Without understanding your ideal customer, it’s like shooting in the dark on advertisements, messaging, products, and all areas of your business in hopes of hitting the bullseye. To connect with your customers and keep them engaged you need to ensure that all activities involved in acquiring and serving them are tailored to their needs. In our complete guide to reaching your ideal customer, we’ll discuss creating a buyer persona and how you can reach your target audience in a way that acquires new customers and keeps them coming back. 

Identifying your ideal customer 

Getting to know each of your customers personally - especially for a larger business - is impossible. However, you can establish a buyer persona that helps you determine who your ideal customer is and where you can find them. A buyer persona (also known as an audience persona or customer persona) is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research of your existing or desired audience. Depending on your services or products, there may be different types of people who will purchase from you so you may need to create multiple buyer personas. 

Buyer personas do an excellent job at keeping you focused on customer priorities. When you make decisions from the content of your social media to the launch of a new product, you can keep your customer persona in mind to meet their needs and goals, build trust, and ultimately streamline your sales process. If it would help, you can even give this customer persona a name, a place of residence, a job title, or anything that helps you picture them as a real person. Let’s create your customer persona: 

1. Conduct thorough audience research. 

Who are your current customers? Who is your social audience? Who are your competitors targeting? Using this information gather audience data and compile a list including: 

• Age
• Location
• Language 
• Spending power and patterns
• Challenges
• Interests 
• Stage of life 
• For B2B: The size of businesses and who makes purchasing decisions 

2. Consider their habits. 

Using the above audience data it’s a good idea to figure out where your audience hangs out online. What social media channels are they using and what platforms are your competitors present on? What do they Google and why? Do they mainly use mobile or desktop? Figuring out your customers’ habits can help you more easily get in front of them with the content you know they’re already looking for. 

3. Identify their expectations, goals, and fears.

What problem can you solve for your customers and why do they need a solution? What motivates them? What barriers do they face? What do they expect to get from your product? Knowing buyer expectations, goals, and fears prepares you to create messaging and campaigns around specific pain points that provide solutions your audience wants. 

4. Recognize their buying decisions. 

People shop in different ways. Some customers make rash purchases. Some people take the time to do their homework, read reviews, and consider other possibilities available on the market. Knowing your prospective client’s buying patterns will help you make sure they have the resources they need to make a purchase. 

Now that you’ve created your buyer persona(s), you should have a better understanding of who your target audience is and an ideal customer to keep in mind to maintain the consistent voice and direction of your business. On the other hand, actually reaching this audience effectively is a whole different conversation. As we move into finding and speaking to your target audience, keep your buyer persona in mind for the things they would prefer. 

6 tips to reach your ideal customer 

1. Speak their language. 

Is there certain jargon in your industry that your buyer persona uses? You may not need to keep your tone formal, or it may work for you to use the latest slang, but talking to your audience as individuals will make them listen to you because they feel like they’re understood. Maybe they like memes or maybe they absolutely abhor memes. It’s alright to try things out, but if you notice that something isn’t working, that there’s push back, or significantly less engagement on a new style of content, then it isn’t what your audience wants and you can adjust your content to reflect what they interact with most. 

2. Relate to your target audience. 

Use imagery, colors, fonts, and overall branding that resonates with your ideal customer. Maybe your audience cares about the environment and whether or not your business is eco-friendly. Whatever your customer persona cares about is going to influence them in their support.

3. Meet them where they are. 

What social media platforms can you find your audience on? Based on your brand and who your buyer persona is you may not need to be everywhere, and that really isn’t recommended. Depending on the resources you have for creating content, you’ll want to be on platforms where you can post consistently and maintain an active presence on those networks. 

4. Leverage influencers and brand partnerships. 

Influencer marketing has quickly become the go-to for many brands. You can utilize the power of an influencer that matches your business to get in front of an audience who already matches your buyer persona. This approach to reaching your ideal customer should be a genuine partnership and can be exceedingly successful. 

5. Show them how you’ll solve their problems. 

Oftentimes, you aren’t selling just a product, you’re selling a solution. If it fits your buyer persona, share testimonials from your customers or reviews on how life-changing your product has been for them. It’s also recommended to shape some of your content as before and after. What is the pain point your buyer persona faced and what transformation did they go through after they bought your product? 

6. Address their objections. 

As a new customer, there can be some hesitancy before making the initial purchase decision and this resistance can happen for a number of reasons: they may have never used a product like yours before or they may not know if they’ll like it. If this is a problem you can provide tutorials or how-to videos that make it easier for your clients to make the purchase decision. You can educate them on your satisfaction-guarantee policy if you have one. Whatever resistance you consistently see your customers facing, address their concerns and give them what they need to purchase confidently. 

Get support with Influx 

There are so many aspects to running a business and it may seem like your attention is being pulled in a million directions. Influx can provide an extra layer of support for your existing team regarding eCommerce support, customer support, sales teams on demand, and more! We’ll arm you with the support you need to improve your retention rate and scale your business! Invest in support and watch your business flourish.