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  Unless you sell staple food items, your product probably doesn’t appeal to everyone. There’s a specific target demographic for smartphones, men’s wear, deodorant, cars, and real estate—just to mention a few examples. As a business, you’d want to know your ideal customer, so you can reach them the right way and engage them more effectively.
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Discovering the right kind of customer or client for your business requires that you go through a process of collating, defining, and reaching out. It begins with collecting all the information you can about the people you’re targeting, using that information to create a profile, and then seeking out and interacting with people who fit that profile. We lay out this process in four steps, as follows:

Survey Your Existing Customers

If you already have customers, you can survey them to identify the characteristics that they have in common. You’ll be looking for demographic data: age, sex, occupation, marital status, residence, etc. You will also want to learn what their needs are—that is, those that your product supposedly meets. The aim here is to gather data about the kind of people who purchase your product. You may then leverage the commonalities and averages of the data to build a profile of your typical customer.

Find Out Who Your Competitors Are Serving

You can also investigate the demographic that your competitors are serving. There are at least two ways to do this. First, sift through social media to find out who’s talking about them. You may get a sense of the age, location and professional brackets to which these people belong if you have a large enough sample. You could also track your competitors’ messaging (ads, social media posts, official communication, etc.) to see who they’re addressing (e.g. moms, business executives, athletes, etc.). Persons in the categories they mention might be your ideal customers too.
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Build a Customer Persona

Using the data you’ve gathered, you can build a description of your ideal customer, or customer persona. For example, if your business sells smartphones, your customer persona could be something like this: Jide is a 30-year-old man who lives on Lagos’s mainland. His income puts him in the middle class. He loves high-end gadgets because of their functionality and sees them as status symbols. As a result, he’s willing to spend up to ₦500,000 on a decent smartphone. You may have come up with more than one customer persona. In that case, you’ll need to create as many personas as there are categories of customers.

Reach Out to Your Ideal Customer

When you have a fairly good description of your ideal customer, you’ll know who to target with your adverts, marketing campaigns, social media posts, emails, and other official communication. You will reach and engage more of the kind of people who want your type of product, and be better at convincing and converting them. And as a result, you’ll record higher returns on your marketing and production investments.
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Final Words

The benefits of knowing the right kind of customers for your business are huge. However, many businesses struggle to find their ideal customer. You don’t have to belong in this category. If you follow the steps we’ve talked about in this article, you should be able to discover and define the perfect customer for your enterprise.
Got a suggestion? Contact us: editor@connectnigeria.com
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This article was first published on 23rd September 2024

ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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