Grow With Soul: Ep. 86 How To Find Your Ideal Customer
Today I’m doing a deep dive into one of the things I’m asked about most often - identifying your ideal customer. This is one of those things that you know you’re supposed to do, you know it will crack a code for you and help you to know what to do next, yet you always feel like there’s a secret you’re missing and you’ve not quite got it right. If this is something you want to uncover a little more, my new Customer Kit workbook is now available and linked in the show notes, and in this episode, I’m going to take you through the process shared in that Kit.
Here's what we talk about in this episode:
Knowing your customer is fundamental in marketing
Many business problems come from a misunderstanding of the customer
Finding your ideal customer can be separated into 3 parts: identifying, locating, and talking
Find out where your customer comes out to ‘fill up’ and get specific with it
Talk to your customer in the customer-focused approach, it is less about what you want to say and more about what they need to hear
Links we mention:
Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 86 of Grow With Soul.
Today, I’m doing a deep dive into one of the things I’m asked about most often; identifying your ideal customer. This is one of those things that you know you’re supposed to do, you know it will crack a code for you and help you to know what to do next, yet you always feel like there’s a secret you’re missing, and you’ve not quite got it right. If this is something you want to uncover a little more, my new Customer Kit workbook is now available and linked in the show notes, and in this episode I’m going to take you through the process shared in that Kit.
Knowing your customer is a fundamental of marketing. That statement kinda goes without saying, I know, but I think we often underestimate just how fundamental it really is. Fundamentals can often become detached from the actualities of your business; they’re so important that they are theorised about at length, but this can make them something of a tick box exercise that you don’t really properly use. Knowing your customer has far-reaching ramifications in your business, and affects so many different parts that it can be one of your most important tools if you know how to use it.
When I work with clients and students, it is surprising just how many different business problems actually stem from a misunderstanding of the customer. If someone has writer’s block, or they don’t know how to structure their podcast; if they’re not attracting engagement on social media; if their sales copy isn’t get sales or if they’re stumped for an idea about their new product; if they don’t know where to start promoting themselves or what the best channels are for them to use – these are all problems that stem from not being fully in touch with your ideal customer.
If you know what your customer dreams of in life, you can create content that helps them to get there; when you know the kind of thing they’re a sucker for on Instagram, you can make posts that get their attention; when you know what they’re truly struggling with, you can create a product that helps them, and sales copy that proves it to them; if you know how they spend their day, you can know where to put yourself to get in front of them. Likewise, if you’re feeling generally lost and confused and overwhelmed by the options, coming back to the core of who you’re doing this for can be a beacon that guides you through to the right decisions for both of you.
While your business is for you and your joy, it is just as much for your customer. Your business can’t exist without serving others, and so, to be as effective as possible, it needs to be centred on the humans you want to help. This is not to say you become a martyr to them, of course, but that everything you do needs to be structured in line with what your customer needs – and if that doesn’t work for you, then that’s not your ideal customer.
When we talk about “find your ideal customer”, I think about this as actually being three parts: identifying, locating and talking to them. It’s no good identifying your customer if you’re not going to do anything to locate and talk to them, and equally, you don’t know how to talk to them if you haven’t identified and located them (this is where you get that screaming into the void feeling). So rather than thinking “I just need to find my customer”, think about it in those three parts of identify, locate and talk to give you a little more structure to your thinking.
IDENTIFY
Let’s think about identify first. Often, I find that people approach this with a lot of trepidation and a lot of tension: “am I doing this right?”, “it’s too big I can’t start”, “how do I know for sure?”. It feels so big and important and like if you get it wrong your whole business will fail and everyone will know you did it wrong.
The problem with this way of thinking is that it posits the idea that there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and that both are out there for you to find. Really, the opposite is true: there is not a right answer for you to find but a decision for you to make. You get to decide who your ideal customer is. You choose who you want to work with, who you want to help and serve and who is ideal to you. So, let’s get out of the mindset of “finding”, and into the mindset of “deciding”.
When we’re thinking about identifying our target customer, there are certain levels we want to cover. The easiest place to start is with demographic information, so how old they are, where they live, what job they do. Demographics are helpful as an ‘in’ to thinking about this person, to picturing them in your mind, and starting to get focused on your customer base not being “everyone”. However, many people stop at demographics and call it a job done, when really, demographics are a starting point, because there isn’t much you can really do with that information. It’s not going to help you write content that speaks to their soul, create products that are irresistible, or strategise how to position your business.
Once we have an idea in our minds of what this person looks like demographically, we need to go deeper into their soul. What are their goals in life? What’s standing in their way? What do they worry about, what makes them laugh, what do they do on the train? When I talk about knowing your customer this is what I mean by knowing; knowing their insides more than their outsides.
WATERING HOLES
After identifying your ideal customer(s), you’ll likely be wondering how to go about actually finding this person. In the wild, if you want to find an animal you go to their watering hole; a place where they come out into the open to quench their thirst. If you stake out their burrow, then they’re not going to come out because they know something’s off, but they will, at some point, need to go to their watering hole. It’s the same with locating your customer. If you loiter outside their house then it’s very unlikely they’ll come out! But, if you go to the communal places where they go to fill up, you can meet them there on equal footing.
Although, of course, with your customer, I’m not talking about a literal watering hole. In this context, the watering hole is somewhere, online and offline, where they spend time filling up on information and inspiration.
For example, it is easy to say “my customer’s watering hole is Instagram”, and then you turn up at that watering hole with your telephoto lens and you find that this watering hole is an ocean. It is huge, and crowded with thousands upon thousands of animals, and you can’t even begin to locate the one you came to see. So we need to get more specific about that watering hole, to know which section of it to go to. When we scratch deeper and think about what kind of content they like on Instagram, which people and hashtags they follow, then we can start to narrow it down and make sure we’re looking in the right place.
Identifying and finding your customer is only half of the puzzle – you actually have to do something with this information. And what you do is use it to talk to your customer as effectively as possible. This is what I call the customer-focused approach.
THE CUSTOMER-FOCUSED APPROACH
The customer-focused approach is where you approach all of your marketing from the viewpoint of your customer, rather than from yourself. So, rather than a thought process be “I want to promote x product, what can I say about it to get the message across?”, a customer-focused approach thinks “what is my customer thinking and feeling right now, what do they need, what’s enticing to them, and how can I provide that to them in a way that’s valuable and link it to what I do?”. It’s a subtle shift of emphasis from focusing on what you want to say, to what they want to hear.
This helps to capture the attention of your customer because you’re providing content that cuts through the noise of everyone selling to them with something finely tuned to be what they need to see or hear at that moment. Think about what makes you stop your endless scroll, the newsletters you actually read or the kind of Stories you don’t skip – what do they provide that the other things don’t? Something in them spoke to you in a way that made you feel that engaging with that content was worth your time.
In this day and age, with so many distractions, it’s getting attention which is the real job of your marketing – you can sell later, but first you need to actually have their attention, otherwise you’re selling to empty air. The customer-focused approach helps you to pinpoint what your customer uniquely needs in order to pay attention to what you’re saying.
This approach, I find, is also helpful for your own confidence and enjoyment of marketing. No one really likes doing the hard sell – or even saying something remotely salesy! The customer-focused approach takes the pressure off feeling like you “have to” talk about your business and products the whole time. It frees you up to connect with your customer on a more valuable plain, and makes the selling process more intimate and comfortable.
As I said right at the beginning, this episode has been a quick lesson in finding your customer, and if you want to dig deeper into this or you want some help to practically apply it to your business, the Customer Kit has exercises, guided prompts and templates to help you identify, locate and talk to your ideal customer.
