One of the key components of selling your product or service is understanding who your ideal customer is. That’s because you don’t want to try to sell to everyone—you want to sell only to specific types of people. And you can’t do that if you don’t know exactly who that is.
The truth is, not everyone is the type of person who is going to buy from you. So you don’t want to spend your time trying to sell to them. Instead, you want to spend your time trying to sell to people who are actually in the market for what you have to sell.
Let’s say your business sells wedding planning. Would you target people who are already married? No, of course not. You would want to try to make sure your advertising goes out to people who are about to be married. Any advertising you do to any other type of person would be a waste of time and money.
So you need to be very clear about who your target audience is. Yes, that means you want to know basic demographics such as gender, age, income, etc. But you also want to know what their problems are, what they are thinking, what they want, and what they want to avoid. And you want to learn the words they use to describe their wants and needs.
And that takes us to the core of today’s email—how to discover who your target audience is, and what their wants and needs are.
We do that by going through an exercise, and I’m going to take you through that now.
The Exercise
Your task is to identify exactly who your ideal customer is by describing their characteristics. Before you do the exercise, I’ll give you some instructions.
- Think CAREFULLY about your answers. This is not a quick 5-minute exercise. Typically, it takes at least 30 minutes to do it properly. In fact, most people I have worked with revisit their answers several times over several days before they feel they’ve got it right. So take the time to really think about your answers.
- Focus on your IDEAL customer: the type of person who would be HIGHLY likely to buy what you are selling.
First, I’ll give you the whole exercise with sample answers. After that there is a blank template that you can copy into your own word processing software to do the exercise for your own business.
Example
Our example is for a fitness coach who specializes in helping older women who have recently given birth get back to their pre-pregnancy weight. She imagined the ideal customer for her services and came up with the list below.
Before you read the list, I want to explain that, for some of the characteristics, you might wonder, “Why does that matter?”. But knowing about each characteristic can be helpful. For example, let’s take a look at income.
You may not think that income matters much in marketing, but it can. Our fitness coach wants to specifically target middle-income earners. Why? Because high-income households have enough money to hire maids or nannies to help them cope. And low-income households typically don’t have enough money to pay for her services. So her sweet spot is in between—women from middle income households.
Now let’s look at our example.
Fitness Coach Example
This newsletter is a little different from previous ones — while I know you will find the read itself interesting, to extract maximum value from the material you need to do the work. So print out the templates and instructions provided, and do the detailed thinking about your ideal customer that is laid out here.
Don’t get frustrated if you find yourself struggling a bit — for most of us, this is not an easy or fast exercise. In fact, you may want to revisit your work a couple of times over the coming days as you reflect on what makes your “ideal client” ideal for you.
If you take the time to do the work well, I can guarantee that it will be an incredibly valuable experience and an excellent use of your time to clarify and tighten your own thinking.
Let me know how it goes!
