How to identify your ideal customer?
An ideal customer avatar is a profile you create for the customer you would ideally like to sell your product or services to. You could think of it as a fictional character that is based on facts.
You want to understand who they are so that you can tailor your products, branding, and marketing to meet their needs and to speak their language.
I’d recommend you to figure this out before you create your product or service so that you can make sure you are building something that can attract the people you want to work with, and to make sure their needs are met with what you are selling.
So how exactly do you define this person? Here’s how I like to approach the process:
The first step is to figure out who do you actually wanna work with, who is the person you'd ideally like to sell to?
There’s no point in building a business that you don’t enjoy. Part of that enjoyment is to work with people you like and who appreciate and need what you are offering.
As soon as you have an idea of a product or service you want to offer, start by thinking about the characteristics of the person you most want to target and who would most need and benefit from what you sell.
Is it a company or an individual? Are they young, old, men, women, speak a specific language, live in a specific area, are they married or not, have a specific income level, or does it even matter? What are their specific goals, values, needs, and challenges?
You could also reverse your thinking and consider who you don't want to serve, who is not your ideal customer.
Once you have a list of ideal characteristics, the next step is to go them through one by one specifically keeping in mind why is that specific characteristic ideal for your business?
You don’t need to specify characteristics that have nothing to do with why they would buy from you. The point here is the word ‘ideal’ so keep that in mind.
Yes, your services could work for both men and women, but perhaps ideally you’d like to target women because you know that they struggle with this particular problem more or your approach is likely to resonate with them better.
Talking about problems, next you wanna understand what is the problem in their life your product or service can help to solve and what is the result they are after.
And this is the key here - what is it that THEY are after.
It doesn’t matter what you think they might need if that’s not what they want.
This is where you wanna get some actual research in.
You want to avoid being in a situation where you’ve created a product or service only to discover that no one is interested in it, or that it doesn’t help the people you want it to help.
I’ve found Facebook groups as one the best resources for information about what people are struggling with and what they need help with -- these groups can be real gold mines and there are thousands of them!
Join groups where you think your ideal clients might be and pay attention to what they are asking about and what is the wording they are using to describe these challenges. Ask questions, search previous topics that could help you, and take note of the relevant comments.
It’s also a great way to start creating valuable connections.
Figuring out their pain points, dreams, desires, and challenges help you not only to create solutions they need but to use the right wording in your copy that you know will resonate with them.
Once you have a good idea of who this ideal customer of yours is, you want to actually create the profile for them where you list the main details related to them.
You haven’t done all this research and thinking just to let it gather dust in your file archives. This information should influence every move and decision you make in your business.
This profile will work as a quick and easy way to check back on who is it again that you're trying to serve if you get stuck with your wording, ideas, or decisions.
Just remember that simply knowing who is it that you want to target isn’t enough - the definition isn’t yet gonna bring them to you. You need to take that information and put it into action.
With kindness,
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