When we start a business we just want customers, it doesn't really matter who they are, we just need people through the door. We need income and we need exposure so we tend to take a scatter gun approach to marketing, posting on Facebook, Instagram, making tiktoks, pushing flyers through doors, hoping that something, in all that plethora of output, will eventually hit a potential customers.
This approach can offer some successes, we probably will hit a few clients and all that content should start to get us some, all be it limited, exposure, but it's a hell of a lot of work for very little reward. So how do we stop shooting wildly into the dark and focus in on our perfect customer.
Step 1: Know Who Your Perfect Customer Is
To know who your perfect customer is you must first know what you offer. Is your product an expensive, luxury item, or a low cost, high turn over service. If you've gone down the expensive, luxury route, you need affluent customers. Anyone might buy an expensive product for a one off celebration, like a birthday, but you'll need a heck of a lot of customers if you're only seeing them once a year. Instead you need customers who can afford to buy your product on a regular basis, who have a high level of disposable income and sufficient time to prioritise your service.
Is your product specialised? A massage is a massage right, everyone likes a massage so surely everyone wants to buy a massage. There is a certain truth in this, but it's not really about "wants", wants takes us back to birthday and Christmas presents. We're looking for the people who "need" our product. So who needs a massage? People with bad backs, sporty people, people who need to relax. For our analogy we'll just pick sporty people, but will revisit the others later.
So now we know our clients need to be well off, have time on their hands and be sporty. What else do we know about them?
Here we can make some assumptions. Generally, affluent, time rich people are older, they have successfully, settled careers or are at, or reaching, retirement. They don't tend to have young kids tying them down and their leisure time is generally their own. Sporty people are also often interested in health in general, eating well, exercising and wellness trends.
By now we have a pretty good idea of who our perfect customer is. We can also go back and revisit some of the characteristics we left behind, like people, with bad backs and create a few variants of our ideal customer to widen our marketing pool. Next we need to go and find them!
Step 2: Finding Your Customers
Once you know who your perfect customers are you can go out and find them. Taking our example we know we're looking for older, affluent people, who are interested in exercise, health and wellbeing. So let's go find them.
Let's start with Social media. It's pretty much accepted now that Facebook is for older people and Instagram for the young, so given our clients profile we can tell straight away it probably makes more sense to invest in Facebook.
We know they're into fitness, so what kind of fitness do older people enjoy, they're probably not on their local five aside team but they may well be at the posh gym down the road, or that luxury yoga place, you wish you could afford.
We also know they have plenty of free time, which might lead us to look at the kinds of clubs or activities they might be involved in. We could check for local rambling groups, book clubs or over 50s groups.
In Conclusion
Now we know who our perfect customers are and we've a good idea how to find them we can start directing our marketing effort towards them. This could mean placing our Facebook posts in groups were our customers are more likely to be, contacting that gym or yoga studio with offers for their clients or reaching out to the rambling group. With this information we can also refine our marketing content, gone are the days of the "massage boost circulation", instead we can replace these generic statements with targeted messages like "massage helps to maintain muscle tone, keeping us fitter and more mobile as we age".
By spending a little time upfront we can create a marketing strategy that maximises our efforts and gets us in front of our perfect customers. So rather than the scatter gun approach we can lock on to our target and see real returns on our investment.
