Ask Ignite: How to create an Ideal Customer Profile

Welcome to Ignite Your Business Radio Show, light the match, throw some gasoline on and buckle up because we're about to take your business to the next level. I'm your host, Josh Wilhelm. We have a question sent in to us today from Bryn from Atlanta, Georgia. I've started a small business, designing and manufacturing t-shirts for niche sports fans, stuff like formula drifting, MMA, fishing, horseback riding, and more.

My problem is that I'm beginning to question whether I have a good grip on my ideal customer profile and how to find more people who would be interested in these shirts that I sell. I thought I know who our ideal customer is, but I'm starting to wonder if I don't actually know. Well, Brent, I would say that is a great question for us to discuss In fact, I was just talking with a friend and business owner earlier this morning about this very topic. And so it is perfect timing for this question to come up.

First, let's start off by answering the question that a lot of people might be asking themselves with hearing you talk about an ideal customer profile. Let's start with defining what is an ideal customer profile. Because even if you think you know or you don't know, either way, it's good just to make sure nonetheless for you and anyone listening. So an ideal customer profile is where you can close your eyes and kind of describe by what is known as firmographics, basically characteristics that make up and define or even describe an individual or a company that understands what it is you sell.

They understand the value of the product and or service that you bring. And then, of course, they're interested in buying it. So it's really it's kind of like I mentioned is really close your eyes, think about it and kind of break down what are the ideal characteristics that make up that of your ideal customer. That then establishes what your ideal customer profile is.

So that's kind of what it means. Okay, so let's now discuss how do you figure out who is your ideal customer? Think of it this way. An easy way to start is by taking a moment and thinking about the top five customers that are easiest to deal with and you really enjoy working with them.

They're willing to purchase your products at full price. They're not trying to nickel and dime you or grind you down on the price. They're overall just a pleasant to deal with, a pleasant customer to deal with. And they're not challenging.

They're not your difficult customers. They're your easygoing. They're just the ones ultimately in the end that you go, look, if I could clone these five customers all day long, I would do so and I'd be happy doing business all day long with those type of customers. So you start off with the five.

Essentially the perfect customer in your mind is what we're trying to go for. Once you've jotted down those five, then I want you to think about breaking them into characteristics by simply asking yourself these questions and then answering them. Things like what is their age group? You know, what are their interests?

So you talked about that your product and your t-shirts have to do with specialty sports, it sounds like. So that would definitely be things that they're interested in characteristics. But thinking about even your five ideal in your particular situation, maybe your top five customers you mentioned MMA, horseback riding, a bunch of different sports, maybe your top five actually end up only liking one sport or a couple of those, not all of them. So one by one, break these questions down for each one of your customers and answer all of them by then thinking about okay so what are their interests Are they married or are they single Are they male or they female How much product do they purchase from you and how often do they purchase from you The same goes, and you didn't really describe this in your question, but if you're dealing with individuals, those are the great questions to ask.

Similar to that, if you're dealing with companies though, very similar type of questions that you wanna ask yourself. Things like, what are the positions within the company that they, for the client that you work with. So being a company is your client. The person that you deal with the most within that company, what is their role within that organization?

What do they do? What is their title? Things of that nature. What is the size of the company that is one of your clients?

How many employees do they have is when you're talking about size of the company? Where are they geographically located within the country or even the world? Maybe they're not just in your country, the United States, maybe they're located in some other country. So regardless of those answers, go ahead and answer or ask yourself and answer those questions for each individual top five clients that you have.

As you start answering these questions for all your perfect customers, quote unquote, you'll start seeing similarities between each of those answers. You can even do this on a spreadsheet and kind of have those questions as columns. The rows would indicate each one of the five customers that are ideal and start answering those questions in each one of the columns and see what the similarities are. I'm guessing and pretty much guaranteeing that you're going to start seeing certain characteristics that are very similar to them.

You might see a few little differences here and there, but ultimately you're trying to pinpoint and kind of locate as much as you can that are similar to each other. So for example, you might have three of the five top customers, the people that you deal with or the customers themselves are women and the other two are men. It doesn't necessarily mean that, oh, well, the majority is women, so that's who we're going to target and go after. But, you know, these are things that as you're going on that you want to continue watching and looking at on a regular basis.

I would also say, too, that equally important to not only figuring out who your ideal customer is, but also figuring out who is not your ideal customer. So similar to the situation of figuring out who it was that was your ideal customer, go through your existing customer list and figure out who are what I call the problem children, the ones that cause you more grief, the ones that are kind of a more pain in the neck for you to deal with on a regular basis. So no one needs to know who these people are except for yourself.

And obviously, as you figure that out, it's something that is important to share with your team of saying, hey, these are kind of our ideal customers and similar to them, that's who we're looking for. And then these are the ones that we're trying to stay away from. These are the type of customers and they probably all will agree with you, especially on the customers that you don't like working with. They probably are paying for them to deal with as well.

So go through those same exact exercises of pick out five of the less ideal, the ones that you don't like dealing with and go through those same questions and figure out what the characteristics are that are maybe very similar to those type of customers that you don't like dealing with and take note of that. So now that you've figured out who your ideal customer profile is, kind of asking yourself, now what? So I figured it out. I know who I want to work with and I know also who I don't want to work with.

