How to determine who your ideal clients are?
Before you run a marketing campaign for your project, you should know who your ideal clients are. You will be able to target the right customers only if you know who they are. You may have several target markets and so, you should spend time and take the right steps for identifying your ideal customers in every market.
For devising your marketing campaign, you should know the demographics of these customers which means that you should know their Geo location and probably some other details.
Find out what motivates your buyers to buy from you
Your marketing campaign should be determined in such a manner that you are able to smoothly navigate through the expectations and needs of your ideal customers. Some of these people may be buying your products because they may find them useful. A few other people may buy them for overcoming their own problems or frustrations. There may be some other reasons also. The point is that you should know what motivates them to buy your products or services.
You must also know why these people prefer to buy from you rather than buying from your competitors. This is for knowing what unique qualities they find in your products/services or in your brand or in what respect, your products/services provide value to them.
Finding your ideal clients
Having a large client base may be the aim, but the quality of those customers is the key factor that determines the success. For example, you may have customers who purchase occasionally from you and there may be customers who make regular purchases also. There may be customers who take a lot of time to make their purchasing decisions. Even after making initial inquiries from you, they may not respond immediately. Your ideal customers are those who make regular purchases and who may not delay confirming their purchasing decisions.
Being an entrepreneur, you should utilize your resources optimally. Squandering your time, money, energy and other resources may prove to be detrimental. You will be better off if you use your resources to target those customers who are likely to be your regular customers and who may not hog your time which is one of the most valuable resources. You should devise your targeting campaign so as to have more number of people who want your product/service instead of blindly doing aggressive marketing for expanding your client base.
The best way to identify them
Your order book is the most valuable document that has to be closely examined for identifying them. You cannot assume that those people who have made the highest purchases are your perfect customers. A customer for whom you have spent your minimum resources and who has contributed to a significant extent for your turnover is an ideal customer. You should ask the following questions for finding such perfect customers.
What is the quantum of each purchase they have made?
Did the sale happen without hassles?
How much after-sales care has the client expected or asked for?
Is the client a repeat-customer?
Does the customer spread word about your project?
You must find out the answers for these questions and you should rate your customers based on these answers. You should make a list of those who have got the highest ratings and they are your ideal clients.
If you delve deep and study your findings, you may find a few patterns or traits among those customers whom you have identified as perfect people for your project. This ‘demographic profiling’ of these people may help you know their age group, their gender, geographical location, social class and so on. But you may have to undertake this study periodically because it is a dynamic process. There may be a number of other traits also but for the sake of simplicity, you can narrow them down and categorize them based on these traits.
Identify the right jungle and hunt in it
The latest statistics say that about 1.19 billion people use Facebook, 500 million people regularly tweet and about 629 million people use other sites like LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. You cannot assume that this entire multitude of people will become your clients. Therefore, it is necessary to know the ‘right jungle’ where you have to hunt. Only by knowing the traits of your ideal customers, you can devise the right targeting strategies.
Advantages of using the right targeting methods
Though there are number of advantages, the main advantage is that it will be easy for you to write the right marketing message that will appeal to these people.
Since you know when, where and how they can be impressed, you can also adopt suitable strategies to target them.
Another main benefit you can derive is that the expenses of your advertising campaigns will be less but your conversion rates will go up. This is because you will be targeting only them.
Dynamic Process
Though you may be adopting the right strategies for targeting your ideal audience, you should make periodical reviews of your strategies to evaluate their success rates. This will help you make suitable amends to them. Similarly, you should review the ways you adopt for identifying your ideal audience also. In other words, you should put in place a dynamic process with which you can keep adopting the right ways to target the right audience.
You must never forget the fact that people’s tastes and behaviors are constantly undergoing changes and so, the way you analyze the demographic data of your audience should also be suitably modified. A dynamic process alone will help you identify your perfect audience and keep current with what they need.