Defining your ideal customer

Defining your ideal customer means clarifying the people who are, or are likely to be, hungry for your particular product or service. Your ideal customers will be people who have a problem that they are searching for an answer to. They will be people who are most likely to spend money on your product or service to fulfil a need or desire they have. Your ideal target customer could have certain demographic, psychographic, occupational or geographic characteristics.

Why is this important?

Knowing who it is you are targeting will greatly influence how you go about communicating your product or service to them. Ideally, if you can find a hungry crowd for your particular niche product or service and can understand very clearly what their particular needs and problems are, you can tailor your marketing messages to fulfil those needs and solve those problems. This will mean your marketing can be targeted. Ideally, for the greatest chance of success, your business will initially have been created to fill a need or solve the problems of a particular customer group.

Your challenge

Your challenge will be in how you go about finding your ideal customer. If you are an existing and established business you will have details of your existing customers and knowledge of what and how much they have bought from you over time. There may be certain patterns; things that your existing customer groups have in common that you could learn from. Your challenge will be in taking the time to analyze the data that you have right on your own doorstep. You can also learn from the customers that you don’t have yet, the ones that you think might be ideal for your business. These are the people who you need to find out about, what their problems are, what they want and what they are willing to spend money on. This will involve some targeted research.

What makes a customer ideal?

• -They want what you are selling.
• -They are willing and able to pay for it.
• -There are a lot of them.
• -You know how to get access to them.
• -You like working with them.
• -You find them easy to sell your product or service to. & They are most likely to keep on buying from you.

IDEAL CUSTOMER - SPECIAL RESPONSE CHECKLIST

To establish your ideal customer, you will need to ask yourself some questions.

-Describe the kind of person who could be most hungry for your product or service. " Who have your best customers been in the past?

-What have your best customers had in common?

-What kinds of people/organizations do you really like working with?

-What kind of problems and needs do they have?

-Where ideally are these companies/people located?

How to use this information

First of all, you need to test your ideal customer description by asking some questions and doing some research. Once you are sure that this customer fulfils all of your criteria then you will need to design both your marketing message and your marketing materials to influence this customer positively.

“Think ideal customer and do business with the best”