As small business owners, entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders or coaches, your success depends on understanding your audience, what they need, and how to reach them. Before you start any marketing strategy, it's essential to identify your ideal customer.
Who are they?
What do they want?
Where do they hang out?
By answering these questions, you can create an ideal client avatar, a detailed description of your perfect customer. Identifying your ideal customer can help you create effective marketing strategies, increase customer loyalty, and boost your business's profitability.
Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs fail to identify their ideal customer, resulting in a lack of direction, wasted money, and reduced sales. In this post, we'll guide you through the process of identifying and targeting your ideal audience.
Many posts will say to start with marketing research or define your offerings. And while both of these activities are important and can bear fruit, it’s crucial to begin with the problem you or your business solves.
Who is it you’re trying to help, and what is the problem they are trying to solve?
If you can’t answer this confidently and immediately, you’re not ready to do the work of creating a product offering, conducting research or developing a marketing strategy.
At Better Story Marketing, we help impact-mindful entrepreneurs who want to make a difference but need help telling their story effectively and efficiently. This level of clarity drives what kind of clients we pursue, what products we offer and how we market them.
Once you can clearly articulate who you’re serving and what problem you solve, then you’re ready for the next step.
This may feel like the same question as, “What problem do you solve?” But it’s a bit more nuanced.
People hire products and services to get a job done. If I want a nicely cut yard, I hire my 14-year-old. Notice I didn’t say “mow the grass.” Because there is a likely scenario where he could say the grass was mowed, but upon inspection, nobody would describe it as a nicely cut yard.
Let’s say a business coach needs to land more clients each month, and they hire Better Story Marketing. We’ll start by creating a customer journey map that might result in designing key content and maybe even a website redesign. But at the end of the day, what they are paying us for is more business owners becoming coaching clients. If the work we did doesn’t deliver that outcome, then we missed the mark.
We’ve identified the desired outcome for our ideal customers as “a personalized marketing strategy that delivers consistent long-term returns without too much cost or upkeep.”
Your job now is to identify the desired outcome of your ideal customer. Then, you’re ready for the next step.
Alright, you know who you’re serving, the critical problem they’re facing and their desired outcome. So now you just need to make their dreams come true.
But what exactly do you sell?
A common mistake entrepreneurs make is a broad, I can do everything approach. Sometimes, this is necessary to get started landing clients and even discovering what you are good at and enjoy doing.
When identifying your superpower, try answering two questions
When I started offering marketing services as a solopreneur, I took the I can do whatever you need approach. I was a fraction CMO, developed strategy, built websites, wrote content, did graphic design, ran ads…
And I learned there are some things I’m really good at and love doing. And some things just aren’t my jam. After a year, it became clear that focusing would benefit both me and any client I served. This level of focus meant offering less.
Having the collective of Better Story Marketing broadens what can be offered a little, but it’s still pretty focused. Our team all love designing and building brands. I love working with people to pull out the story of their business or nonprofit and then collaboratively designing and implementing a customer journey to tell that story well.
We don’t run people’s marketing, but we design a marketing strategy that mostly runs itself. Partly because creating that is our superpower and partly because we think it’s the best option for most entrepreneurs and nonprofits out there.
Now it’s your turn.
Take a piece of paper, and at the top, describe your ideal customer, the problem they’re facing and their desired outcome. Now, set a five-minute timer and write as many products and services that could be offered to them. Don’t filter when an idea comes to you. Write down as many as you can.
Now, look at the list and circle the ones you’re really good at. Then draw a star next to the ones that are life-giving, and you feel like you could do over and over again.
Look at the sheet and focus on the products or services that are both circles and have stars. Your ideal customer is someone looking for these services.
Whether you're new to marketing automation or already have a solution but aren't sure if it will scale well, we're here to help.
During the Q&A session, you can ask questions about how to best leverage marketing automation in your business or about our Better Story Marketing OS Software.
