Not Everyone is Your Customer.

If you Market to Everyone, You Market to No One.

If you want to stand out, grab attention and close more sales, you absolutely need to get to know your ideal customer. There is a human being at the end of every purchase, so you need to get to know them better than they know themselves in order to:

• Design the right product or service
• Craft the right marketing messages that attract their attention
• Find them online or offline to kick start a conversation
• Make them feel like you really understand them and are THE SOLUTION to their problem.

One of the ways to do that is to do some research to really get to know your customers – their needs, wants, challenges, and aspirations – and create a Target Market Persona to keep you focused on who you serve and why. To help you create one, download my template here and keep reading why it’s so important.

This process requires empathy, the ability to put yourself in their shoes to understand their needs, wants, fears, and emotional triggers. It also requires some work. You can’t just assume what they want or think your customers are just like you. You need to do some research. This can be done via surveys, social media scanning, or the best option, phone calls or face-to-face chats. Nothing beats personal contact to get the information you need.

The goal is to figure out who is most likely to buy from you and then target them with your marketing and sales efforts to make more money.

What do you do with the information you collect?

Create a Target Market Persona Board.

Target Market Personas are short but insightful representations of the ideal audience you want to reach.

These could be current customers, prospects you want to sell to, or influencers you want to partner with. Knowing what these people want and how you can help them is essential to creating targeted, relevant marketing messages and focusing your marketing activities. By doing research to identify and understand your ideal audience, you’ll create better products and services, write better marketing messages or letters, choose better companies or clients to work with, and be able to focus your time, energy and resources to achieve your growth goals.

Can you have more than one target market persona?
Sure! Customers, prospects, influencers, referral partners, and any other segment who can help you achieve your goal are all target market personas. We suggest no more than 3 though because it is hard to focus and be relevant to more than that many segments at a time. Start with the most important and then add new profiles over time as your needs or markets change.

To help you focus on the customers who will love your brand and be the most profitable to work with, click the button to download my Target Market Persona template.