutts Agency to Help You Market to Your Ideal Customer
Here at The Coutts Agency, we know that finding your ideal customer and marketing to them can be a highly involved process. You only have so much time each day, and the amount you have to focus on marketing may be minimal or nonexistent. That’s where we come in.
We’re ready to help you find your ideal customer and take your marketing efforts to the next level.