Who is your ideal customer?

A simple question but one that many small businesses don’t take time to think about and build a strategy around.

Starting a business is tough and there can be a tendency to take on more or less any customers where you can provide them with your product or service and get paid. Being passive about this is probably not a good approach. 

Let’s say you’re a start up freelance designer. You can turn your hand to most types of creative work but what you really enjoy is film, video and animation projects. If you take on ‘any old job’ you will not be playing to your strengths and before too long you could get stuck in a cycle of poorly paid and unrewarding work.

So lets get back to the ideal customer. There are some ‘givens’ - they pay you on time, they recognise the value you provide and don’t squeeze you too much on price, they share your core values and ethical code, they are easy to deal with.

More than this we need to paint a mental picture of who they are. Are they members of the public or working in a business? If in a business what position do they hold? What age and gender are they? Where do they hang out? What social media platforms do they use? What do they read? What do they do in their leisure time?

Knowing what kind of customer you are looking for should drive your marketing strategy. How will you get in front of these people, build a relationship and sell to them?

For our designer, if his ideal customers are small media or publishing companies, he needs to find and engage with the executives who manage the budgets for the kind of work he delivers. That is quite a specialised and small pond and he needs to give some thought to how to reach these people. A blanket Facebook or Instagram campaign is unlikely to achieve stellar results. Targeted networking or attending industry events and conferences might be a more fruitful approach.

One way of putting it would be, ‘We get the customers we deserve’. We need to be on the front foot with this. Be clear about the business we are in and the customers we want to work with...then go find them.

www.base52.co.uk