Chapter 3 – Finding Your Ideal Customer
Your ideal customer is one who is willing to pay for the solution to their problem. Therefore, you can find your perfect customer by going where they go and offering helpful advice and solutions to their problems. Again, you are looking for a well-stocked pond of hungry, paying customers.
You will be able to offer the solutions in several ways, such as creating free content that will encourage them to view you as an expert and therefore willing to buy your paid content. The one thing that you don’t want to do is treat your free content dismissively.
You should look at it like the free samples you get when walking through the supermarket. One taste will hopefully convince people to buy a whole package.
The whole package might transform the initial purchase into the beginning of a long relationship between a new, now loyal customer who becomes a repeat buyer of your brand. If they can’t keep buying the same product repeatedly, perhaps they will be willing to try more of your products as they become available.
Always providing your customers what they need and knowing them well you can seem as though you can anticipate their needs. This creates the kind of ideal customer who will sustain your business month after month, year after year.
The more loyal repeat customers you can gain, the more income you will receive on an ongoing basis, and not have too many lean months, but a reasonably predictable, steady income.
You can build your email marketing list by offering them a free newsletter, download, or both, that will allow you to market products and services of interest on a regular basis.
Many of your customers, because they trust your expertise, will buy what you recommend and what you produce, often just because it's you who is recommending or providing the product.
This is the kind of ideal customer that you need to locate or create through high-quality interactions with them in where you can come to be seen as the expert in your niche.
Research and Survey Your Target Market
Once you've identified a profitable niche, you now need to focus on pinpointing precisely what is the audience's pain points. In other words, you need to determine your target audience' most urgent critical problem. Being able to identify the issues your niche is experiencing can be the key to profitability if you can provide them with the best solution.
To identify a need in any niche, you can start by looking at the problems in your own life. Think about what would improve your life, or what would take away one of your life's challenges. You can generally find these answers on popular blogs or niche forums.
Yahoo Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com) is an excellent resource for finding out what solutions to problems people are searching for. Try using the search terms, "help with," "advice on," cure for," followed by your specific keyword.
The solution to your niche audience's problem will be where the most profits lie, whether it's a physical product, a digital product, a service, or information.
You can also start your search with Google Correlate (https://google.com/trends/correlate/). Google Correlate is a tool on Google Trends that enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series.
The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide or a question that you enter. It uses web search activity data to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The results can then be viewed on the website or downloaded as a .CSV file for you to further analyze.
Creating Your Ideal Customer Profile
After deciding on your niche, you can spend time researching your ideal buyer and defining your target customer’s problems, wants, demographics, and then segment them into buyer groups. To help you narrow this down, ask the following questions.
To get the demographic information on the places they hang out, you can use Quantcast (https://quantcast.com). Quantcast is the world’s largest AI-driven audience behavior platform that was designed to understand, influence, convert, and measure the consumer journey, to help marketers discover new customers, drive incremental growth and deliver business outcomes.
With the help of several online resources like Survey Monkey (https://surveymonkey.com), SurveyGizmo (https://surveygizmo.com), and Google AdWords, you can utilize online surveys to questions your target audience as to precisely what they want.
The stronger the demand and desire for your product or services, the more probable people are to participate in the survey. You can use incentives like discounts, free downloadable products, or online services the users expected to find when they clicked on your advertisement.
You want to aim for 1,000 responses to your online survey. From this cross-section of your market, you should be able to calculate if enough people are participating in the study to suggest an affordable response rate.
From the information provided in the online surveys you should aim to provide the prospects with (a) precisely what they are looking for, (b) just the way they'd like it, and (c) at the price they are prepared to buy it for. The answers that are given will also provide you with the language you need to use to write your sales copy.
You want to be sure to ask questions about the problems that they are experienced, how difficult it is to find solutions to their problems, what keywords they used to search for solutions, etc.
You can ask for socio/economic/demographic information as well, like age, education level, job, etc. You can even ask them how much they'd pay for a solution and how they'd like it delivered.
There is a qualitative difference between market intelligence, like that, gathered from a survey, and keyword intelligence. Market intelligence can be much more valuable because it allows accurate and confident decision-making regarding marketing and strategic decisions.
The time you spend researching your niche and the ideal customer will be time well spent because it will provide you more than enough ideas on products to create, provided that you have found an eager niche willing to pay for solutions to their problems.