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How do you feel about defining your ideal customer?

Essential for marketing? Or total 🐄💩?

The reason I ask is over the weekend, someone posted in a group I’m in that they were struggling to nail down their Ideal Customer because their service could help everyone.

Cue a ton of people jumping in to say that IPCs (ideal paying customers), customer avatars, target audience (if you’re an old school marketer) whatever you want to call them, were outdated and unhelpful.

And I agree, to an extent.

Yes, the traditional way of defining your ideal customer using demographics (so age, income, location, industry and so on) is outdated.

But, that doesn’t mean you can skip the exercise altogether!

As someone else pointed out on that thread, you might be able to help everyone, but if you try and market to everyone, that’s going to make your marketing extremely hard, and pretty ineffective.

And this is why so many people are getting stuck with it.

They hear all the “NICHE DOWN” chat (and yes, capitals are needed to convey the shouty, and unhelpful, nature of that advice you see scattered around the internet with wild abandon)

But they also know intuitively that squeezing people into a rigid box isn’t the right thing to do.

So, because they don’t want to box people, or exclude anyone, they come back to trying to market to such a broad group of people. Their messaging is really general and ends up appealing to no one.

So they go back to trying to niche, hate it again, and they end up going round and round in circles bouncing between the two extremes.

Sound familiar?

So how do you define your audience, without boxing people in or excluding them?

I like to get people to focus on their favourite type of customer.

The ones they love working with and who they always get great results for…

What do they have in common?

Not demographics, like income or gender, but what are their beliefs, values, challenges, and desires?

To give you an idea of mine… I work with businesses who give a shit about people and the planet, and who know that making money and making a profit don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

I work with people from all backgrounds, genders and communities, sole traders through to national charities, in no particular industry. But all my clients share similar frustrations about going against the grain and making real impact.

And regardless of their size and what they do, they usually share a lot in common:

  • They’ve been going for at least a few years, but often for many. But they’ve hit a bit of a growth ceiling and are feeling stuck.
  • They know they’re exceptional at what they do, but they have a hard time getting other people to see it.
  • They have a strong moral compass, and they want to make the world a better place – but often they wouldn’t describe themselves as ethical or sustainable businesses.
  • They find marketing hard because they don’t like how it feels, although they would typically find it hard to articulate why, and will usually say it’s because they don’t have the time/money/team/resource to do it properly.
  • Often lots of information is stuck inside the founder’s head, so it’s hard for the rest of the team to move things forward. The founders often find it quite hard to let go of things.
  • They usually think they need a re-brand or a new website. What they really need help with is their positioning and messaging, which then makes all the tangible/deliverable/doing stuff way easier.

Not a demographic in sight, right? Instead we’ve got a solid understanding of the challenges they’re facing, what they look like in real life for them, as well as the values they share.

You need to spend some real time here. Dive really deep.

Talk to your favourite types of customers. Ask them what’s going on for them, how they feel and what’s important to them.

There will be a common thread for you but it’s not always obvious.

If you want some help pinning this down, give me a shout

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