How to Identify Your Ideal Customer

Can you describe your ideal customer as well as your best friend, and in a sentence or two? Who does your business serve? This is one of the fundamental questions in any marketing plan. If you can't, you need to learn how to identify your ideal customer because the success of your overall online marketing and SEO both are going to be dependent upon this information. 

In its simplest terms, marketing can be defined as providing the right information to the right audience at the right time. Understanding who you're trying to reach is critical to your marketing success because if you don't understand who your ideal customer is, you won't know what information they need from you or what words they use to describe what they need so you won't be the one using them and they'll find another website to help them. 

How Do You Identify Your Ideal Customer?

When you decide to start a business, hopefully, you’re thinking about who you want to serve and how you can help them. If your focus is just on making money and wanting to help “everyone,” you’ll probably find it harder to succeed in the long run. This is why choosing your target audience and establishing your ideal customer is so important. Providing exceptional products or services for a niche market is much easier than trying to be everything to everybody. They say that when you try to serve everyone, you serve no one, and it's very true. 

Focusing on one target market (or several sub-sets within one target market) makes it easier to be successful because you can get to know your audience, their needs, and how your product or service solves their problems. When you're trying to help too many people with your business, you have to address so many potential problems or issues that you either water down your message or end up confusing and overwhelming them. It's much better to focus on one customer. 

I find it's best to go ahead and create a narrative of my ideal customer to help them feel more real to me and easier to connect with. I find doing this makes a big difference when I'm creating content, courses, offers, etc., and I encourage you to do the same thing. I know my ideal customers as well as I know my best friend these days, and it makes a big difference. 

When You're First Starting Out and Don't Have Customer Data

If you’re starting out and determining what business to build or which audience to choose, think about your experience. Where do you have the most experience? Are there specific things you've done, experiences you've had, or lessons you've learned that would be helpful to others?  Are you trained in an area or especially interested in something, and would want to talk about it and potentially help others with it? If so, that's a good starting point. 

Start by thinking about the questions you had early on in your journey, or what your friends or family members ask about. You can start your first ideal customer bio by basing it on yourself earlier in your journey, someone you've helped, a client you've served, etc. It just helps you to clarify who you want to help so you can identify an ideal customer

Maybe You're Established but Confused About Your Ideal Customer

If your business is established, but you aren’t sure who you’re trying to serve or haven’t selected a niche market yet, you may have data that will help lead you to the answer. If you have a website, Facebook Business Page, or Instagram Business Account, you have access to data about your fans/followers and site visitors. This can help you determine who your target audience is or, more importantly, should be.

Where can you find data?

• If your website or blog has Google Analytics set up, you can find the information you need in your GA account. Look at your traffic data, go into demographics, and you’ll get a feel for your website visitors.

• If you have a Facebook Business Page, you can access Insights, which will provide you with demographic information for your fans and page visitors.

• An Instagram Business Account also provides demographic information for your followers.

If you’re using personal Facebook or Instagram accounts to run your business, now is the time to change to Business Accounts. You’re missing out on audience insights when you stay with a personal account. 

If your business is more offline than online, consider your best customers over the years.

• Who do you find to be the most pleasant to work with?
• Who have you been able to help the most?
• What issues can you solve better than anyone else?

What Information Matters When Defining Your Ideal Customer?

You’ll want to determine a few things about your fans/followers if you can access demographic information.

• Where do they live?
• How old are they?
• What gender are they?
• What other interests do they have (this is available in GA)?
• When do they visit your website or social media channels?
  • What day(s) of the week?
  • What time(s) of the day?
  • How many times in a week/month?

Now, the most important step here is to determine if your business is attracting the right people or not. If you’re not attracting your ideal customer, then you need to determine if you should adjust your ideal customer to include the people who are following you or if you’d be better off adjusting your messaging to try to attract your target audience.

Why Does Information About Your Ideal Customer Matter to Your Online Marketing and SEO?

Once you’ve identified your ideal customer, it’s much easier to provide the right information to them. When we market our product or service, we always want to think about our customers, not ourselves. Our customers don’t care about our business goals; they care about their issues and concerns, and they want to know if you can solve them. A customer's #1 question is, "What's in it for me?" and your marketing needs to answer that. 

By knowing who your audience is, you can provide more relevant marketing materials for them. You get to know them and their issues and can work to address their needs. When you focus on an ideal customer, you see better results.

You can create better content that's going to connect with them. We want to make sure we're bringing the right people to our websites and understanding who they are, what they need from us, and how we can help them is a good start.