Most companies totally under-estimate the importance of identifying who their ideal customers are. This ultimately leads to a broad based marketing campaign that becomes costly and does not produce the desired results.

What else could one have expected. If you are not 100% clear who your ideal customer is, how will you ever find them in the billions of people who are out there. As they say, “if you’re targeting everyone, you’re targeting no one!”

First things first, you need to workshop with your marketing team and understand who your ideal customer is. And, not who you think the might be, but who they actually are. Go through the people who you invoice, write down a list the top 20 customers that spend the most with you. Now wouldn’t you want more of them?

I worked with a business coach who claimed that his ideal customer was a young, trendy, up and coming tech start-up guy. That’s who he thought his ideal customer was. When we finally analysed who his top spending customers were, we figured out it was a more mature tech CEO who had reached a ceiling in his businesses and was looking to break out of that.

So the business coach had an ideal customer in mind, but most of his revenue was coming from a completely different customer set. His ad agency had therefore been targeting the wrong audience, that’s because he never looked at the data, only at what his he wanted his dream audience to be.

Never confuse your status goals with reality. It’s all good and well sitting at the family thanks-giving lunch, saying you’re coaching young, trendy, up and coming tech start-up guys that are going to make a ton of cash, when in actual fact you are making most of your income from more mature tech CEOs who have ceilinged out. One probably sounds more glamorous than the other.

Are you in business for status reasons or to make money? Spend your marketing budget wisely, target your ideal customers and you’ll suddenly find you’ll get more of them. Funny that 🙂

In all seriousness, never under-estimate who your ideal customer is, your marketing spend should focus on bringing you more of those customers and cost you a whole lot less.

If you have any doubts about that, contact us to see how we can help you.