Whether you’re selling products or services, online or through a bricks and mortar premises you have to persuade people to visit, you need to know who exactly you’re appealing to. This is a vital piece of data that informs everything else about your business. In order to design advertising, you need to know who it’s going to appeal to. When you’re setting prices and deciding on sales, you need to know who you’re asking to pay those prices, and whether that’s realistic.

Constructing the profile of your ideal customer is a project you need to work on in the early days of your business, to optimise your offer to the market in those early days when your profit margin is a knife edge, and keep refining as your brand matures to make sure you keep a finger on the pulse of the market and are always ready to offer something people really want.

Today we’re taking a look at just how can find your ideal customer, and what you might do with that profile once it’s created.

Research

While a degree of your insight into the customer you’re aiming at can be derived from choices you make. You can decide what sort of customer you want, but even that decision needs to be based on data. It’s no good targeting a kind of customer from personal preference when they can’t afford your products.

You need to work with a market research company to generate the consumer insight you need to construct a profile of your ideal customer.

Surveys can reveal how and why people value brands you want to compete with, giving you valuable tips about how to build a loyal audience for your business quickly. Aping a competitor too openly is a bad move – it looks like you don’t have confidence in your own identity – but recognising how they’ve identified what consumers valued, and turned that into branding that lures them in is an important source of insight.

Decision Time

Once your research has returned a lot of data for you to work with, it’s decision time. You need to interpret and decide just what the implications are for your nascent company.

Your data will give you plenty of directions to go in, and now it’s down to you to decide which is the best fit for your company, and your team. If you’re experienced with mass delivery and the sheer scale of the mass market option, it’s worth chasing a big mass of customer without much to spend individually. If you’re more specialised at providing an individual service with a concomitantly high price tag, it makes more sense to pursue a smaller market of wealthier individuals.