What do I then do with that information? So now you can more precisely use that and focus your marketing and your sales efforts and dollars to your ideal customer Instead of maybe you were taking this kind of big picture shotgun approach that you were trying to hit many different customers because before you didn really know who you trying to reach. And so because of that, this wide approach that you were spending lots of dollars spread over multiple different areas, now you can be more precise.

Now that you know who your ideal customer is, whether you're advertising on social media, whether you're doing it through PPC or SEO, now you can really start targeting your efforts in that your marketing, marketing dollars, those kind of things. But even on sales, as you get people calling you, leads are coming in, businesses coming in, you can quickly assess even with those customers who is your ideal customer and who is not so that you can stop wasting time with the ones that are just burning up the hours and using up your time, using up your staff's time, employees, asking lots of questions that you know they're probably not going to be a good buyer for you.

So again, you can use those efforts wisely. And as I said to stop wasting your your marketing dollars towards the non ideal and repurpose that to go towards your ideal. So it really makes a big difference on how much you're even spending. Maybe you end up even saving yourself a little bit on your marketing budget because you are very precise.

Or in some cases, you might notice that you're spending more because it's a little bit more challenging to get in front of those ideal customers based on who you've targeted down to. Another point to this as well is really start thinking about continuing to analyze customers that are coming in with those same questions. As I mentioned before, having a spreadsheet that you can kind of be adding to where you started off with your five ideal, continue with the list of generally, maybe it's a kind of full big bucket of customers that you have in there from past and then moving forward that you're asking yourself and you're making sure that your team or yourself alone are answering these questions as you pick up new customers and see if then your marketing dollars and your marketing efforts are getting you more in line with who your target audience is.

But it's really important to continue re-evaluating these and looking at these on a regular basis. Not to mention too, is it's important for you to do this probably once a year. Re-evaluate and make sure that you're spending marketing dollars, make sure that you're targeting the right type of customer. As we know, COVID recently threw a huge wrench into things for a lot of different businesses.

And so maybe the ideal customer you started with has now changed. And that could be the very reason that, as you stated in your question before, that you thought you knew who your ideal customer was, but now you're kind of second guessing yourself or questioning if you really do. Maybe that is simply because with who you went in pre COVID, with who your ideal customer was, now has changed. Maybe you're getting more online sales.

And because you're getting more online sales, it's a different type of customer. It may not exactly be the same characteristics of your ideal customer that you had going into pre-COVID. Now that we're kind of post-COVID, now that customer might have changed. So you have to constantly be reevaluating this on, I would say, minimum a yearly basis, just to make sure that everything is moving in the right direction.

Your marketing dollars are attracting the right type of clients. Your sales are bringing in the right type of clients. So continue checking that on a regular basis. Lastly, on this point, too, is don't be tempted to kind of deviate.

You know, I think for a lot of us as business owners, we have this feast or famine mentality, which certainly I understand But sometimes that be kind of emphasizing and helping direct you in a wrong direction that you really don want to go with You know thinking like well man I might not get the sales that I have coming in So I just got to take every sale as it comes in Not necessarily There's a power of saying no sometimes and saying that this isn't the right type of customer.

Or in the case that you're selling stuff online and you can't really go, oh, sorry, I know you already purchased this. I have to return your money and say no to you because you're not my right type of customer. Not necessarily the case, obviously that could disrupt and actually harm your business more than anything else. But making sure that again, your marketing efforts, your marketing dollars, your sales efforts are truly going towards who your ideal is, not just everyone out there that likes sports in your case.

So really making sure that you dive into that. Don't be tempted to be deviated off track or just because someone says, hey, you should start selling some other kind of product to the same type of customer base. Make sure that it's a good fit for you, for your business, for your customers, and make sure it's something that they're still interested in and want on a regular basis. I'd also say on this too is in figuring out who is your ideal customer profile, I consider this to be one of the most important aspects of just doing business in general.

It affects so many different parts of your business and not only yours, but really all businesses, big and small, everything from marketing to sales to even your company goals, your employees. So what talent you're bringing on specifically geared towards the products and services that you're providing your ideal customers, it's pretty much every aspect of your business has some connection to figuring out who your ideal customer profile is. So I consider this to be, like I said, one of the most important parts of running a business is really starting with who your ideal customer and that who that ideal customer profile really is.

So I would say on this is in addition is that so many businesses, like I mentioned before, small and big, they try and be everything to all customers, do everything for all customers. And oftentimes it kind of goes against obviously everything that is in kind of a fiber of your being as an entrepreneur. But if you try to really speak to all, I would say you're really probably not speaking to any one person these days. People have very specific needs.

It's not like the Wild, Wild West where you had this catalog of all these different products and it was a lot less customized to every individual's needs. But no different than back in those days, you sold, the ones that were successful were the ones that were selling specifically to their ideal customer profile. It might not have been called that back in the day, but the more specific they were in targeting their ideal audience, their ideal customer base, the more successful they typically were because they were speaking directly to them.

They were speaking directly to their needs and addressing those needs accordingly. Thank you again, Bryn, for your question. It was a great one about the ideal client profile. If all of you listening have any further questions about this or any other topic, please don't hesitate.

Drop us a line at questions at igniteradioshow.com. here at ignite your business radio show we want to give you our listeners an opportunity to give and answer those topics questions concerns that interest you most i hope the information i shared with you today helped light the fuse inside of you ends up taking your business to the next level like to thank our production team our engineering team and most of all all of you listening until next week i'm your host josh wilhelm have a great and successful rest of the week everybody .