Knowing your ideal customer’s goals and priorities help you paint a picture of what life could be like after using your products and services. Think of it as selling the dream. When your products or services help your ideal customer reach their goals, also known as product/market fit, it becomes much easier to write copy for your blog. . It fortifies your marketing efforts by making your “bait” even tastier for your key audience. It diminishes the likelihood that you’ll inadvertently mimic your competition. You’re going to find your own customer and your own voice! THE TWO “BUCKETS” OF IDEAL CUSTOMER ANALYSIS.
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At Home Improvement Leads, we are committed to helping both homeowners and building professionals find ways to connect, interact, and develop positive relationships. We’ve come up with a few ways to help people find ideal customer profiles. In our case we’re assisting contractors, but these guidelines could help anyone find their ideal.
May 27, 2015
While it’s true that defining your ideal customer can feel like you are excluding other audiences who might buy from you, focusing on the right people brings clarity to your marketing efforts which ultimately leads to a more profitable business.
New York Times best-selling author Ramit Sethi said it best: “Algorithms change. Tactics change. But the fundamentals of learning what people want, seeing exactly where you can help them, and then telling the right people about it (emphasis mine) are classic strategies that worked 1,000 years ago and will work 1,000 years from now.”
This post is about getting to know the right people who will benefit from and pay for your products and services. What follows is 10 essential questions to ask in the process of defining your ideal customer. Let’s get started.
1. Where do your ideal customers hang out?
Name the digital and physical spaces where your ideal customer hangs out. The more specific, the better.
“Hangs out on Facebook” is too general.
“Hangs out in the Wine Lovers of Atlanta Facebook group” is more precise and actionable.
“Likes the outdoors” is too general to mean anything insightful.
“Likes going to the park every Saturday morning with their kids” shows habits and values.
“Reads blogs” isn’t targeted enough.
“Obsessively reads Lifehacker, Techcrunch, and Reddit” is revealing. Knowing where your ideal customers hang out influences:
How To Find Your Ideal Customer On Instagram
- Where you advertise (certain Facebook groups, niche forums, physical locations)
- Places to listen and learn about customers
- The best blogs for writing guest posts
2. Where do your customers get their information?
In an ideal world with unlimited resources, your company would have helpful and relevant content on every single channel. But since you’re not Coca-Cola, you have to be strategic about targeting where your ideal customers go to get information.
When your customer is in research mode, where do they go? Google? Certain blogs? Books? Magazines? Twitter?
Write your findings as a simple sentence: “When Maggie is curious about a topic, the first place she goes is Google search on her iPhone.”
3. What are your customers challenges and frustrations?
Empathy is the biggest benefit to defining your ideal customer’s challenges and frustrations. By knowing what it’s like walking in your customer’s shoes, you’ll be able to create great products and services that address their specific pain points and problems.
Here are a few examples to jog your creativity:
“I wish someone would just edit this video for me.”
“I need to lose ten pounds before spring break.”
“Ugh. I wish I could schedule my tweets.”
Your ideal customer’s challenges and frustrations impact a number of things:
- Services you offer: The service you are offering has to cure a large enough pain point that your ideal customer will pay you to do it for them instead of doing it themselves.
- Products you make: Similar to the service you offer, the products you make must solve your ideal customer’s challenges or frustrations to be worth buying.
- Emotions you speak to: There are a number of emotions behind the challenges and frustrations your ideal customer is experiencing - sadness, anger, fear, hope, a desire for something better. By speaking to what your customer is feeling, you’ll be able to connect with them emotionally on more than just a rational level.
- Customer stories you tell: The logic here is simple. When your ideal customers see an existing customer who solved their challenges and frustrations with your product/service, then they are more likely to buy your product/service.
4. What are your customers goals and priorities right now?
Knowing your ideal customer’s goals and priorities help you paint a picture of what life could be like after using your products and services. Think of it as selling the dream.
When your products or services help your ideal customer reach their goals, also known as product/market fit, it becomes much easier to write copy for your blog, website, and other touchpoints in the customer journey.
Here are a few examples of copy written to speak to customer goals:
5. What brands do your customers like?̋
Make a list of the brands your ideal customer likes, both in general and within your space. At a higher level, it’s like the Mac versus PC commercials. Both brands have their own look and feel and draw different types of people. Is your ideal customer more Nordstrom or Ross? Target or Walmart?
For brands within your space, knowing what companies your ideal customer likes could spark ideas for future partnerships to pursue. Or give you inspiration on how to better connect with your audience.
