Who is Your Ideal Customer? Carefully Finding and Honing Your Target Audience

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Although we always tell ourselves that the customer is always right, how many of us know who that ideal customer is? The truth is, not enough businesses delve into what makes up their key demographic and overall targeted buyer.

That old philosophy of thinking that customers will automatically gravitate to a business they find attractive has a lot of faults. In a different time, perhaps this was an arguable case. In today's world, though, you can't expect to just market to the masses and expect the perfect customer to automatically start buying products off your website.

Simply put, the business world became a madhouse of competition when the Internet provided so much vast opportunity. Over the last 20 years, competition became so fierce that the likelihood of another business doing the same thing you are became tenfold.

With this in mind, it's more important than ever to find a more targeted customer base. The reason is that once you find the exact people you know would buy from you, you'll be able to build a loyal customer base to whom you can turn time and time again.

Keep in mind that if you have to find your targeted customer online, you can help enhance the attraction with what's on your website. It's why it's important to identify this ideal customer before you start any planning so you know exactly for whom you’re designing.

So who is your ideal customer? Let's take a look at how to identify them.

Creating Buyer Personas

Many companies go the buyer persona route today to narrow down their demographics. You'll find plenty of tutorials online on how to create these, though it does take some time. Before you even start your business, you should set time aside to create a digital portrait of the ideal customer who would definitely buy from you. Doing it from scratch, though, is a more time-consuming process.

The best way to get started is to pay attention to conversations on industry message boards or on social media. In these places, you can see what customers are looking for, otherwise known as their pain points.

If you already have a database of early customers, you can use them to help you cobble together an ideal persona. It works much like creating a fictional character in a novel using similar complex attributes.

By understanding everything about what your ideal customer does and wants, you help shape products and marketing content you know they'll be interested in at first sight.

Finding Business Customers with Growth Potential

Finding the ideal customer isn't just centered on the B2C world either. In the B2B industry, you also need to focus on what your ideal customer is. One good way is to look at businesses that you know have growth potential. They'll frequently give clues that they're going to stick around and be there for you as a loyal buyer for years to come.

Entrepreneur points out that by looking at a business's hiring practices, you can tell whether they're on the way up or slowly dying out.

Creating Content for Your Ideal Customer on Your Website

One good method to find out what kind of content your ideal customer would want is to survey them through an email subscriber list. In the chance you've already created leads through this method, find out exactly what they want to see in marketing content.

The more you can find out early, the less time you'll waste on the content creation process down the line. Merely creating content you think everyone will automatically gravitate to only hurts yourself and wastes valuable time you could apply in a smarter way.

Using the customer pain points above, you can focus on web design or content that hones in on business problems and how you can solve them. Don't forget how this approach helps you in forming your own web brand as well as targeting customers.