Understanding Your Perfect Customer

Jon Richardson • July 25, 2021

Identifying your perfect customers

Christchurch web designer building new websites for small businesses
Who is your perfect customer? This is one of the first questions I ask when working with small business owners on a new website.

More often than not they are unable to give me a description of their ideal customer they will describe big proportions of the population, such as women in their 30s or pubs and restaurants on the South Coast.
When I point out that there is a big difference between a Michelin starred restaurant in Brighton and a micro pub in Bournemouth I often hear, well our product or service can help both and we will adapt it so we can sell to everyone.

Whilst this may be true, what is also true is that there is a certain demographic that is a better fit and much more profitable for the small business in question.
But if you can sell you product to everyone, why is it important to understand who your perfect customer is? 
 
You wouldn’t want to turn down any opportunities, right?
In this blog we will look at the 4 key reasons why you should focus your digital marketing efforts and particularly your website on this ‘perfect customer’:

What is a Customer Avatar

First of all, it is useful to explain what we mean by Customer Avatar or Persona. Quite simply a identifying your Customer Avatars is an essential part of your marketing strategy. There may well be several different avatars either for different products or services or because there are several people involved in making the decision to buy your product. 


So, what is a Customer Avatar. It is a description of a particular individual involved in purchasing from you and the more detailed the description the better. As well as demographics, age, gender, marital status, income and education etc, you should also look at location (work and home) income, where they get information from (both online and offline), what social media networks they use etc etc.


In addition to this the Avatar should also highlight their challenges, pain points, goals and ambitions.

All of this helps you understand what your messaging should be. This then forms the basis of the content of your website, emails, social media posts as well as your traditional marketing collateral such as brochures etc.


Without this information you are literally throwing mud at the wall. Yes some will stick and you’ll get some sales but you will be wasting significant amounts of energy and money on things that don’t work or attracting the less profitable customers.


As a small business owner or a start up it is difficult to take time out of the day to day work to conduct these types of exercises but it is hugely important. Working On and not In your business. 

If you are still not convince here are 4 reasons that may change your mind.

1 - Your product isn't perfect for everyone

Small Business owners are often living month to month and don’t want to turn away any possible business and so try to sell to anyone and everyone.  There are several issues with this mindset. Firstly not everyone is interested in what you do, if you are a pub in Bournemouth town centre specialising in steaks and have live rock music until late then you are not going to appeal to the vegan couple in Southampton looking to celebrate their wedding anniversary!


By focussing on what you do best and targeting the customers that see the value in that. Not only are you making your marketing efforts much more effective, saving time and money in the process, you are also going to acquire customers that appreciate you, recommend you to their friends and come back time and time again.


Remember not everyone will love your product or service and by trying to make them, you’ll devalue yourself and push away those perfect customers that are much more appreciative and profitable.

2 - Your message will be clearer & easy to understand.

At the risk of stating the obvious, being clear about what you do and how you do it is essential for effective communication. If someone isn’t clear about what you do and, more importantly, how it benefits them then it is unlikely that they will buy from you!


If your website is trying to appeal to everyone by stating hundreds of ways your product can help anyone and everyone, you will overload people with information making it difficult for them to make a decision.


We adapt how we communicate every day, especially when we are trying to convince someone to do something.  For example, if you are trying to convince your better half to try a new restaurant in Christchurch you will naturally use the reasons and state the benefits that are most appropriate to the person we are talking to, you don’t give them every possible benefit or reason why anyone would like to go. 



Basically, you are being specific and tailoring your message. This is the same approach you should adopt for your business, whether that message is on your website, in your social media posts or other marketing collateral.


Because if you don’t, it will be confusing and confused customers won’t buy from you!

3 - You'll save time & money

One thing that is common for all small business owners and start-ups is that the two things they never have enough of are time and money! Even if money isn’t necessarily an issue, you don’t want to waste it on talking to people who aren’t interested.


At a very basic level, you may be thinking of building a Facebook ads campaign. But before you spend hours planning it and thousands of pounds on the adverts, ask yourself does your perfect customer use Facebook?


A Customer Avatar identify how and where your perfect customer gets their information, it may be Facebook, but they may prefer downloading pdfs from your website. This will allow you to focus your time and budget on those areas that will actually work.

4 - They are simple & easy to build

Many small business owners have never heard the term Customer Avatar, but instinctively know what they are. The problem is they haven’t taken that information from their heads and put it on paper.


The difficulty sometime lies in knowing where to start, what information is important and how to document it. There are plenty of templates that you can use and you can download our customer avatar template here.


The next issue is then actually understanding what makes up your perfect customer. To understand that I would suggest an exercise. List all of your customers on a piece of paper or, preferably, in a spreadsheet. Mark them as either Gods or Dogs (Gods being great customers and Dogs being customers you wouldn’t necessarily want). Then list all of their attributes, age, gender, marital status , income range, how they get their information, their goals, challenges etc

Conclusion

Hopefully you now understand the importance of a Customer Avatar and how they can add significant value to your marketing.


Your customer avatar should be considered before every marketing activity, whether it is a social media campaign, email marketing, otherwise you will be throwing mud at the wall and money down the drain.


Your Customer Avatar should definitely form the basis of your website content. If it hasn’t then your website will not be delivering the traffic and leads that it could. You need to rectify this as soon as possible either by updating your website content or if that is not possible because your website is on an old platform then you consider having a new website built.


About Overt Digital Media

Overt Digital Media are a digital marketing agency specialising in designing websites for small businesses. Our websites are built on the latest platform and have Artificial Intelligence built in to generate more leads for our customers.  Find our more about Artificial Intelligence websites here.


We are based Christchurch on the edge of The New forest and help small business owners throughout the UK to grow their business.


Currently we are offering free 50 point marketing audits to help small businesses identify way of finding new customers and convincing those customers to spend more. If you would like to generate more of the right type of customers for your business then please get in touch

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