How to Define your Ideal Customer

Questions to use to define your ideal customer.

By asking your existing customers questions about themselves, you'll get a better idea of your ideal customer. If you are using analytics on your website, you may already have a lot of this information already. You should be able to track who comes from where, when, and what items they have bought. But if you don't have this information then an online survey (maybe with some incentive for completing ) is a great way to find this information out.

To define your ideal customer, you'll need to know:

• Age
• Sex
• Relationship status
• Do they have children?
• Location
• Profession

Other questions such as what websites they visit, what makes them happy and how would they describe themselves are all pertinent too. You may also be interested in specifics relating to your brand. For example, if you're selling pet supplies you'll want to know details about their pets.

It may well be that there are more than one group of ideal customers. For example, if you're a university, then you'll be interested in attracting new 18-21 year old students as well as students who have already studied with either yourself or another university.

When you've identified your ideal customer (or customers), give them a name (for example, Maisie the mature student) and even a picture of them and distribute it to your team so they know who they are targeting.

What does your ideal customer want?

The obvious answer here is "my product", isn't it? Well, no, not always. They may need a question answering or a helping hand to solve a problem. This is where content marketing comes in. If you know your ideal customer and what they want then you're in a great position to get them to buy your product or service...eventually!

First you may have to provide them with what they want now. Let's use an example here of Joe's Garage (not the Frank Zappa song but a garage specialising in used parts for Volkswagen camper vans ). The customer may be attracted to Joe's Garage by an infographic about how the campervan's carburetor works shared using Pinterest, or a YouTube video on how to dismantle the engine or an article about how to get Volkswagen camper vans into perfect condition before selling. They may have used search engine optimisation to get their content listed high on Google too or paid advertising.

When the customer accesses their information and is pleased with it,, they will have an affinity with your brand and be much more likely to buy from you.

So as you can see, understanding your customer is really important. As any good SEO consultant will tell you: without having a good understanding of your target audience, your marketing efforts and money may be completely wasted.