Have Fun Identifying Your Target Audience!

If you’ve spent any time looking at marketing advice before, you’ve probably heard it—know your customer. Know your target audience and speak directly to them. I know it’s common advice, and I also know from my own experience that small business owners constantly underestimate the value of identifying an ideal customer.

Why is that? Well, maybe it feels kind of fluffy to devote time to creating this idea of who would buy your product. Or maybe it just feels like work—lots of work when you have a thousand other things to do. You might wonder if it actually results in increased sales.

Let me tell you that a laser focus on marketing to your ideal customer will benefit your business. Take Lululemon for example. When the company began, they had a clear vision of who they were selling to: “a 32-year-old professional single woman named Ocean who makes $100,000 a year.” This clear focus helped propel the company to the big business it is today.

So how do you make this easier on yourself? How do you focus on defining who your ideal customer is when you have so much to do?

Here are a few ideas. First, lean into it and make it fun. Use the internet to find pictures of what they might look like. Let your imagination run wild dreaming up their typical day, and what they wish their typical day looked like. This is one area you can really let your creative side shine as your flesh out who your ideal customer is.

Second, your target customer doesn’t have to be you, or someone like you. Your goal is to identify the type you love to work with. There are no rules. Let yourself picture exactly who you’d love to spend time doing business with.

Lastly, you may be wondering what kind of questions to ask to define your ideal customer, and where to start. Fortunately, there are a million resources out there already! Rather than reinventing the wheel, I’m going to share one great resource that really helped me. This is a great ten-minute podcast from Kaitlyn Ryan at Marketing Not Magic which has all kinds of questions beyond the usual age/gender/income questions.

Here are a few sample questions to give you a taste:

• What does your prospect’s typical morning look like?
• Work from home? Do they drive? Do they take an Uber?
• What are they listening to?
• What are they drinking/eating?
• What apps are they checking?
• Who, if anything are they caring for?
• What’re they wishing they could make time for?

You can find the podcast here!

In summary, my advice is—have fun with your target audience and get creative imagining them! And if you want to talk about your audience and bounce ideas off someone else, get in touch. I love working through the brainstorming process with clients.