How to find your customers without looking too hard (and wasting spaghetti).

Are you struggling to find more customers? Are you feeling like you’re wasting money on marketing, throwing “spaghetti at the wall” just to see what sticks? Are leads drying up? 

Where ARE they?? 

The first place to look is in your own back yard. Only then you can you find others. 

In your own back yard – your company’s database – you already have your best customers clearly identified. They are the ones you talk to all the time. You know them well – their likes and dislikes, what makes them tick, and why they love what you deliver. At least you should know these things. When you understand your customers to that depth, you develop wonderful relationships that tell you juicy things about your business and core offerings. These insights guide what you produce, when and how you deliver, and why your business instincts are bang on. 

Therefore, step one to finding more customers is getting to know the ones you have . . . really, really well. For more information about how to dig deeper for customer information, check out our blog that gives Best Questions for Customer Insights.  

Next, apply your insights to clearly define your target market, and then paint a picture – a persona – of your ideal customer.  

Your target market consists of prospective customers who will benefit the most from your offerings, and therefore most likely to buy what you’re selling. They are the decision-makers (or at least powerful enough to influence the buying decision). 

To find your target customer, consider these six questions: 

• Who are our “BEST” customers today? 

• What does our ideal customer want? 

• Where is our ideal customer? 

• When does our ideal customer buy our product/service? 

• Why does our ideal customer want to buy our product/service? 

• How does our ideal customer buy our product or service? 

Answers to these questions will start to paint a picture of a persona – someone with a name, personality, physical location, and all kinds of needs, wants and desires. That persona lives smack-dab in the middle of your target market. 

Now you can be laser-focused on the centre of your dart board. Now you can stop the “spaghetti at the wall” approach and start to market with deliberation, using words that resonate with your best customers because they themselves have told you those words. 

And don’t forget to keep a finger on the pulse of your best customers. Don’t make assumptions that their world goes unchanged. Review and/or redefine your target market and persona annually to ensure that they still represent the primary buyer/decision maker – your best customer! 

Check out our downloadable Target Market & Persona with full definitions PLUS a guided exercise that you can implement right away!