Defining Your Ideal Customer: 4 Important Questions to Ask Yourself

Synchronizing Sales & Marketing

How can you expect to increase sales if your marketing and sales are not aligned? At SyncShow, we’re passionate about helping businesses with their sales and marketing alignment needs with SaleSync™, a strategic process that includes detailed profiles of your target audience, complete with pain points, goals, objectives, where they can be found online and the ideal marketing messages that will appeal to them.

Developing a target audience upfront that includes demographics, pain points, goals and objectives helps marketers target their efforts to attract the right prospects for the sales team.

Defining Your Ideal Customer

Defining your ideal customer allows your team to understand who you want to work with and what types of customers are set up to work best with you to yield the best results. Rather than taking a general target market approach, you can look to your existing customers and their behaviors. By asking yourself these questions, you’ll be able to hone in on who your ideal customer is and how you can focus your marketing efforts to attract more customers just like them! 

1. What Are Their Demographics?

To start identifying your target audience, you need to start broad and narrow it down from there. Asking the questions below will create a foundation for your team to filter out potential customers and start honing in on your ideal customer. It will also help you to better formulate your messaging by understanding what industry they come from and what unique factors make this specific customer great to work with.

• Are they a B2B business or a B2C?
• What industry are they in?
• How many years have they been in business?
• What does their revenue look like?
• What are they searching for online?
• What makes them want to look for a solution to a problem?

2. What Are Their Problems?

This is one of the most important questions to answer when analyzing current and potential customers. This answer will give you a better idea of what challenges they’re facing and how your company can be their best solution. Knowing their hurdles will allow your team to create more targeted content that the customer finds beneficial. Without the targeted content, they might view your emails or blog posts as spam and disregard them because they’re not relevant to what they’re experiencing. Remember, don’t sell them something, solve their problems.

• What are your customer’s biggest challenges?
• What tools does your customer need to solve their problems?
• How can your company be part of its solution?

3. What Type of Content Do They Like?

Oftentimes when creating content for our customers, we think about what we personally like to engage with, but your team should be focusing on how your customers want to be served the content. To do this, start relying on data. Tracking metrics from current ideal customers such as email open rates, social media engagements and blog pageviews is a great place to start when identifying what your potential ideal customers enjoy most. Based on that data, your team can create targeted content that resonates with who you are trying to reach! 

• Do they like videos?
• Educational content?
• Blogs?
• Email?
• Social media?

4. What Is Your Relationship Like?

The relationship you have with a customer and how you work with them is the foundation for showing them how your company provides value. If your ideal customers are smaller companies where the CEO is the main point of contact, you can begin to target CEOs in all of your messaging. 

Another example could be if your company excels when working with a customer that embraces your work and tackles challenges alongside you. By identifying that strength of your company, your team can begin to shape communications around it and stress that you will be like a member of their team! Being able to make these distinctions will set you up to go after prospects that will be similar to the customers you already love working with. Ask your team the following:

• Are you in contact with their CEO?
• Do you communicate like you are part of their company?
• Do they treat you as a resource and call you into action when needed?
• Are you able to prove your company’s value?

Set up a time to talk with your team to see who they view as an ideal customer and why. By asking the questions listed above, you can begin identifying what types of customers your company works best with. When you know you’re a good fit to work with a potential customer, the customer will easily see value in your team’s work!