The fifth step in identifying your ideal customer, your target market, is to look at all the information you have gathered and write down a description of your ideal customer/s. We do this in two parts.
Watch the first video for an explanation and complete as much of the description as you can. When complete, progress to the next part to watch the second video for a bit more detail on the process.
Remember, you may have more than one customer with similar traits and demographics. If so, you will need to write descriptions for each of the ideal customers you have identified. We recommend allowing about 30 minutes per ideal customer description to complete this step.
If you haven’t already done so, you can download the Course workbook in the Materials section. As additional support, there is also a completed example Workbook to use as a reference.
Note: you need to watch the video to be able to mark this module as complete and progress to the next module.
Video Transcript
Okay. We’re nearly there. We’re at the final stage of being able to identify who your ideal customer is.
Now you can see here, we’ve got a summary (you can have more than one).
And what you do now, is you go through your answers for this worksheet and put the descriptions and the common characteristics of your most profitable customers that you love working with that you’ve identified through this process, into here.
Now, this doesn’t have to be in sentence format. I can just bring down here to give you an example of our ideal customers for Starfish Marketing, for example.
So we have a small business with less than 10 employees. And we say any industry.
A lot of marketers will actually tell you to be really specific and really niche down. We find that is too challenging for a lot of people. And particularly if you’re you’re in a regional area, it can actually narrow too much your marketing. So just have a sensible approach to it.
Obviously your ideal customer cannot be everyone because not everyone is going to want your products. So it’s understanding who the people who are most likely going to want to buy your services or your products that are going to be profitable for you, that you’re going to love working with.
And working out who they are, so then in the next module, we can create your key messages to connect with those people as part of your marketing.
So if you look here, I’ve broken it into two sections, demographics and psychographics.
So the demographics you might say, okay, age 35 years plus, living in the Albury-Wodonga region, married with children in their teens, they run their own business in partnership with their spouse. They have a joint income of X and they’re located in regional Australia, which obviously if they’re living in Albury-Wodonga, yes, they are. I could potentially pull out the living within Albury-Wodonga region – because we work in the cloud with a lot of businesses who are outside that region, but are predominantly regional Australia based.
So that’s the demographics.
Then we look at the psychographics.
So, we know that our ideal customers, our customers would love working with a actively participating online business forums.
We know that they use Instagram and Facebook to promote their businesses. And they also use those two platforms for their personal use.
We know that they occasionally use LinkedIn. But it’s not a huge focus for them.
Really getting into the psychographics now.
We know that they’re time poor. They like to have control and they want to do everything themselves. It comes back to them being that action oriented.
They do appreciate that others have skills they may not have. But they need to trust someone before they’re prepared to hand over those activities or handover the actions that they’re not getting to do, potentially.
They’re always seeking to learn more and to improve.
They make decisions based on emotion and they make decisions, usually really quickly.
And family is a key driver for them behind wanting to succeed. So they potentially want to leave the business to their next generation when they’re ready to retire. Or they want to have that flexibility to be able to spend time with their family rather than all their time in the business. So it’s a really key driver behind their wanting to succeed.
They really value family, integrity, communication, community, genuine connections. And that’s where that trust factor comes in.
So that’s one of our ideal clients.
So that’s the type of descriptions you go into there.
And then we have the other one here, which is a larger organisation, and it’s more based on the achieving outcomes, return on investment. They’re looking for someone who’ll collaborate with their staff. They appreciate expert advice and want that implemented in their business.
So by understanding who those customers are, we then are able to craft our key messages to connect with those clients. And that’s what we’ll go to in the next module. Stay tuned.
  
