Image by Ed Yourdon on Flickr
I recently posted an article titled Who Are You Marketing To where I talked about the importance of having an ideal customer in mind when creating & marketing your businesses products. I also mentioned that when you have an ideal customer in mind, you need to know everything about them in order to market your product more effectively. That’s where an ideal customer profile comes into play.
Here are 4 reasons why you need an ideal customer profile.
1 – It simplifies your marketing efforts
2 – It identifies who your customer is
3 – It identifies who your customer isn’t
4 – It gives you insight into your customer
Mainly it helps you to understand how to deliver value to your customer. If you don’t know who they are, how will you ever know how to sell them your product?
When you’re creating an ideal customer profile for a product you need to consider the following 2 things: Physical Characteristics & Emotional Characteristics.
Physical Characteristics include things like age, marital status, gender, occupation, employment status, income, & education level.
By knowing your customers physical characteristics you can focus certain parts of your marketing to them based on that information.
Emotional Characteristics include things like values, hobbies, fears, goals, desires, interests, etc.
These characteristics are going to give you an idea about what your customer cares about, about their concerns, & about how they make decisions. All of which help you in marketing to them.
I’ve included a worksheet for you to use in order to identify the above characteristics in your ideal customer. You’ll need to print off one worksheet for each product you offer. Not all products are going to be for the same type of customer. Once you’ve filled out your worksheet, you need to store it where you can access it anytime you’re marketing your product.
You can use your ideal customer profile in several ways.
You can use it when writing your product descriptions, when searching for keywords used to find your product, in answering all questions a customer may have, & in product pricing. You can also use it when you’re trying to find where your ideal customer would be so you can spend your marketing efforts there.
Now go create some ideal customer profiles & start marketing your products to the people who will buy them!
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Hi Meagan, thank you for your great posts about marketing!
You wrote that you had included a worksheet for your readers to use in order to identify the physical and emotional characteristics in their ideal customer. I can’t find a link to this worksheet. Could you please post it and send me the link to it? I’d really like to work with it. Thank you.
Ilka
Thanks for pointing that out Ilka! I’ll definitely get that linked up!!