Your Customer Is NOT Everyone
I am a cappuccino drinker. Heat of summer, depths of winter, if at all possible I start every morning with a cappuccino.
If you sell morning tea, I am not your customer. If you offer me a trial taste at the store, I’ll say no. If you get in my insta feed, I’ll scroll by. Even if Oprah says it’s great, I’m not going to start being a morning tea person.
But what if you sell an awesome cappuccino maker? Tell me! Tell me! I want to know all about it, every single feature. I want to try it out. I want the 3D video. I am definitely your customer.
If you are an entrepreneur with limited time and resources (which is pretty much all of us), doesn’t it make sense (and wouldn’t it be a lot more fun), to focus your marketing on people who are more likely to be your buyers? This is the whole idea behind getting really specific about your target customer and focusing on a niche.
The Benefits of Being REALLY Specific About Your Ideal Customer
1. It lets you focus your finite resources.
Let’s go back to our tea example. If you are marketing to everyone, you’ll have to place your ads in “Coffee Talk”, “Soda World” and “Tea Leaves Today” (yes I made those up, but stay with me). But if you focus just on the existing tea drinkers, you could triple your ad spend with “Tea Leaves Today”. Sure, when your business grows big and you’ve saturated the morning tea market, you can start spending money to try to convince the coffee drinkers and soda drinkers to switch. But why would you start there? It’s so much easier (and economical) to start with the people who already drink tea.
2. It’s easier to break through the noise.
It’s way easier to get someone to pay attention if you start your pitch (or instagram post or website) with “Hey Morning Tea Drinker!” rather than “Hey Everybody”. Our brains are really good at filtering out information that doesn’t apply to us. As a consumer, I’m not really that interested in what you have to say to “everybody”, but if I’m a Morning Tea Drinker you’ve got my attention because you’re talking right to me.
3. It lets you create deeper relationships.
If you build your business around morning tea drinkers, you can focus on meeting their needs and interests. You might discover they drink morning tea because their doctor told them they had to stop drinking coffee. Or they don’t like coffee. Or they don’t like products with more than 3 letters. Whatever. The more they identify as a morning tea drinker and the more you say “I am the company for morning tea drinkers” the closer you come to building a deeply loyal community around your brand. And do you know what deeply loyal communities do? They buy more of your stuff and they tell their morning tea drinker friends.
4. The more you can customize the more you can charge.
There’s no way to create a highly specialized product for everyone. But if you provide an organic, green, exotic morning tea that’s ideal for people who have a hard time getting out of bed (and it solves their problem), morning tea drinkers who have a hard time getting out of bed are going to be delighted to pull out their credit cards for your solution.
How to Get Specific About Your Ideal Customer
So now that you know the benefits of being specific about your customer, let’s talk about how to do it Here are three exercises you can do to triangulate around developing your target audience niche.
1. Look at your data
- Who are your repeat customers? What do they have in common?
- Who are the customers that spend the most money with you?
- Where do your referrals come from?
2. Look at the Market (a few close competitors or similar businesses)
- Look at the language they use on their website and in their social media – who are they trying to attract?
- Look at their lead magnets if any – who are they trying to interest?
- Look at the colors and imagery they use, what do they tell you about who they want to be part of their community?
3. Reflect
- Who are the customers or clients you like to work with the most?
- Who do you think your product or service helps the most?
- Who do you think needs your product or service the most?
I will add that when answering the last two questions in the Reflect section, I highly recommend you go out and talk to some of these kinds of people because it’s really easy to make up answers in your head that may not reflect reality. (And no, Chat GPT can’t read their minds either). If you’re not sure what to ask, you can check out my other posts on the topic here and here.
Wrap Up
- Narrowing down who your target customer is won’t hurt your business. In fact, it will likely save you time and money, help you create a stronger brand and possibly let you charge a higher price.
- If you’re not sure who your audience should be, look at your existing customers, see who the competition is targeting (and potentially pick another segment), and talk to customers who represent the various segments and see who gets most excited about your offer.
This post is part of a series: 8 Secrets for Designing Offers People Want to Buy
