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I’m going to make a pretty big claim right now and say that ideal customer work can make or break the success of your business. And there are a lot of different reasons for that. I’m going to cover those in today’s blog and I’m also going to share with you how to conduct better market research.
We no longer needed to get on the phone with individual people every 90 days. We don’t always have the time and the capacity for that. Now I’m not saying that that’s not a good strategy, but there are other more effective ways to do ideal customer research that is actually going to help you in the long run with your marketing.
There are two things that we do really well over here at Brandmerry and that is helping you build a personal brand around you and your story and teaching you how to market very effectively, to have incoming leads for brand awareness, and ultimately converting them to paying clients. More income, more impact. That is our goal.
And both of those categories rely on ideal customer research.
I know you’ve heard about the ideal customer avatar. You might even be at a place where you’re like I’m so sick of this work. I get it. And I hope that at the end of this blog, you’re feeling revamped, re-energized, and you have a new strategy to get the feedback and the information that you need to totally elevate your branding and your marketing.
So why is ideal customer work so important?
Well, at the end of the day, you have a business. You’re selling to someone and you better know who the heck they are or they’re not going to buy from you. As I’ve mentioned, ideal customer work plays a role in both branding and marketing.
So from a branding side, we want to focus on ideal customer work to really understand who your customer is at their core. Understanding what their big problems are, their struggles, their goals, their aspirations is incredible information.
You can even use ideal customer work to find out what social media platforms they’re hanging out on, where they get most of their information and other people that they look to for advice in your industry.
The branding work and ideal customer work can help you set a very strong foundation for your brand and your business moving forward.
Once you know who your ideal customer is, it’s much easier to craft your offer to serve them at the highest level.
You can craft better messaging, which has got to play a role in your website copy and your marketing. You’re also able to better understand emotional branding, which I talk about in this video right here, where I share a little bit more on how we make our audience feel and the connection that we create.
In addition to that, one of the things that play a huge role in branding is the art of storytelling. And in order to tell great stories as a business owner, you’ve got to know who you’re telling those stories to. It’s not enough to just share stories to share stories. We want to share stories that are going to motivate our audience to take action, aka buy our product or our service.
So from a branding perspective, ideal customer research is so important because it’s going to set the foundation for everything that you’re going to create in your business.
From a marketing perspective, it’s all about content.
When you’re thinking of content, you want to make sure that you’re thinking of content that not only attracts new people to your community but also moves them through the client buying journey.
I talk about that entire journey, that entire process in this video right here.
It’s really important that you understand that your content is there to not only let people know who you are, build that brand awareness, pull them in and attract them, but ultimately connect with them, leading to the sale.
It’s so important to understand who you’re talking to and ultimately who your business is for.
KEY ELEMENTS TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER
I want to share with you some updated strategies for doing your ideal customer work. But before I do that, let’s talk about some of the key elements that you need to understand about your ideal customer.
TIP #1: IDENTIFY DEMOGRAPHICS
I recommend that you start broad and then narrow it down a bit as you go.
So this stage is all about the demographic. These are the things that you know about the person that you ultimately want to work with or who your product and service are ultimately for. Depending on where you’re at in your business, you might have more information about this individual or you might have nothing.
At this stage you want to think about the individual people who AREN’T the right fit for your brand, ultimately starting to narrow it down.
One of the ways to do this is to focus on things like demographics.
What do we know about this person?
Is this person just graduating from college?
Is this person a working mother?
Who is this person?
And I’m not recommending that you have to focus on men or women or mothers or not mothers, but those are some of the things to start considering.
What do you know about the individual that you want to work with? The offer that you’re ultimately creating, who is it really designed for?
This information is going to help you narrow it down from everyone, which is not an ideal customer, to getting a little bit more specific.
TIP #2: ANSWER THE TOP QUESTIONS
Then the next thing you want to do is answer a few top questions.
Every single business has to solve a problem. This is actually part of the niching down process.
If you don’t solve a problem, you’re going to have a really hard time selling anything. And just so we’re clear every product, every service can solve a problem. It’s your job to figure out what that problem is and narrow it down really specific to your ideal customer.
So let’s say that my target market is new moms and I sell a program that teaches you how to tidy up your house. The problem is that new moms don’t have a lot of time in their schedules. They’re tired of a messy house. It’s overwhelming. It’s weighing on their shoulders, not speaking from experience at all. And they want to understand better strategies to keep it maintained if you will. Keep their sanity.
So the problem is that they want to be able to tidy up their home in a limited amount of time. And they don’t understand exactly how to do that.
Every single thing comes down to a problem.
What is the problem that your ideal customer is facing?
How are they feeling about that problem? Where are they now?
This is incredibly helpful with marketing because it allows you to connect with your ideal customer and allows them to feel seen, heard and understood.
So they’ve got these current struggles, they’ve got these pain points, they have this problem. What do they ultimately want?
If they resolve this problem, what does life look like for them? Do they suddenly get to make their eggs in 10 seconds and stop cursing every morning at their pan that keeps sticking?
You want to understand what the core problem is, where they are now, and what those pain points and struggles are.
How would they describe that to you and where do they ultimately want to be?
Why haven’t they solved the problem yet? Why haven’t they done it on their own or with another product or service? What are some of the things that they’re specifically looking for that they haven’t found?
Another thing that you can start to explore is the objections.
I find that these are incredibly helpful for service-based entrepreneurs. If someone hasn’t solved their problem just yet, they probably have some obstacles standing in their way.
What are some mindset pieces that they have? Maybe they think they don’t have enough time to do the work. Maybe they think that they don’t have the energy or the capacity to take on something else.
What are those objections? These are incredibly helpful when it comes to selling your product or your service. If you can understand these obstacles and the objections your ideal customer is going through, then you can use that in your marketing.
So these are just some questions that you can start to organize the research that I’m about to give you my favorite tools for, into these little categories.
This is going to help you with your branding and your marketing overall.
MARKET RESEARCH STRATEGIES
So let’s now talk about some of my favorite ways to do market research.
Number one is a free tool that not enough people know about that is incredibly powerful. When you think about your own life and your own customer journey with different products and services, where do you turn when you need something? Google.
We all go to Google. It is a database of information.
And the free tool that we love to use is called Answer The Public.
Answer the Public
What Answer The Public does is it takes the information from Google and it categorizes it into questions and into sub-categories. So you can go on to Answer The Public and type in an ideal customer that you know you want to work with.
You can type in a core problem.
You can type in your industry.
So you can start as broad as you want. And then it will divide it up into a bunch of different webs.
Let’s say I type in brand photography. I am a photographer and I want to sell brand photography and I want to better understand my ideal customer and what they’re looking for when it comes to brand photography.
I can type in brand photography and then it’s going to show me all of the top questions and searches related to brand photography.