To put it simply, we’re all in business to make money – and in order to do that we need more customers, right? But, as famous strategist and best-selling author Seth Godin said, everyone is not your customer!
His point is that all businesses have a target audience. Not everyone will need or want your products or services, and that is totally OK – you can’t be everything to everybody, so don’t try. What’s important is to find more of the audience who does want to buy from you, and this is only possible if you first understand who your existing customers are.
Do you know who your most valuable customer is? Do you know which channel drives the most enquiries for your business?
These are two of the most important questions any business owner should be frequently asking themselves regardless of the sector they operate in.
Customer data is crucial
You should already be collecting valuable information about your customers in an internal database – where they found you, how they made initial contact, what they bought from you, when, and the value of their purchases.
Ideally you should be beefing up this record of information with some rich demographic data that tells you a bit more about them as a person (age, profession, income, family status, for example). If you want further detail about the types of information you can discover and the top three ways to find out who your customer is, take a look at my blog on how to do customer profiling.
Identify trends
You need to be analysing this data frequently, as it will start to paint a picture for you to answer those two questions I asked earlier.
It should help you to identify trends so you can clearly see the type of customer that enquires the most and the type of customer that converts the most. Do their customer profiles match? Are they the same type of customer demographic? Did they come from the same channel? Do they purchase the same type of product or service and what is the lifetime value of each customer?
This type of information is GOLD DUST to a business owner or marketing director as it enables you to build up an accurate profile of your key customer groups, which helps you make informed decisions about where you invest your future marketing efforts.
Create customer personas
When you have rich information about your customers, you’re able to go one step further and create visual customer personas. It pulls together all your data trends into human form, so you and everyone else in your business can understand and identify them more easily.
Each persona should be reflective of a group of customers – they should not be detailed descriptions of any one particular person, but they should represent your most common customer ‘types’, informed by the patterns in your data.
Look at the information you’ve collected about your most valuable customers and group them by what they have in common, such as age range, income level, profession, how they use technology etc. Most companies find they have three or four different customer personas.
Now give each one a name and find a stock image of someone who resembles the type of person you’ve built. For example, Clare and Steven: they’re a professional couple aged between 38 and 44. They have two teenage children and live in a detached mortgage-owned home in the suburbs. They have high levels of disposable income and enjoy expensive holidays abroad. From working full-time and looking after the children they have a busy lifestyle and are time poor. They are quick to own new technology, they’re active users of social media and subscribe to Sky TV and Netflix, and they use online shopping and banking.
These are your ideal customers – you know these types of people have bought from you before.
Find more customers
By creating personas, you’ve narrowed down your customer search into just a handful of ‘people’ and identified where they spend their time, what interests them, and how they are motivated – so now you can go and find more of them!
You can use your knowledge to target these types of customers in the places you know they typically hang out, and you can use specific messaging that you know resonates with that audience.
Going back to Clare and Steven, if we wanted to target customers like them we know they are high internet users and very active on social media, so a mix of Facebook/Instagram advertising and organic social content would be better than running an advert in their local paper, as they wouldn’t have the time to sit and read the paper.
If you know from your analysis that some of your most profitable customers came from word of mouth recommendations, then you should consider offering a referral incentive scheme to encourage more existing customers to refer you to their friends and family.
You can also use your enquiry data to fine tune your marketing. If you get lots of leads from Facebook, for example, but none have converted into customers, this should prompt you to either change your messaging, or stop investing as much time and money into that channel.
In today’s economic climate, we can’t afford to waste money on campaigns that don’t generate results, which is why customer profiling and data analysis is such an important part of the marketing process.
How well do you know your customer? Do you need help defining your ideal customer? My customer co-ordinates service will do all the hard work for you. Contact me about undertaking your customer profiling and I’ll provide you with clear data and personas to help you find more customers.
