Why is your Ideal Customer Profile so important?
Your Ideal Customer Profile matters
It's no secret that social networks and the Internet are becoming a vehicle where entrepreneurs with small capital can achieve relevant results almost immediately. The digital marketing is an exciting and structured discipline that has some basic principles that must be followed and respected.
One of these principles is to define the ideal customer or your business, also known as buyer persona or customer archetype. In the ocean of the Internet, being specific is the difference between getting results and not getting results.
What is the Buyer persona or customer archetype?
Let's start with the basics. A business exists to provide a solution to a problem that a social group has in common. So a dentist is willing to extract that tooth that bothers you so much, a school is willing to provide education to your little children, and a company is looking for potential employees with the ability to contribute to the company's profitability.
Each target audiences that we have given avobe as examples have completely different characteristics from one another. The way to attract a potential customer for a dental service is going to be completely different from the way to attract a candidate for a position in a company.
The methodology to identify the differential traits of the different potential customer profiles is referred in the digital marketing as a ?buyer persona? or ?customer archetype?.
Let's start by defining the term: a ?buyer persona?, also called a ?customer archetype?, or ?ideal customer? profile is the representation of the theoretical profile of the target audience based on real data.
In order to do so, it is very important to start a research on your potential target audience so you can collect the following information:
- Who already is buying the product or service.
- Who would buy the product or service but not yet.
- Which competitors already sell this product or service.
We have to do the research on them and we will start to see a series of common factors that allow us to identify the ideal customer as a group that we can then offer the solution they are looking for.
To create a buyer persona the most important thing is to ask the right questions, so we must have a script with the right questions. Some of the relevant questions are the:
- Basic demographic information: age, marital status, number of children and ages, etc.
- Educational level.
- Economic activity: employed, self-employed, business owner, unemployed, etc.
- Age range.
- Where they are living.
- Lifestyle: people that likes to play sports, travel, partying, sedentary life, etc.
- What are their concerns that keep them awake at night.
- Identify his motivations,
- What are his professional, personal or business goals.
- What are their objectives, what are their needs at a personal and professional level?
- What are her/his personal life circumstances...
Conclusion
Having a product or service to sell is not enough. The entrepreneur or business owner needs to identify which social group is most likely to consume her/his offer. Identifying the characteristics of the target audience and developing the customer archetype or Buyer Persona is the first key step for an effective marketing strategy.