Share this
Defining Your Ideal Customer: 4 Important Questions to Ask Yourself
by Anthony Zuccaro on Fri, Jul 10, 2020 @ 10:30
Synchronizing Sales & Marketing
How can you expect to increase sales if your marketing and sales are not aligned? At SyncShow, we’re passionate about helping businesses with their sales and marketing alignment needs with SaleSync™, a strategic process that includes detailed profiles of your target audience, complete with pain points, goals, objectives, where they can be found online and the ideal marketing messages that will appeal to them.
Developing a target audience upfront that includes demographics, pain points, goals and objectives helps marketers target their efforts to attract the right prospects for the sales team.
Defining Your Ideal Customer
Defining your ideal customer allows your team to understand who you want to work with and what types of customers are set up to work best with you to yield the best results. Rather than taking a general target market approach, you can look to your existing customers and their behaviors. By asking yourself these questions, you’ll be able to hone in on who your ideal customer is and how you can focus your marketing efforts to attract more customers just like them!
1. What Are Their Demographics?
To start identifying your target audience, you need to start broad and narrow it down from there. Asking the questions below will create a foundation for your team to filter out potential customers and start honing in on your ideal customer. It will also help you to better formulate your messaging by understanding what industry they come from and what unique factors make this specific customer great to work with.
- Are they a B2B business or a B2C?
- What industry are they in?
- How many years have they been in business?
- What does their revenue look like?
- What are they searching for online?
- What makes them want to look for a solution to a problem?
2. What Are Their Problems?
This is one of the most important questions to answer when analyzing current and potential customers. This answer will give you a better idea of what challenges they’re facing and how your company can be their best solution. Knowing their hurdles will allow your team to create more targeted content that the customer finds beneficial. Without the targeted content, they might view your emails or blog posts as spam and disregard them because they’re not relevant to what they’re experiencing. Remember, don’t sell them something, solve their problems.
- What are your customer’s biggest challenges?
- What tools does your customer need to solve their problems?
- How can your company be part of its solution?
3. What Type of Content Do They Like?
Oftentimes when creating content for our customers, we think about what we personally like to engage with, but your team should be focusing on how your customers want to be served the content. To do this, start relying on data. Tracking metrics from current ideal customers such as email open rates, social media engagements and blog pageviews is a great place to start when identifying what your potential ideal customers enjoy most. Based on that data, your team can create targeted content that resonates with who you are trying to reach!
- Do they like videos?
- Educational content?
- Blogs?
- Email?
- Social media?
4. What Is Your Relationship Like?
The relationship you have with a customer and how you work with them is the foundation for showing them how your company provides value. If your ideal customers are smaller companies where the CEO is the main point of contact, you can begin to target CEOs in all of your messaging.
Another example could be if your company excels when working with a customer that embraces your work and tackles challenges alongside you. By identifying that strength of your company, your team can begin to shape communications around it and stress that you will be like a member of their team! Being able to make these distinctions will set you up to go after prospects that will be similar to the customers you already love working with. Ask your team the following:
- Are you in contact with their CEO?
- Do you communicate like you are part of their company?
- Do they treat you as a resource and call you into action when needed?
- Are you able to prove your company’s value?
Set up a time to talk with your team to see who they view as an ideal customer and why. By asking the questions listed above, you can begin identifying what types of customers your company works best with. When you know you’re a good fit to work with a potential customer, the customer will easily see value in your team’s work!
