Locating the person most likely to buy your product or service at a specific time can be a tricky but always worthwhile endeavour. Pitching a carefully crafted marketing message or sales communication to the right individuals can turn high engagement rates to sales – fast.
In How to Find your Ideal Customer we will look at:
1. What is an Ideal Customer.
2. Why it’s important to find them.
3. Defining your Ideal Customer Profile.
4. Finding your Ideal Customer.
If you’re struggling to turn engagement rates, website traffic, and sales outreach into tangible deals then find out more about the importance of the ideal customer.
What is an Ideal Customer
The ideal customer for your business is the person most likely to buy your product or service.
In account based marketing (ABM), it’s a fictitious representation of a company who would most likely benefit from what you’re selling. Sales Hacker list their desired customer profile to include the size of the company, the business they’re in, the activities they carry out, and why they’re likely to want your product or service.
After you’ve established your ideal customer profile you can drill down deeper into defining your individual buyer persona. A Buyer Persona outlines deeper customer insights into individual pain points and challenges, as well as content and channel preferences.
Defining your Ideal Customer and Buyer Personas
To get a clear picture of your ideal customer profile, established businesses can analyse who their best customers are, whilst new companies can rely on research and social demographics.
If you are an established business evaluate what common attributes your customers with the shortest sales cycle, lowest acquisition cost, lowest churn rate, and highest referrals have. You could be noticing trends based on company size, industry, who the decision makers are, or what budget they had.
To get down to the nitty gritty, and establish what pain points, challenges or goals your existing customers solve when using your product or service it’s always best to talk to them directly. If talking to a customer directly isn’t an option, searching for what customers are saying about your product or service on independent review sites and community boards can provide a great insight into your customer’s true feelings.
Once you’ve found out who your customers are, what they do, and how they think and feel – no small task! Next is tracking the customer journey to find out what channels they are coming from and what content they are engaging in.
Track all the way back from the conversion page to referral source to find out where the converting customers are coming from. Look at the keywords they’re searching for as well to grasp the problem they are trying to solve with your product.
When evaluating content, the first step here is to always have an industry baseline to know if you’re currently performing well or not. It might be the case, like in SaaS, that company posts receive little engagement, and more from click throughs. This helps when establishing good vs bad content and channels.
Finding your Ideal Customer
Since you now have a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is and your buyer persona, how do you go about finding these customers and delivering the right marketing message, at the right time. Let’s look at it by channel
Digital Ads
You can use your ideal customer profile and buyer persona to create your audiences within ad platforms. This ensures you’re getting the most value from your ad spend by targeting only the customers who are most likely to convert to a sales.
By using data tools, such as Zymplify’s Contact Search tool, you can access thousands of B2B email addresses –  completely GDPR compliant. Search based on your ideal customer profile criteria to build an email list of up to date buyers and key decision makers. Bonus point: upload these lists to ad platforms to create multiple customer touchpoints that reinforce your brand message.
If you’re interested in finding in-market buyers that fit directly with your ideal customer profile and move them flawlessly from potential prospect to happy customer, sign up for Zymplify’s free trial.
Want to talk to a Zymplify expert on how our platform could work for your business personally? Then sign up for a free personalised demo here.