The benefits of getting to know your ideal customer

When it comes to marketing your business, it can be easy to leap in to writing copy for your website, creating beautiful social posts and designing your brand. However, it’s important to take a step back and really understand WHO you are targeting and creating all that lovely content for.

When you know exactly who your ideal client is it will not only make it a lot easier to do all that stuff, but it will also make your marketing efforts more effective, because not only will you be talking the right language, about the right things but you’ll also be talking about them in the right place.

You will already have a rough idea of who you’re targeting but by adding more details it can really bring that customer to life for you and help you to better understand where to focus your marketing efforts and provide clarity around your messaging.

Getting started with your customer profile…

The basics

If you think about your customer profile as a fab cake with loads of layers. The first layer would be the basic demographics this is things like age range, if they are part of a specific gender group, what level of education they may have, what religious beliefs they may have and where they are located.

With each layer on top of that further narrowing down who that person is by looking at their spending habits, how they make spending decisions, what do they do for a living, if they have kids and if so, how many, where do they get their news from? what other brands do they love?

Giving your persona a personality

Once you have the basics covered you are then going to want to think about the psychographic side of things to so think about what their personality is like, their core values and what their interests are. Some people find it easier to do this part if they give their ideal customer a name.

How you can help them

Then it’s time to think about how you and your business help them. Think about what pain points your customers have and how you can solve them. This not only gives you a steer in terms of your key messages and content creation but it also helps you to think of new products and services that you could launch in the future.

** if you have a lot of services / products you may need to create more than one profile**

If you’re selling B2B you’ll need to create a profile with the company and the key buyer for your services whether that is the founder or a head of department. Company wise you’ll need to think amount of employees, turnover, values, spend etc then also build a personality around the key buyer to.  

How it can improve your marketing strategy

Helps you develop targeted messaging: knowing your ideal customer well helps you to understand what language, tone, and imagery will align with their preferences and values. You’ll also be able to easily highlight the benefits and solutions your products or services offer to address their pain points.

Choose the best channels for you: as a small business person / one human band time is limited so you want to make sure you are sharing your content in the right places. Your ideal customer profile will help you to pinpoint the platforms and media your ideal customers are likely to use.

Customer journey: knowing your customer inside out helps you to create a customer journey that helps them finds the products / services / content they want easily and a streamlined, easy transaction will likely keep them coming back for more.

Build stronger relationships: your ideal customer profile will enable you to tailor your products, services and customer experience to their pain points and provide the solutions that they are looking for. It will also help you to tailor your comms and content to ensure that they feel valued as a customer.  Plus people are more likely to spend and recommend brands that have similar values to them.

Helps you to create content: when you know your customer really well you’ll spend less time looking at a blank screen trying to think of what to create, because you’ll know what they’ll want to see from you. It will also help you to set your strategy and choose your content pillars.

Keep it fresh

You’ll need to revisit your ideal customer profile(s) on a regular basis as your business evolves as your audience could change or you may need to add another customer profile for any new products and services that you add as your business grows.

Need some support with creating your ideal customer profiles and implementing them into your marketing strategy? Why not book in for a power hour where I can help you with not creating them but using it to improve customer engagement and generate better results.