How To Define Your Ideal Customer (FREE Download)
When you try to attract everyone, you’ll end up attracting no one.
One of the first things I learned as an entrepreneur was the value of defining your target audience and limiting your potential customers. I know how strange that must sound. It seems a little counterintuitive to limit your focus and your audience as an entrepreneur, especially when you are first starting out, right? I mean, don’t you want to cast the widest net in order to try to attract as many customers or clients as possible?
Actually, no.
Spend even just a short amount of time consuming content focused on growing your small business and you will quickly learn that the industry experts all agree – when it comes to starting your business and honing your messaging, you’ve got to niche down.
The riches are in the niches.
- Pat Flynn
Defining your niche and establishing your target audience (aka, your ideal customer) will allow you to get hyper-focused with your messaging strategy and it will allow you to solve a problem for one person. Well, not ‘one person’ exactly, but a specific set of people with similar goals and attributes that you characterize into one person.
Consider this: Time is money.
Cliché yes, but hear me out.
When someone intercepts your content, that person will decide within just a few seconds whether or not you and your business are going to be able to help them solve a particular set of problems they need to overcome. A few seconds!
Your sales page, your value proposition, your brand; every bit of messaging in your online presence needs to be crafted with absolute precision so that the person who is viewing your content knows right away if you are the ideal person to help them.
If your messaging isn’t clear as to who you serve and how you help (meaning, if you are trying to appeal to everyone), the user will get confused and quickly navigate away. And once they’ve made up their mind, it doesn’t matter how many more times they intercept your content, they likely aren’t going to click again. They’re gone forever.
Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.
- Seth Godin
SALES TIP: People do business with those they like, know, and trust.
They can only know you if you’re speaking to them
They can only like you if they think you’ll help solve their problems
They can only trust you if they think your life’s purpose is in helping them.
‘Ok, ok, you’ve got me convinced – I need to define my ideal customer – but how?’
Some of the questions you will need to work through include:
Demographics: How old is your ideal customer? What kind of education do they have? Do they have kids?
Psychographics: What are their values and beliefs? What are their interests?
Social Behaviors: Where do they hang out online? What activities are they partake in?
Going through this exercise in detail (there are many more questions you will need to answer in order to uncover who your ideal customer is but we will get to those in a bit), will help to narrow your scope and allow you to focus on one person when crafting your messaging for your online assets. This will be the person that you create everything for, every single day. This is the person who is going to fill your sales funnel.
At this point, you might be asking ‘Will I still be able to serve customers who fall outside these parameters?’
Of course! There are bound to be outliers that will find you and want to hire you. And that’s fantastic too. As long as you are staying focused on marketing to your ideal customer, you will keep that funnel full with the audience that you can best serve and provide the most value for. The rest will take care of itself.
‘Alright, I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and dive in. Where do I start?’
So, how do you know who your ideal customer is? What questions do you need to ask yourself?
If you are feeling a little bit lost and unsure where to begin the process, I can help.
I created the Ideal Customer Worksheet to help guide you through the process of determining exactly who your ideal customer is. The best part is, it’s FREE.
Once you’ve gone through this valuable exercise you will be able to create content that is clear, strategic, and direct - content that is designed to help pull your ideal customer in like a magnet.
Header image credit: Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels
