Identifying Your Ideal Customer

When you run small business money spent on marketing that does not bring an increase in sales or visitors will be viewed as a bad investment. While all marketing will not convert a consumer into a customer there should at a minimum be some tangible evidence of increased interest in your product or service. When there is no increase one of the reasons could be because of bad market targeting.

Bad market targeting is when a business's marketing fails to connect or convert consumers into customers. When businesses develop their marketing strategies and campaigns they do so with a specific customer in mind. What often happens is the campaign overreaches or misses with that audience or the audience does not mesh with the brand the business has established about itself. One of the ways a business can avoid this is by understanding its ideal customer. Building an ideal customer profile will help your business avoid the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. When your business targets itself it puts itself in a more enhanced position to hit its mark. Without that aim, you could hit anyone and it would be termed successful even if that is not who you intended or desired to reach.

Churches have even begun to evaluate who their target market is. When Rick Warren launched Saddleback Church in the early 80s after finishing seminary he developed a fictional character named Saddleback Sam to develop a framework for reaching the people in the Southern California community he had moved to. What Rick Warren understood and entrepreneurs have to move into is a deeper understanding of more than just the product they produce. It is no longer enough to believe you have the best product on the market. You have to know who you are best positioned to reach with that product you have developed. With Rick Warren, Saddleback Sam became the framework for many churchplanters who followed him in launching innovative, targeted churches.

The first step to developing a profile of your ideal customer is to see who you already doing business with. Your connections identify your current. When you look at who is already buying your goods or enlisting your services you will get a good idea of what kind of customer base you are currently reaching. There are times when a company will be surprised that a large percentage of its customer base comes from a specific demographic. But usually, a business knows who it is reaching even before the data is analyzed.

When you look at your current customer base if they are consumers there are some physical characteristics that should be paid attention to. How old are they? What is their employment status? Are they male or female? What is their occupation? What kind of education do they have? All of these questions are central to developing a profile of what your typical customer looks like.

If your clients are commercial businesses, useful information could include what industry they are in or the number of employees they have. Other questions that could be evaluated are the type of business they are in and the revenue level they are at. When you are gathering information about your clients knowing what you are reaching will help you penetrate that market further.

Another aspect of your existing customers to look at is their emotional characteristics. While this is somewhat more difficult than evaluating physical things, understanding the lifestyle patterns of your customers will help you understand the frame of mind of your customers when they make purchases. Something else you may want to look at is the notes your sales staff took while making their prospect calls. Rick Warren took six weeks cold calling, meeting and greeting, and getting to know the community of Southern California. By the time he started the church he had a sound idea of the habits, thoughts, and perceptions of the typical Saddleback family and how best to reach them. All of this information is valuable to you understanding who exactly is purchasing your goods and services.

The goal in marketing is to identify a market that will value your goods or services to the point of you being able to charge a premium for them. This is called the value factor. The question you have to ask yourself is, based on both who you have already reached and who you are targeting, is the market strong enough to help you reach your growth goals? If it is then you have found a viable market. If you have not, then retool your strategy or your goals because as long as the information remains the same your return on your marketing investment will be poor. As Rick Warren was preparing to graduate from seminary, he began the process of gathering information on areas in which to plant a church. While at first looking internationally and then scaling it down to the fastest growing areas in the U.S., Rick Warren was able to look critically at the information to see what areas were able to support the kind of church he envisioned leading. Today Saddleback Church is one of the largest churches in the nation and alot of that growth is based on the work Rick Warren did in the beginning, understanding the community he was preparing to penetrate and the people of it.

When you are faced with a target market decision it is important to think narrow. Choose to serve one will-defined market rather than a multitude of people groups. By doing so, you enable your company to develop goods and services tailored to that particular market. To get a handle on this, visit your local bookstore and locate a magazine that your ideal customer would read. Evaluate the different aspects from copy to story types to discover effective tools for you to apply to your business.

Identifying your ideal client is the fundamental step to successful marketing in small business. Developing that profile will help you uncover who you are currently reaching and position yourself to reach the audience you intend to connect with, When you combine the characteristics of physical description with a real understanding of what the customer wants, based on what their problem is and who they will make their purchases, communicating the best way to them you have profiled your ideal customer. And that will keep your business growing.