In this blog post you'll learn the best way to learn your target market and find your ideal customer. In business, especially when it comes to sales, there’s a lot of talk around the best ways to learn your target market or find your ideal customer. But what exactly does that mean? Most people usually only look at their target market or ideal customer at a very surface level.
Let's dig a little deeper and if you need more help after you read this post, we have a more in-depth guide and some templates that can make the job a lot easier for you.
What is an Ideal Customer?
Your ideal customer can be defined as the target market that you need to attract to succeed and grow your business. Reaching these ideal customers will typically require a product or service that solves a specific problem or meets a specific need.
It’s important to identify what those problems and/or needs are if you hope to expand your clientele and reach more potential customers. But it's not just about the product; it's also crucial to identify key characteristics of your ideal customer so that you can easily find similar potential customers.
How to Define Your Ideal Customer
So, who is your ideal customer? What problem does your product or service solve? What need does it fill? Who would benefit from your product or service the most? Where can you reach those specific people? And one of the most important questions to ask yourself: Who would pay money for what you have to offer? It’s a lot to consider! To make the ideal customer identification process simpler, we’ve broken it down into three stages: PAM.
Pain – has a specific need that your product or service can fulfill
Access – is an audience large enough to be reached & knowing where to reach them
Money – has enough money to purchase a solution for their problem
Let's talk about each in more detail…
Pain is an important word here. We aren’t necessarily talking about physical pain. And this kind of ideal customer pain is different from just wanting something. There’s something going on that is causing enough frustration, annoyance, discomfort, or disruption that the person is willing to spend money to get relief from the pain (a solution).
If it’s just a minor concern, people aren’t going to be as likely to spend money, but if it’s something that would improve their life in a significant way, that’s the sweet spot. What pain is plaguing your ideal customer every day? Is it something they need to learn? A tool or solution to make something they must do easier?
Access encompasses two different things: how many potential customers there are and where you can find them. You may have an excellent product but if your target market is so narrow that only a handful of people would qualify as ideal customers…well it’s going to be challenging to access that small of an audience.
There are exceptions of course, like if your audience is really small but super fanatical and easily found congregating somewhere like an online forum. Which brings us to the other part of access – where to find your ideal customers.
For this step, we want to think back to the pain criteria above. Who are the people experiencing that pain, and where can they be found? Are they young people who congregate on TikTok and Snapchat? Are they middle-aged women that use Facebook every day? Maybe they are avid Twitter users or Pinterest junkies. No matter who they are, having easy access to where they already are is crucial.
Money is the final piece of the ideal customer puzzle. If you’re selling a premium product for $49 or even $99, it’s important that you identify the right customer for that price point. Odds are, they are going to follow middle-tier brands like Target or Bed Bath and Beyond, as opposed to bargain brands like Dollar Tree or Walmart. Think about the kinds of places your ideal customer would spend money and use that in your customer personas and targeting. The same is true for lower-priced products in the $5-20 range that have an upsell on the backend – you want to be sure that the people you are targeting have the money to buy!
Once you’ve determined your ideal customer, it can be helpful to create a customer persona, which we cover in detail in our Shortcuts and Templates package on this topic. Customer personas are detailed descriptions of your ideal customer that include specifics about their lifestyle. Personas (also known as avatars) can be incredibly useful when brainstorming ways to reach your audience, determining price points, and coming up with ideas for new products.
If you'd like to dig into creating your customer persona and where to find your ideal customer…
Sign up for Our FREE “Find and Attract Your Ideal Customer” Course
It's easy to go deeper into this topic and really hone in your ideal customer. Just sign up for our TOTALLY free EkitHub University course.
In this class we discuss what an ideal customer is, how to know who your ideal customers are, how to find them, and how to create a unique selling proposition to get them buying like crazy.
Sign up for This Free EKitHub University Class and You'll Learn:
- What is an Ideal Customer
- How to Define Your Ideal Customer
- How to Find Your Ideal Customer
- Ideal Price Points
- What is a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
- How to Create Your USP to Attract Your Ideal Customer
- BONUS LESSON: Creating a Customized Business Planner to Stay on Track
As you can see, we'll have you building your laser targeted audience in no time.
Click here to sign up – absolutely FREE!
And don't worry…if have any questions or need help implementing what you learn, we're always available to help in the Q&A Brainstorming Community. It's included for free with your EKitHub University Membership.
Yusef Kulan and Alice Seba
Your Partners in Easy Product Creation at EKitHub.com