Working on customer engagement and outreach is an important part of any brand strategy, and is guaranteed to boost sales as well as brand awareness.
One of the main goals of your outreach strategy should be identifying your ideal customer. Understanding consumers’ buying habits, from the start of their purchasing journey through to buying a product or service, enables you to develop customer engagement and outreach marketing strategies more accurately. Indeed, recent Feefo research into consumer behavior found that many customers seriously deliberate before they decide on a product or service.
A customer who already has interests aligned with your brand’s products and services is more likely to become a repeat customer and share your brand with others. Once you’ve started working with your ideal customer, you may find you invest less time in attracting new customers and spreading information because your customer base already has a good understanding of your mission.
If you’re wondering how to find your ideal customer, we’ve put together 5 effective ways to get you started.
How to find your ideal customer
Understand your existing customers
When identifying your ideal customer, the best place to start is by analysing your current customer base.
Whether you’re a local company or an e-commerce site, understanding key data about your customers is vital, especially if most of them share certain criteria.
For example, basic data – age range, industry, income level and location – enables you to quickly narrow down your ideal customer base and target market. However, you shouldn’t overlook factors like customer interests, occupation and favorite brands as they’ll give you a deeper understanding of your ideal customer’s priorities.
If you don’t have this information, conducting a customer survey is a really effective way to learn more about your customers and can boost brand awareness, too! For more in-depth data, consider creating a customer focus group where you can work more closely with your customers. Another benefit of focus groups is being able to establish brand ambassadors who will champion your products or services.
Ultimately, understanding more about who your customers are will enable you to meet your customer’s wants and needs, predict their future shopping habits more accurately, enable you to better plan your ongoing product or service development as well as strategies more effectively.
Learn how customers find your brand
Pinpointing how and when consumers find your brand will give you a better understanding of your customer’s habits. Once you know this, your customer engagement and outreach strategies can be adapted to attract and communicate with your ideal customer.
Knowing whether your clients are attracted by your storefront, traditional advertising or they found you through social channels allows you to streamline your approach to marketing so that it targets the right audience.
For example, if your clients are predominantly social media users, you can adapt your marketing plans and invest more in online activity. Consider adopting cross-promotional strategies aligned to your customer’s interests and spending habits.
Don’t be afraid to be innovative here; your customers are far more likely to remember and respond to a unique marketing campaign than a more generic offering, especially if they’re part of your ideal customer base.
Use a buyer’s perspective
When developing your marketing strategies, it’s important to remember your customer’s perspective.
Most consumers like to research the brands they are interested in to ensure they are making a well-informed buying decision. Therefore, by understanding your customer’s needs and wants, you’ll be able to more effectively demonstrate why your company is the right fit, i.e. your product or service will either solve their problem or meet their desires.
Start by asking yourself what are your clients needs? How does your product or service meets or even exceed that need? In what way does your product help to solve your customer’s issue or problem? How can you exceed their expectations?
By identifying why people decide to purchase your product or service, you can ensure your brand messaging demonstrates exactly how your product will benefit them, and your marketing strategies can target those customers with key needs.
Understand purchasing habits
One of the best indicators of who your ideal customer is the activity of your repeat clients.
Consider who your repeat customers are and what prompts them to purchase consistently from you. Is your product or service something that people purchase periodically? Are people stocking up on your product monthly or using your service every week? Are your customers influenced by promotions, discounts, offers or seasonal releases?
Knowing when your customers are likely to purchase or repurchase from your company will not only allow you to predict sales, it will also enable you to plan production and develop personalized outreach strategies for specific customer groups.
Define your own goals
Investing in your brand messaging is always money well-spent. If you aren’t clear on your own company goals, your brand awareness, customer engagement and outreach activity will not be aligned with your customers’ needs and wants, making it harder to build relationships and communicate effectively with current customers, as well as attract new consumers.
Analyse your previous marketing campaigns; what worked, what didn’t work and decide which were the most successful. Consider the different kinds of language and imagery you used, and why some content and images appealed to your customers more than others.
Consider updating your website and storefronts to keep them aligned with your marketing goals and strategies. These spaces are where you’ll interact with your customers the most so ensure your messaging is clear and concise. Make sure your customers can easily and quickly find information on how your product or service can benefit them.
Feedback is crucial to developing the right message and brand awareness campaigns. Whether you use a feedback platform, like Feefo, or in-house, always encourage your customers to leave feedback on your products and services, your customer service and delivery options, and other aspects of your business.
Never shy away from listening and responding to your customers, good and bad; whilst you can’t meet everyone’s ideal scenario or solve everyone’s problem, by responding to feedback, your customers will feel that you have listened – you have created an engaged customer.
Finding Your Ideal Customer
Are you ready to find your ideal customer base?
Finding your ideal customer base goes beyond simply understanding who uses your services and why. It allows you to develop a better understanding of how people discover your brand, the impressions they have of your company and how you can exceed their expectations.
In turn, this information will enable you to invest in more effective marketing campaigns, streamline your brand messaging and generate a higher number of repeat customers.
Directing the right message toward the right people will have a much higher return on investment than a more generic approach – taking the time to identify your ideal customer is certainly worthwhile.