When you are just starting out, you take the customers that you can get – but at some point, you have to switch to the customers you want. Here is a quick primer on how to use the attributes of your existing customers to define your ideal customer profile.
Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can target them and scale your business – but if you don’t define your ideal customer attributes, you could waste a lot of money and time!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hey. It’s Tim.
Welcome to the Marketing Minute. Today I want to talk about your initial batch of customers when you’re a startup company, a small company, a small agency. You end up with these customers that may not be ideal. These are the customers that you can get. These are customers that maybe you have a relationship with them already. It could be your old boss. It could be your sister’s cousin’s friend’s dogs walker. But there’s somebody who is attached to you or someone in your business. These are not necessarily your ideal customers. But in order to scale your business, in order to really make it grow, you’re going to need to create relationships with people who are outside of that circle of influence. But before you can do that, you need to know which companies outside of the circle of influence that you want to target or which customers you want to target.
The thing to do is to take apart the customers that you already have and to find the parts of them that you like, the parts that resonate with you. It could be their industry. It could be the way that they sell, whether B2B or B2C, they sell online or offline. It could be their company size, whether they’re a big company, a small comp. Take each one of these attributes and essentially put them in a list. Once you’ve got this list, you need to start to think of this list as maybe a description of a personal ad. That you like companies that are under $50 million in sales, that are located in the North East that sell to consumers.
As you start telling yourself a story around these attributes, you’ll start building a picture of that ideal customer in your head. Once you do that, then you can create and execute marketing plans to drive and scale your business. But it’s crucially important that you know who you want to sell to before you start spending marketing dollars. Because if you start spending without knowing the desired results, you’re going to waste your money and that impedes your growth.
This is Tim with the Marketing Minute. Thanks.
