Ideal customer definition
A company’s ideal customer is also known as a persona.
This is a fictitious person with the greatest potential to be interested in the services and products offered by the company. This ideal customer is defined on the basis of social and psychological attributes and characteristics.
It’s essential to define your ideal customer, because without it you could be communicating with people who have absolutely no desire to buy your products or services.
Imagine an AIRBUS salesman trying to sell a plane to a housewife… Even with the best salesman in the world, it’s impossible! It’s the same thing that happens on a smaller scale in every company. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of not defining their ideal customer, wasting both time and money.
Who is my ideal customer?
Building on existing customers
Your company doesn’t target everyone as a customer. A customer is a person or another company who has already done business with you, for example, by buying your products or using your services. Let’s say you run an IT consulting business, in which case your customers would be the companies that have previously sought your services to improve their IT infrastructure.
Identifying your customers is fundamental to improving the way you communicate with them. A useful tool for this is customer relationship management software, which enables you to efficiently store and organize information about your previous business partners.
It can be interesting to use the company’s current customers as a basis for finding potential ideal customers. Current customers will express what the product or service did for them, and why they bought it. All this information can help the company to better communicate with your ideal customers.
Create a persona
The easiest way to identify your ideal customer is to create a persona. To give shape to this fictitious person, you’ll need to put yourself in their shoes and understand their needs, questions, desires and so on.
For example, you’ll find the following elements:
- Age
- The sex
- Location
- Occupation
- Income group
- Marital and family status
- Personality
- The features
- Habits
- Likes
- Dislikes
- Lifestyle
This information will give you an idea of how to present your content, the marketing tone that resonates with specific age groups, and the products or services that appeal to your ideal customer.
There are a number of sites where you can create personas for visually appealing results, such as: CODEUR
Really understand the needs of your ideal customer
To understand your ideal customer’s needs, you first need to understand their problems. If possible, ask someone directly about the problems related to the needs you’re trying to solve. Don’t impose your solution as the solution to their problems; the aim is for the ideal customer to describe your product as the only real solution to their problem.
What are its objectives?
What is his vision of life?
How can your product or service help them achieve this goal?
You can include this information in the creation of the persona to make it even more complete and accurate.
How and where can I find my ideal customer?
Look to your competitors
Your competitors have usually already done the work of targeting the ideal customer. Understand who your competitors are marketing and communicating for. Also analyze social networks and websites.
You can use a tool like UberSuggest to see the keywords for which your competitor comes up most frequently in Google.
Create content that addresses your ideal customer's problems
You’ve already identified the key issues facing your ideal customers. One way to find prospects is to
For example, if you know your ideal customer is a business school student, you could create an article referencing the best sites for finding internships when you’re a business school student. Once your target is on your site, you can then tell them about your solution. Of course, this content should ideally be thematically linked to your solution.
To maximize the impact of your message, make sure your content is well-written and error-free. A tool such as a spell-checker can help you enhance the credibility and readability of your texts.
With such a strategy, you’ll gain visibility and passively generate new leads.