6. What is your customers preferred form of communication?
Do they tweet? Text? Chat? Email? Or prefer physical mail? This is a matter of where your audience wants you to communicate with them. For example, a number of brands use Snapchat to communicate with teenagers. Why? Because teenagers aren’t spending their screen time checking Facebook. The core principle is to communicate with your customers where they already are.
7. What phrases and exact language do your customers use?
Robert Collier has this genius quote: “Always enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind.”
There is already language in your customer’s mind for their problems, needs, and desires. Your job is to listen and write it down.
When you are researching the places where your ideal customer hangs out, document the exact phrases they say and store them in a spreadsheet to spark ideas for website copy, blog posts, and landing pages. Or send a survey using SurveyMonkey to ask open ended-questions and document your audience’s word-for-word responses.
People are naturally attracted to other people who speak their language, get their sense of humor or have the same point of view. It provides a feeling of belonging and connection that can create loyalty towards your brand. Your goal is for customers to say to themselves “Whoa it’s like they’re talking to me” every time they read your writing.
8. What is your preferred customer’s budget?
Pricing is tricky. Price too low and people will undervalue you, but price too high and no one will buy. For example, if a house in San Francisco cost $100, everyone would know it’s a scam. Whereas if a cup of tea cost $100, it’d be ludicrous.
The sweet spot is to charge the maximum amount your ideal customer is ready, willing and able to pay.
9. What does a day in your ideal customer’s life look like?
7:55am - George wakes up to the sound of smooooth jazz
8:15am - Brews the new Costa Rican roast using his shiny new Keurig
8:43am - Stuck in traffic on the 101 listening to smooooooth jazz again
9:15am - Gets into the office
9:18am - Checks email, like everyone else
10:01am - Starts prepping his company email newsletter
12:05pm - Eats the Italian combo at Subway
1:08pm - Afternoon lull, wishing his office had a nap pod
2:35pm - Sends newsletter
2:38pm - Brainstorms how to generate more leads to meet quarterly growth goals
4:00pm - Interviews a customer for market research
6:15pm - Drives home ready for a Breaking Bad marathon on Netflix
Imagining what your ideal customer’s daily life looks like adds a personal, human element to your marketing. It also gets practical - when is the best time to email them? When are they most likely to respond to your communications? When are they most attentive?
10. What makes your perfect customers happy?
The customer journey is more than robotic transactions and the exchange of money for goods and services. As emotional beings, people want to interact with brands that makes them feel good about themselves.
Where are the places in your ideal customer’s journey you can insert surprises, do the unexpected, and bring a smile to their face? Maybe it’s a handwritten thank you note after signing up for your service, a personalized email sent on their birthday, or free shipping for all deliveries (who doesn’t love free shipping?).
Inserting happiness into specific customer touchpoints can create a deeper level of emotional connection that grows loyal and raving fans for the long-term. Or as Marty Neumeier would say, improves that “gut feeling” people get when they hear about your product, service, or company.
The end result
After answering all of these questions, write a paragraph summarizing your findings. It could look like this summary of Maggie, the ideal customer for a web design blog focused on female designers:
“Maggie loves spending time learning about wine in her Pinot Noir Lovers Facebook group. It’s a passion of hers. Her biggest frustration in her role as a designer is figuring out how to use Photoshop. When she’s in research mode, the first place she goes to is Google search on her iMac at work. Her long-term dream is to start her own design practice so she can make her own schedule and work with clients she wants to work with, especially non-profits. Last week when she was shopping at Anthropologie browsing her favorite blog on her iPhone, SF Girl By The Bay, an ad popped up with an invitation to check out a course for web design.”
The end result is a better understanding of where and how to reach ideal customers who will gain massive value from what you’re offering and pay for your products and services, happily.
So you’ve defined your ideal customer? Here’s how to personalize their experience with data.
What is a Customer Profile?
The golden rule for any business to reach the zenith of success is to know the interests, likes, dislikes and trends of the customers. A document that contains all such information including the buying patterns, demographic characteristics is called a customer profile, alias Customer Persona or Avatars.
It contains all the facts like demographics, buying behaviours, interaction with customer services, creditworthiness, and purchase history. Many companies develop an umbrella strategy for marketing and sales and thereby end up getting nothing! Customer profiles help you reap the best results through customer data analysis.
It helps businesses to make crucial decisions by tracking customer information, such as trends, demographics, and psychological graphics. It is much easier to attract more customers when you know about your current customers. With competition for customers increasing every day, it is one of the simple ways to have a competitive advantage.
The basic template for a customer persona is shown below.
(Click on the images to have a better view or you could also download the document below.)
To download the template, click here – Aeroleads Customer-Profile Template.
How to profile a customer profile
1) Which problem are you trying to solve?
Before you start hiring people, developing a website or an app or start investing heavily, you must know about which problem are you going to solve? Is there already any solution to it? If yes, then how can your idea add some more value? Looking at the customer profile database, it will be easier for you to focus on the requirements of the customers. You need to deliberate over the behavioural aspects of your customers.
2) Dive deep into the customer journey map
A customer journey map is a type of document that gives a deep insight into the customer needs, goals, challenges and other patterns. It will help you to know the type of products your customers are interacting with. In this way, you can get the most out of the customer profile.
3) Dig into the demographics
First, discuss the external demographics and then talk about the needs and company’s offerings. Some of the external attributes are as follows:
Which market is your product targeting?
What specific vertical does your company operate in?
What is their annual turnover or revenue?
Number of employees working
Location of the companies
All this will help you develop a solid customer profile with more in-depth analysis.
How To Find Your Ideal Customer
4) Collect Customer Feedback
Just like a personal interview helps the HR or the boss to know the candidate better, if you interact with the customer face-to-face, it can be the next towards achieving growth. If you are short of time, then you can surely arrange a call or video call! And if the customers accept your proposal, then they are your loyal customers and worth time investing. It will help you to foster better relations with your customers. This is one of the unique aspects of the customer profile, which many companies miss out!
5) Examine contextual details
Moving to the next important step of building a consumer profile, if you have collected the external details, now is the time to know about the goals. Some of the most crucial questions that must be answered by building a customer profile are:
What unique features are you providing your customers? (Helping them to save time, money or grow their revenue)
Were you able to solve their pain points?
How does your product or service different from your competitors?
Does your product fit into their short and long-term goals?
6) Understand your industry
Before you compete, you must know your competitors. Before you start selling your product and introduce new features, you must know about the shortfalls of the industry, the trends and how consumers perceive it! This will help you in brand identity and help to stand out! This becomes the initial steps of marketing strategies and finally developing a customer profile.
5 Examples of Ideal Customer Profile
Ample company profile templates are available on the web that can help you create a harmonious and a reliable company profile. Just search online, and you will witness fantastic company profiles.
So, let’s glance over the best customer profiles below!
HR managers or small business owners can make their job of creating a company profile easier with these templates.
NOTE:- These are mere examples of a customer profile template; the same can be changed according to your business and can be as creative as you want it to be.
1) Profile with Personal Information –
Let’s kickstart the process by looking over a simple customer profile template.
How To Find Your Ideal Client Photography
Here, as you can see, it contains just the basic and important details. If you like to keep things simple then you could opt for such a customer persona. Also, few customers would not want to spend more time filling out a huge profile, hence it’s another advantage.
Click here to view
2) Profile with Customer’s Interests –
Map out the interests of this customer based on demographics, psychographics, behavioural as well as environment including age, interests, job role, gender, location and more.
With this, you’ll be ready to develop a strategy to consistently reach these customers.
Click here to view
3) Profile with Abilities –
It’s common for companies to feel that everyone can benefit from their offerings, and while that might be true, it doesn’t mean everyone is a good fit. It’s good to have an Ideal Customer Profile to prioritize where to focus on selling and marketing efforts. The following abilities have to be kept in mind –
- NEED for your product or service?
- TIME to deploy and get the benefit from your offering?
- SUCCESS experience in your solution area?
- BUDGET to deal with the unexpected?
- WINNERS, who get a personal benefit when you win?
Click here to view
4) Profile with Artistry aspect –
Artistry basically means creative or skills.
This specific profile must contain portions asking for customer contact details and some personal details. Along with this, it must ask for events invited to, customer service and products of interest.
5) Buyer Persona with Demographics –
This kind of customer profile is basically the one that has a lot of details. As you’ve seen the ideal customer profile template above, buyer persona consists of questions related to the demographics, psycho-graphics as well as actionable insights.
These profiles come in different shapes and sizes. Some are very elaborate and in-depth, others consist of simply two or three telltale signs of being a great fit for your solution.
Basically, customer profiling provides a much-needed structure to a marketing plan.
Here are some useful customer profile examples which you can consider for upcoming years.
Hence, hopefully, these examples give you an idea to create your company’s customer profile.
After all, at the end of the day, businesses are there to make money and having happy customers makes money. Hence, you should be making your decisions based on your customer profiles and how it benefits them.
Navaneetha, popularly known as “nav”, loves to read, play badminton, play the keyboard and sing but when she’s not doing any of those, she loves to write. What started as a high school hobby to write is now her ongoing passion. At AeroLeads, she manages Inbound Marketing and Social Media Marketing.