Share this
- Inbound Marketing (126)
- Manufacturing (82)
- Lead Generation (70)
- Website Design & Development (58)
- Social Media (46)
- Online Brand Strategy (38)
- eCommerce (33)
- B2B Marketing (30)
- Digital Marketing (28)
- Expert Knowledge (28)
- Company Culture (22)
- Content Marketing (16)
- Customer Experience (15)
- Metrics & ROI (15)
- Search Engine Optimization (15)
- Marketing and Sales Alignment (12)
- Transportation and Logistics (10)
- Content Marketing Strategy (9)
- Email Marketing (9)
- SyncShow (9)
- Digital Sales (8)
- Lead Nurturing (8)
- Digital Content Marketing (7)
- General (7)
- Mobile (7)
- Brand Awareness (6)
- Digital Marketing Data (4)
- Video Marketing (4)
- LinkedIn (3)
- Professional Services (3)
- Transportation Insights (3)
- Demand Generation (2)
- High Performing Teams (2)
- News (2)
- PPC (2)
- SEO (2)
- SSI Delivers (2)
- Synchronized Inbound (2)
- Value Proposition (2)
- Account-Based Marketing (1)
- Facebook (1)
- In-House Vs. Outsourced Marketing (1)
- Instagram (1)
- KPI (1)
- Marketing Automation (1)
- Networking (1)
- Paid Media (1)
- Retargeting (1)
- StoryBrand (1)
- Storytelling (1)
- November 2024 (4)
- October 2024 (4)
- September 2024 (4)
- August 2024 (4)
- July 2024 (1)
- June 2024 (1)
- May 2024 (4)
- April 2024 (1)
- March 2024 (3)
- January 2024 (2)
- December 2023 (4)
- November 2023 (3)
- October 2023 (1)
- September 2023 (4)
- August 2023 (3)
- July 2023 (2)
- June 2023 (2)
- August 2022 (2)
- July 2022 (2)
- June 2022 (1)
- March 2022 (2)
- February 2022 (1)
- January 2022 (2)
- October 2021 (1)
- June 2021 (1)
- May 2021 (1)
- March 2021 (1)
- December 2020 (1)
- October 2020 (2)
- September 2020 (1)
- August 2020 (3)
- July 2020 (3)
- June 2020 (4)
- May 2020 (2)
- April 2020 (3)
- March 2020 (9)
- February 2020 (5)
- January 2020 (6)
- December 2019 (5)
- November 2019 (7)
- October 2019 (6)
- September 2019 (8)
- August 2019 (5)
- July 2019 (5)
- June 2019 (3)
- May 2019 (2)
- April 2019 (1)
- March 2019 (2)
- February 2019 (1)
- January 2019 (2)
- November 2018 (1)
- October 2018 (1)
- September 2018 (1)
- August 2018 (1)
- May 2018 (2)
- March 2018 (1)
- November 2017 (1)
- October 2017 (1)
- September 2017 (1)
- August 2017 (2)
- July 2017 (2)
- May 2017 (1)
- April 2017 (1)
- February 2017 (1)
- January 2017 (1)
- December 2016 (1)
- November 2016 (8)
- October 2016 (7)
- September 2016 (2)
- August 2016 (2)
- July 2016 (6)
- June 2016 (3)
- May 2016 (4)
- April 2016 (6)
- March 2016 (6)
- February 2016 (7)
- January 2016 (7)
- December 2015 (6)
- November 2015 (2)
- October 2015 (3)
- September 2015 (2)
- August 2015 (4)
- July 2015 (9)
- June 2015 (9)
- May 2015 (8)
- April 2015 (8)
- March 2015 (9)
- February 2015 (7)
- January 2015 (8)
- December 2014 (7)
- November 2014 (7)
- October 2014 (5)
- September 2014 (4)
- August 2014 (4)
- July 2014 (5)
- June 2014 (4)
- May 2014 (5)
- April 2014 (4)
- March 2014 (7)
- February 2014 (9)
- January 2014 (7)
- August 2013 (2)
- July 2013 (4)
- June 2013 (6)
- May 2013 (7)
- April 2013 (7)
- March 2013 (8)
- February 2013 (5)
- January 2013 (7)
- December 2012 (4)
- November 2012 (4)
- October 2012 (2)
- September 2012 (1)
- July 2012 (1)
- April 2012 (4)
- March 2012 (5)
- February 2012 (2)
- January 2012 (3)
- November 2011 (1)
- May 2011 (3)
- April 2011 (1)
- March 2011 (1)
- February 2011 (1)
- December 2010 (2)
- November 2010 (3)
- August 2010 (1)
- July 2010 (1)
- May 2010 (2)
- April 2010 (1)
- January 2010 (1)