Who Is Your Ideal Customer?

 If you have yet to answer this question, you’re also probably wondering why your business is underperforming. Satisfied customers are the foundation of any company. However, to satisfy someone, you have to know their needs. With the vast number of people in the world, it’s impossible to satisfy everyone. You have to focus your efforts to maximize your results. When you make a conscious decision to do this, it becomes much easier to figure out who is your ideal customer.

What Is An Ideal Customer?

The short answer to this question is someone who stands to benefit from your product or your service. However, within that, you also want to cater to people who can help your business go where you want it to be. Let’s say you sell electronics. If you’re dealing in high-end home theater equipment, you’re going to want to invest your marketing and sales resources in people with the means to afford it. However, within that, you’ll also need to narrow your focus to those who appreciate state of the art equipment. They will see the value in what you have to offer and they have the means to help your business be successful offering it.

Know Your Product First

However, before you can know your customer, you have to know your product. Take a look at it from a buyer’s point of view. What does your product do for them? What problems does it solve? How will using it improve their lives? How will buying from you be of benefit to them—as opposed to buying from someone else? Assessing your situation in this fashion will make it easier to design your site to sell electronics online to a specific group of people. It will also make it easier to craft effective marketing messages and activities.

Then Get To Know Your Customer

With answers to the questions above, you can begin to identify the traits of your ideal customer. Where do they live? Where do they work? What do they do for a living? Where do they shop for what you’re offering? Are their purchases usually tied to a life event?  At what time of the year do they most often tend to buy? Have they bought products similar to yours in the past? Where do they conduct their research before shopping? How do they shop, and most importantly—how do they conduct their purchase transactions?

Create a Persona

Using that data, you can create an entity to which you can speak. Find a picture of this type of person somewhere and assign a profile to them. You might say, “The ideal customer for my electronics business is a college student, looking to have the latest electronics for their dorm or apartment. Their budget is tight, but they like cool tech. They are pretty savvy about electronic devices and they spend a lot of time in online forums and on social media.” These perceptions will help you craft organic content and product messaging in the style of language to which they can relate. It will also give you the insights you need to place these assets in the places they tend to frequent.

When you’re working this way, you’ll get a lot more mileage out of your marketing and advertising budgets. What’s more, you can use this to inform the tone and tenor of your ecommerce site to help this group of people feel at home shopping it. Get the factors related to determining your ideal customer right and you’ll find yourself with a cadre of satisfied, enthusiastic and loyal customers.