The Power of Knowing Your Ideal Customer
Everything in your business, from product creation and pricing, to marketing and design, should start with your target audience in mind.
Before I start any design project with my clients, I ask them ‘who is your target audience’. At the start of every course or workshop I have, I ask people ‘who is your ideal customer’. I talk about it all the time.
Because I truly believe that understanding exactly who it is you’re targeting is the foundation you need for a successful business.
Over the years I have gone from a rough idea of a target market (‘female small business owners’), to a slightly more specific target audience (‘female freelancers in creative industries’), to now, where I have gone laser-focused on an exact ideal customer avatar (or ‘muse’). I call her Hannah.
Getting clear on exactly who Hannah is over the last 12 months and keeping her in the forefront of my mind while doing anything in my business, I believe has been one of the top contributors to the recent growth of my business and has transformed the way I feel about doing the work each day too.
Why is understanding your ideal customer on a deep level so important?
1. Understanding your ideal customer is the start of everything in your business
As I keep saying, knowing who you’re targeting should be the very start of any activity in your business. Because if you don’t know who you’re doing things for, how can you know what to do, and how & where to reach people? Are you just floundering around hoping that just anyone will buy into your offering?
2. Start Creating offerings that solve real problems
When you’re creating new products or services, if you start with your ideal customer in mind, you can be sure that you’ll end up with something that solves a real problem, and that people will actually buy. Creating a product and then looking for an audience to sell it to is the wrong way around, and much harder to do!
3. This can help you come up with endless ideas for products, services & content
With that being said, if you know who your ideal customer is and the problems they face, this can give you endless ideas for how to serve them best. It can also help you come up with content ideas for your marketing, because you' know the types of things they want to see.
4. It makes marketing so much more effective
If you know who you’re targeting, you’ll know where they’re hanging out, and how best to reach them too! This means no more wasted time trying to build up a presence on one platform, only to find that your target audience doesn’t even hang out there. No more wasted money trying to advertise to the wrong people or writing content for websites that your ideal customer doesn’t visit.
5. Create stronger connections and deeper relationships with your ‘fans’
If you try too hard to appeal to everyone, you’ll end up appealing to no one. You’ll be vanilla. Average.
If you create for specific people - sure, you might put off some people who aren’t your ideal customer - but imagine how much more connected you’ll be with the people who are your ideal customers, and how much more they will love you and cheer for you.
6. Stop working with clients who aren’t a good fit
We’ve all had client experiences that we didn’t enjoy. But as soon as you get clear on your ideal, dream customer, you can start just targeting them, and spend less time working with people who just don’t light you up.
7. Stop wasting time on the wrong people
Not only can you stop working with the wrong people, you can stop having conversations with the wrong people altogether! There’s nothing worse than getting 30 minutes into a sales call only to realise you’re the wrong fit for each other, or doing 10 back and forth emails before realising they can’t afford you. Being clear in who your targeting can cut this out.
4 Myths surrounding ‘ideal customer’ exercises
Some people aren’t a fan of going through ‘ideal customer’ exercises, and some people might mis-understand the purpose of doing it. I’ve busted some common objections and myths below:
“If I go to specific, I’ll loose out on customers.”
Quite the opposite! If you’re too general, you’ll appeal to no one strongly at all! Since getting specific on my niche, my business has grown and been more successful than it ever was when I was trying to target too broad a market. When you get more specific, there’s more room to create raving fans, and less competition.
“Going into all this detail is pointless & a waste of time.”
In my ideal customer exercises I always encourage people to think about the finer details, which some may say is a waste of time. But what it does is create a whole persona that is more memorable for you to think of every time you do something in your business.
“My business is b2b (sells to other businesses), so these exercises aren’t relevant.”
At the end of the day, there will always be an individual making the final purchase decision. Even if your audience is big corporates; your ideal customer is the person who finds out about you and/or signs off on working with you. They are your ideal customer, and the exercises are still 100% relevant to you.
“You can’t have more than one Ideal customer.”
Most of us have more than one! Our businesses are layered and complex, and people rarely have just one. 2 to 3 is what I’d recommend if you have different aspects of your business - it just means you have to do these kinds of exercises a few times over!
Create a ‘CV’ (one-page summary) of your ideal customer…
…Or want to go deeper?
TAKE THIS A STEP FURTHER AND JOIN MY ‘IDEAL CUSTOMER MASTERCLASS’.
This virtual video training and workbook will take you through exercises that will not only help you feel 10x clearer on who your ideal customers are, but also how to apply all this to your business too.
WHAT’S INCLUDED:
1 hour long video training (streamable or downloadable)
10+ page PDF workbook (fillable virtually or printable)
FREEBIE: Ideal Customer CV Template (.PSD file or Canva template)
(You do not need Photoshop OR Canva for this training, this is just an optional extra to supplement the rest of the workshop).
THIS IS AN INSTANT DOWNLOAD.
You can save it for later and learn in your own time whenever you want to, and refer back to it as much as you like.
VAT will be applied at the checkout for UK/EU customers.
