Who Are You?

Defining your key customers

By Andrea Hill

I have been on only one blind date in my life, but it was memorable. I’m still not sure the friends who set us up meant well. They said they did, but I am skeptical.

My date was told that I was at the top of my class at a prestigious university, musical, nerdy, and working with an interfaith group. I was told that he was an engineer with a brilliant mind who was also musical and close to his parents. All true.

What my friends left out was that he leaned as far right as I leaned left, and that he was more than a bit of a white supremacist while I was doing gang intervention and tutoring in the inner city. The date? We had a rip-roaring argument in the middle of a posh restaurant followed by a chilly mid-January walk home in heels (for me).

It was bad enough that I couldn’t afford the $40 for my half of an indigestion-inducing dinner. But had this been a marketing strategy, someone might have spent $3.5 million for 30 seconds of Super Bowl exposure, only to find out their audience was out playing football at the park rather than watching it on TV.

Before you do any marketing, take the time to figure out your customer.

Start with Broad Definitions

You already understand the basics of demographics. Define your customers in terms of age range, gender, income, cultural identity, and geography, right? But which customers should you define in this way? All of them?

No. Remember, you don’t need all the customers; you just need the right customers. The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) says that 20 percent of your customers account for 80 percent of your income. Who are these 20 percent that provide you with so much value? These are the customers to profile. Leave the 80 percent out of this activity and you will do a better job of defining how to find more people like the 20 percent currently paying your bills.

Dig Deeper to Learn What Matters

Once you have broadly categorized your 20 percent, it’s time to get to know them. Using customer interviews, your personal knowledge of your customers, and free and purchased market research, answer the following questions about your 20 percent:

• What are their family/lifestyle situations?
• What worries them?
• What matters to them?
• What problems must they solve?
• What is their philosophy about spending versus saving?
• What causes do they embrace?

Not all of these questions will yield conclusive information about your 20 percent, but you will begin to see some patterns emerge. For instance, you may discover that your 20 percent is predominantly single and pursuing minimally invasive lifestyles. Or you may find that your 20 percent is primarily men in their 40s worried about being successful in second marriages. These patterns will give you vital information about your core customers, including how to speak to them, how to appeal to them, and how to find more people like them.

Make a Customer Avatar

Remember that marketing is a form of communication, and communication only works when both parties want to participate. Had I known what truly mattered to my blind date, I would have known to decline the date, or at least which subjects to avoid. This information could easily have come in the form of a visual cue; for instance, had he been wearing a t-shirt featuring militant right-wing imagery in the picture of him I was shown before our date.

Not long ago I was flipping through my son’s sketchbook in which he had drawn dozens of pictures of attractive women. They had every possible physical characteristic from dark to light, tiny to voluptuous. The one common theme was that all wore glasses. “What do glasses signify to you?” I asked. “Smarts,” was his concise reply.

Using clip art, stock photos, or your own drawing skills, create a picture of your ideal customer. Believe it or not, this exercise is highly beneficial. The process of thinking this creatively about your core customer will forge within you a deeper, more meaningful connection, and the result will be an avatar that you can share with your employees, copywriters, graphic designers, and anyone else who has contact with your customers. When you are satisfied with your Avatar, name it, post it in a highly visible place, and give it a seat at the product design table, marketing discussions, customer service and policy meetings, and promotion planning sessions.

Create an Ideal Dialogue

What is the most powerful way to communicate with your ideal customer? Some generalities apply. If you are speaking with men, you need more verbs and succinct focus on features over benefits. Women are more receptive to emotional appeals, will read more copy, and focus on benefits over features. Most small business owners default to writing in their own voice, using the writing style that comes most naturally to them. But marketing copy—from something as simple as a tagline or headline to something as complicated as a radio spot or advertorial—must be written to catch and keep the attention of your core customer.

Create a Dialogue Guide to go with your Customer Avatar. Define how you want to speak with this customer: What words and phrases are most meaningful? What level of excitement will you convey? Will your communication be casual or formal, playful or sober? Use this guide to direct all your copywriting and messaging activities to ensure that you stay true to your brand and customer definitions.

Once you have done the exercises outlined in this article, you will discover that all your marketing decisions become clearer. You will have a better understanding about which magazines your core customers are likely to read, which websites they visit, and what types of promotions they respond to. This knowledge will result in more effective marketing. Because while most marketing misadventures aren’t as embarrassing as a publicly bad blind date, you won’t get off as easy as $40.