To create an effective marketing strategy for your business, you must first identify your ideal customer profile. Whether you are supplying product or services as a B2B or B2C, it is still hugely important to identify and target your ideal customer market. If you feel that your customer profile is lacking clarity, then we have put together 5 steps to profile and identify your ideal customer and bring it back on track.
Identify your Customer Persona
When trying to understand who your primary customer is, you must gain as much insight as you can into their persona. Get to know your customer’s basic demographics such as gender, age, occupation or business type. What is their income or financial situation? Delve into their interests, do they have a keen interest in health, environment, fitness, food etc.? What are your potential customers likes and dislikes?
All these areas will give you incredible insight into building a clear image for your perfect customer. Once you have this image then verify your assumptions with research, questionnaires etc.
Define your Product / Service
Review the needs and benefits that will make your customers purchase a comparable product or service to yours. Customers look for a product or service because it is of benefit to them. Create a clear definition of what your product or service is and how your customer can benefit from it? How are you going to solve their problems? Why do they need you? What emotions may influence their decision to buy from you?
Identify your Customers Location
You will start to be getting a clear idea of your primary customer. Next, discover the places that attract your customer, both physically and digitally. Where are they geographically? What do they read (online and offline)? What engages them? What captures their attention?
Understand the customer buying strategy
How does your customer buy your product or enquire about your services? Have they bought from you before? What attracts or encourages your customer to buy from a particular company?
Assess your Google analytics
If you already have an established business and website, your Google analytics will give you extra insight into your customer base. Some areas that you can focus on and learn more from include:
- To find out who has bought from you in the past: Depending on how you currently track sales or conversions, you’ll look in Behaviour ⇒ Events, Conversions ⇒ Goals, or Conversions ⇒ E-commerce.
- Find out how most of your target audience found out about your site: Go to Acquisition ⇒ Overview, then move down into each channel to find specific info.
- Discover some basic demographic info about your audience: Go to Audience ⇒ Overview to find info like country, city, language and even operating system used.
