Do you have the customers you want, or the ones you deserve?

Attracting ideal customers is not easy. It demands a laser focus. Andrew Griffiths shares five ways to define precisely who your ideal customers actually are, and attract more of them.

If you’re anything like me, when you first started to build your business you were grateful for any customer who walked through the door (or inbox). In the early days that’s generally how it works – being selective feels like a luxury.

The problem is that if we don’t start to get selective and targeted with our customers, we get whoever comes our way.

This means we can end up with the customers we deserve, but not necessarily the ones we want.

Cheap is not always cheerful!

One example of this is when we sell ourselves as being cheap. We then attract customers who are looking for cheap. They in turn tell their cheap friends and before you know it, you have a business that struggles to make money because all of your customers are cheap.

And cheap customers tend to not be overly loyal. They are demanding at a level far higher than they are prepared to pay for!

We need to reach a stage where we are clear on the type of customers we want to attract into our business. Making an ‘ideal customer avatar’, is a great way to paint a clear picture of the exact type of customer you want to attract to your business.

How to define your ideal customer

Figuring out who your ideal customer is can sometimes be a little challenging. Here are a few ideas that might help you get more clarity:

1. 1. Go back over your last year’s worth of figures and see which customers have been the most profitable (not those that have spent the most, but those that you have given you the highest profit margins). Clearly we want more of these people or businesses as customers.
   2. Think about every project you did in the last year, which ones were perfect? The customer was great, they paid well, they respected you and your team, in fact everything was perfect. Who were they, what industry were they in, and what made everything go so well? Ask these questions to paint a picture of your ideal customer.
   3. Think about where your business is heading – your goals and dreams. Are your existing customers going to help you achieve these? If not, what are the characteristics of the customers who will help you to get where you want to go?
   4. What products or services are the most profitable for you and the easiest to deliver? Who are the ideal customers to buy these?
   5. What is going on in your industry and what trends are emerging? You need to do some serious research or you may wake up one day and find that you no longer have any customers. Generally there is a lot of information available about trends, big data is churning this information all the time. Use it wisely and plan your future.

Target your marketing

Once you are really clear about who your ideal customers are, and you can define your niche, you can develop your messaging accordingly.

You can start to write targeted content, develop products and services specifically to suit their needs and generally tailor your business to suit whatever it is that your ideal customers want.

This post originally appeared on Flying Solo on 1 August 2019 and was republished 26 January 2022.

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