You get to decide the questions and we want to help you automate telling your brand story so your business or nonprofit can move ahead.
We’ve fleshed out who you’re helping, the problem they’re facing, the outcome they want and the services you could provide them. Now it’s time to combine them madlib style.
I’m looking for [who you’re trying to help] who is facing [problem they need solved] but would be able to [outcome they desire] if they could get [service you provide].
You now have a one-sentence description of your ideal customer. This is the customer you want to design your marketing, products and systems for. You’ll find more satisfaction and success by focusing on your ideal customer, even if it means saying no to other customers.
Now that you have your ideal customer clearly identified, you will want to validate by connecting with some actual customers.
A common strategy for testing is to create a landing page to present your targeted product or service to your newly identified ideal customer.
It’s ok if you don’t yet offer the product or service. This is a promotion page to test if your superpower matches their problem and desired outcome.
Once you find an ideal customer, show them the page and ask them to process it out loud as they review it. You can learn a lot by user-testing a simple landing page with some customers.
Now that you’ve validated some of your assumptions, it’s time to refine your ideal customer persona. Consider the following questions:
You can also include testing out social media ads, email marketing campaigns, or even direct mail. Analyze your results and refine your targeting until you find what works best.
Find out who else offers what you provide, how they target their audience, and what sets you apart. Look for gaps in the market and opportunities that you can capitalize on. Consider the following questions:
You can conduct additional market research by reviewing industry reports, reading online reviews, and speaking with your customers.
When you know who your ideal customer is, the problem they’re facing and a solution to provide the outcome they desire, then you have most of the pieces you need to tell your brand story effectively.
When the story isn’t clear, customers don't pay attention.
Having a compelling and clear brand story helps you stand out from the competition and invites your potential customers to engage. Clarifying your brand story is critical if you want to expand your reach.
Once you have your story clearly told, you’ll want to integrate it across all your marketing collateral. This can feel like a lot of work, but it’s foundational to marketing your small business or nonprofit. Writing your story and integrating it into a targeting marketing strategy is the key outcome of our Better Story Brand Intensives.
Identifying your ideal customer is essential to creating effective marketing strategies and growing your business. Remember to track your marketing campaign's performance, analyze the results, and adjust your strategy accordingly. With the right approach, you can build customer loyalty, increase sales, and achieve business success.
Identifying your ideal customer is the first step to building an effective marketing strategy.
It’s also a key element to writing your brand story. Or if you get overwhelmed and just want help from someone who does this every day, reach out and schedule a story session. We’d love to hear about your business and explore how we can help you tell your story in a way that directly impacts the bottom line and enables you to make a more significant impact.
A customer persona, also known as a buyer persona or marketing persona, is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It's based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
A well-crafted customer persona will include details such as:
Creating customer personas can help businesses better understand and reach their target audiences. They are used in marketing to determine where to focus efforts and guide product development by aligning with the needs of the ideal customer. They can also help in tailoring content, messaging, and offers to specific audience segments.
Remember, most businesses have more than one type of customer, so they create multiple personas to represent different segments of their audience.
Lean more about how to identify your ideal customer persona.
Customer personas are a powerful tool that can guide many aspects of your business, from marketing and sales to product development and customer service. Here's how you can use them:
The key to using personas effectively is to keep them in mind in all areas of your business. They should be a guiding force behind your decision-making, helping you stay customer-focused.
Lean more about how to identify your ideal customer persona.
Customer personas are important for businesses and nonprofits alike for several reasons:
For nonprofits specifically, personas can help in:
By creating and using customer personas, businesses and nonprofits can ensure they are truly meeting the needs of their audience, leading to better results in all areas of their work.
Lean more about how to identify your ideal customer persona.
Creating a comprehensive customer persona requires a mix of demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information. Here are the key elements you should include:
Remember, the aim of a persona is to represent a significant portion of people in the real world and should therefore be as realistic as possible. Also, personas are fluid and may change over time as you get more information about your customers.
