We caught up with Katie Kattau, Insight Manager at Reach.
With nearly 7 years of experience, Katie ensures our data sets match your target audience, ensuring you connect with the right audience for maximum return on investment. Here, Katie explains all about ‘ideal customer profiles’, and why it’s important to identify what that means to you and your business.
Q: What is an ideal customer profile?
A: An ideal customer profile, sometimes known as a target audience, is a description of the perfect business or customer you want to target for your business. Customers who fit your ideal profile are vital for return on investment as they are more likely to buy, stay loyal to your product, and refer you to other potential buyers.
Q: Why do you need to define your ideal customers?
A: Every business needs to work out its ideal customers (you can have more than one). This is especially important to allow businesses to effectively target their products or services to their target customers, minimising wastage on their marketing budget and customer ‘churn’. It would be a waste of your money if you were to target all people, everywhere, unless you were the government!
You want to ensure you’re pointing your advertising to those who will likely respond or buy from you, which is ultimately your goal!
You might be a start-up, an established business or you might have a new product launching. Either way, you can always revisit your ideal customers as the landscape changes, and as your business changes.
Q: How do you research your ideal customers?
A: So, if you’re an established business, note down your best customers or use a pre-existing CRM system, analyse them, who are they, what are they into, why do they buy your products or use your services?
- Are there any recurring patterns or shared characteristics?
- Is there anything that connects them?
Now, identify their challenges. You can ask them, ideally, your customers’ pain points will be solved by your product or service.
If you’re a new business, have a look at your competitors to learn about who your customers may be.
Q: How do you create your ideal customer?
A: So, where do you start? A template to fill out will really help you navigate creating an ideal customer. There are many on offer, so find which one suits you. Really get into your customers mind and try to avoid a ‘gut’ or ‘hunch’ thought, your findings might be completely different. You can fill out basic demographics, their challenges, a day in the life of, the products/services used.
Make it simple, it doesn’t need to be reams of text and thoughts. Something easily digestible for all employees to understand. Remember this can be used by many teams in your business.
