One of the most important factors in making a successful marketing strategy is knowing how to find your target customer. Being able to effectively understand who your ideal customers are would allow you to build your entire business, products, services, and sales.

You can identify your ideal target customer by determining their common characteristics that are found in your demographics. Catering to your ideal target customers is essential for your business to get started and getting established.

As your guide, here are 5 steps to help you find your ideal target customer

1. Start with your smallest market

You must keep in mind that finding your ideal target customer where they would feel that what you have to offer is special, may it be a product or service. Getting started at this, you will first feel that what you have to offer is not much, but the key is to find your narrow group with a very specific needs or problems and a specific demographic that can increase your traffic and profits.

You can then expand your reach after gaining attraction and become one of the biggest players in your smallest market as you grow.

2. Create your initial value hypothesis

Once you’ve done the first step as discussed above, you must create a “Why Us?” proposition and use it as your hypothesis for determining and telling people the reason to choose you over your competition.

Most of the times, business owners get caught up trying to execute their business plan when their market doesn’t really care about it. Therefore, what you discover in your market and apply it in your business. Learn about the different factors that would make people choose you, your products, or services.

3. Get a picture of reality by doing Discovery Test Sessions

Businesses that are established and thriving can learn from their everyday interaction with their customers. However, for start-up businesses they don’t have much daily interaction, so they must come up with different ways to test their theories on the fly.

The key to making your initial assumptions is to do a “Discovery Test Sessions,” using prospects that can be easily fitted into your smallest market group. However, keep in mind that this part can be a bit tricky because you have no relationship with your prospects.

By joining industry or trade organizations, you’ll find your ideal target customer. Another option is by offering a free sample of your products or beta test relationships to those who are interested to provide feedback.

The most important thing in this step is that you’ll be able to connect and talk to your prospects or your ideal target customers about what they are looking for or what they need. This is one of the most excellent ways for your business to grow and evolve.

4. Perform social listening

If you want to know more about your ideal target customer, doing some social media research and eavesdropping in some conversations is the best way to go.

Joining groups on Facebook and LinkedIn to determine what people are asking and looking for is one of the most effective ways to listen to your ideal target customer.

5. Always evaluate your decisions

Once your able to find your ideal target customer, keep in mind to consider these questions:

• Are there enough customer to fit in my criteria?
• Will my ideal target customer really benefit from what I offer?
• Do I know what drives my ideal target customer to decide?
• Can my ideal target customer afford what I offer?
• Does my message reach my ideal target customer?

Remember to not break down your ideal target customer too far because you can have more than one niche in the market. You must know if you should come up with different marketing message for each niche.

You’ll know that you’ve broken down your ideal target customer too far when you can reach different niches effectively using the same message. If you’ve noticed that you only have 50 people fitting into your criteria, then it’s probably time to reevaluate your target.

Conclusion

It can be true that finding your ideal target customer is one of the hardest parts of creating a marketing strategy but once you know who to target, it would be much easier to figure out what kind of message to use to resonate with them.

For more info on how to find your ideal target customer, download our Brand Identity ebook.

Are you looking help in finding your ideal target customer? Talk to one of our online branding specialists now!