Lean more about how to identify your ideal customer persona.
The number of personas you should create depends on the diversity of your customer base and the complexity of your product or service offerings.
Three to five personas are often enough to cover your main customer segments. These should represent the majority of your customers or the customers you are specifically targeting.
Less is better.
Remember, the goal is not to create a persona for every individual customer, but rather to capture the key types of customers that represent your larger audience. Each persona should be distinct enough to guide different marketing strategies or product developments.
It's also important to review and update your personas regularly to ensure they continue to accurately reflect your customer base.
Lean more about how to identify your ideal customer persona.
Your brand story should consist of:
Learn how to write the brand story for your small business or non-profit.
A compelling brand story helps small businesses differentiate themselves from competitors, connect with their target audience on an emotional level, and establish a unique identity in the market.
Learn how to write the brand story for your small business or non-profit.
To make your brand story authentic, focus on sharing your genuine motivations behind starting your business, highlight real customer experiences and testimonials, and ensure consistency between your brand values and actions.
Learn how to write the brand story for your small business or non-profit.
It's a good practice to review and update your brand story periodically to ensure it accurately reflects your current business values and goals. Certainly, any time there is a change to the products or strategy of the business, the brand story should be updated.
At Better Story Marketing, we review our story twice a year as a team to ensure it represents us well and connects with our ideal customer.
Learn how to write the brand story for your small business or non-profit.
These anecdotes allow customers to connect with you on a deeper level. This isn’t the time to tell your company history, it’s telling the parts of your back story that overlap with the customers’ stories.
They can allow the customer to see both why their problem matters to you and how you’re qualified to help them. However, it's important to strike a balance and ensure that the anecdotes align with your brand identity and resonate with your target audience.
Learn how to write the brand story for your small business or non-profit.
A customer journey refers to the complete sequence of experiences that customers go through when interacting with a company or brand. This journey captures all stages, starting from the initial awareness or discovery phase, moving through engagement and consideration, leading to purchasing, and finally towards post-purchase interactions which may include support or advocacy.
The aim of mapping the customer journey is to get a comprehensive insight into different customer interactions across various touchpoints. It helps businesses understand how customers are experiencing their brand, where there might be pain points or areas for improvement, and how they can streamline the process to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Understanding the customer journey is vital for delivering exceptional customer experiences, improving customer retention, and driving business growth.
Learn more about creating a customer journey map for your small business or non-profit.
The customer journey map should include the following stages.
Learn more about creating a customer journey map for your small business or non-profit.
Mapping the customer journey allows you to understand your customers' experiences, needs, and pain points at each stage of their interaction with your business. This understanding can help you improve your products, services, and marketing strategies to better meet your customers' needs.
Learn more about creating a customer journey map for your small business or non-profit.
Creating a customer journey map involves several key steps. Let's walk through them:
Remember, a customer journey map is a tool to help you better understand and serve your customers. It should be used as a guide to improve your customer experience, not as a strict rulebook.
Learn more about creating a customer journey map for your small business or non-profit.
It's a good practice to review and update your customer journey map periodically to ensure it remains accurate and relevant. Changes in your business, market trends, or customer behavior may require adjustments to your map.
The frequency at which you should update your customer journey map largely depends on various factors such as changes in your business model, introduction of new products or services, shifts in customer behavior, or significant changes in market conditions.
However, a good rule of thumb is to review your customer journey map at least once every six months to a year. This helps ensure that it continues to accurately reflect your customers' experiences and expectations.
If there are major changes happening more frequently in your industry, you might want to review and update your map quarterly.
Remember, the customer journey map is a dynamic tool that should evolve with your business and your understanding of your customers. Regular reviews and updates will help you keep it relevant and effective.
At Better Story Marketing, we review our map quarterly as a team to ensure it is effectively engaging our ideal customers and helping them reach their goals.
Learn more about creating a customer journey map for your small business or non-profit.