The Ideal Customer Persona
Once you have completed your customer segmentation and you understand who your customer is you can now think through the ideal customer or your customer persona. Your ideal customer is a representative/fictional model or persona. It represents the general traits that make up your customer.
Who is your Ideal Customer?
For instance, Jeremy is a child dentist and has decided that his customer segment is a mother between the ages of 30 – 55. His market segment is living in New York and has a combined monthly income of between $40 000 – $120 000. His further knowledge about his customer segment is that they have between one to five kids and live in a suburb.
Based on this information Jeremy can now create the ideal customer persona. To make it really relevant to him he can give the customer a name, say how many kids they have, where they live, and what they earn. Developing a customer persona can really help Jeremy to get into the shoes of the customer, empathize with them and start to understand who they really are.
Choosing the right balance
Your customer persona should not be too generic or too specific. If they are too generic you will spend a lot more resources to capture the attention of your audience. You will also struggle with the right balance of relevance in the posts that you share. If they are too specific you might lose a section of the market and not cater to enough people.
When you develop your products and services or do research about your customer, you should always do so by keeping the ideal customer persona in mind. This will help you to think through what their needs are, what keeps them up at night, or what their aspirations are. The ideal customer persona also has an impact on how you engage your customer through each of the principles of engagement.
As this is such an important aspect, why don’t you take a moment now to think about your ideal customer? Who are they, where do they live, what are they doing, or thinking about. What questions will you ask them if you have a chance to talk to them? You might centre all of your major decisions around your ideal customer so why not start by thinking about it now?
Take a look at the following link to an article by Rebecca Patterson on a few tips to identify your ideal customer –Seven Ways To Identify Your Ideal Client (forbes.com).