I resolve to find my ideal customer and start speaking their language.

Your brand is not about you, your brand is about your customers...and not just any customer, your ideal customer. It’s so important for you to discover who your ideal customer is and start speaking to them.

We’ve outlined some steps below to help you get started.

1. Identify who your ideal customer is.

Your ideal customer is the customer who is most highly predictive of your brand's success. The person who will bring in the most amount of revenue over time because he or she has so strongly bought-in to your brand experience.

To identify your ideal customer, ask yourself these questions:

• Who will keep buying from us again and again?

• Who will become our brand champion?

• Who will express irrational brand loyalty?

• Who will submit positive reviews?

2. Create your ideal customer profile. 

Now take it a bit further. Close your eyes and conjure up a vivid image of who the perfect person is to buy your brand. Who are they? How old are they? Are they male or female? Married or single? What is their income? Conjure up an image of who that person is, and write down everything you can think of. Once you’ve written down everything you can think of, dig deeper.

Continue to go through the process of envisioning who this person is and what their life looks like. Write it all down. Even draw a picture of them.

3. Discover your ideal customer’s needs. 

Once you’ve created this ideal customer profile, the next step is to think about that person’s needs. This is the hardest part; this is the part where you have to really dig in.

Understanding your ideal customer in depth enables you to understand what that person needs most from you and your brand. By getting inside the head of your ideal customer, you’re able to extract the story that the customer wants to tell themselves and the world about who they are. Eventually you’ll get a clear image of who your ideal customer is and, ultimately, whom your brand is for.

4. Complete the ideal customer exercise. 

This is great, but how do you actually do it? How do you figure out who your ideal customer is?

We recommend our Ideal Customer Profile Exercise. Ideally this is done in a group brainstorming session with the staff in your company who are most involved in customer-facing roles.

Don’t just invite the top executives! Often it’s your salespeople, customer service reps, returns processors and delivery drivers who are closest to the customers. They actually know more about your customers than your marketing team ever could.

What I’d recommend is bringing a group together with a big roll of butcher paper and dividing up into smaller groups to answer the following questions:

• Who is our ideal customer?

• What does their average day look like?

• What are the needs they’re looking to fulfill?

5. Outline marketing strategies for your ideal customer.

Once you’ve discovered exactly who your ideal customer is, the next step is to create marketing strategies to gain the interest of this customer. Everything you do in your marketing should always focus on your ideal customer, because they are your target audience.

We love helping clients figure out their ideal customers and “ah-ha’s” about them. Feel free to reach out below, we'd love to help you as well.