After a decade of sitting down with businesses as a brand strategy and graphic design specialist helping businesses in my native Orange County California and nationwide, I’ve made a few observations about businesses and their advertising, so let’s chat today about who your perfect customers are so you can talk to them.
One of my initial questions for businesses, when I’m brought in, revolves around asking to whom they sell their products or services. More often than not the answer I get to this question is a version of “everyone”. This is probably not the case. I haven’t met a product or service yet that is truly for “everyone”.
Every business has a set of ideal customers and often businesses even have more than one set!
The question is how do you figure this out? Well, I have a method that I nicknamed the One-Two-Three Ideal Customer Method.
This is the abbreviated version with only one question from each section. The original version, which takes around 2 hours on average to complete, is a system I made up for myself. After gifting it to a few people, I figured out that it worked for my clients too.
Here’s my favorite question for each section to get you started:
One: In one sentence write down what you sell.
Yes, use one sentence. This is a basic idea of what you tell people you do. By having to consolidate it into one sentence you clear away the fluff. For example, I could say: Purple Rose Graphics simplifies complex graphic design, marketing, and communication strategies into a useable action plan to help create and maintain brands for small and medium-sized businesses, which helps them understand who they are and communicate with their ideal customers better allowing them to be effective salespeople for their business so they can increase their sales while taking the pressure out of how to stand out and become more successful. That’s a little long, so instead: I help businesses understand who they, what makes them special and teach them how to explain that to their customers. Keep editing it down until you have one specific and simple sentence.
Two: find your top two favorite clients of all time and describe them in detail, including what problem you solved for them
Yes, your two favorite clients of all time. The ones you wish every client or customer was like. Describe them – their looks, their personality, everything about them. If you’re new and haven’t had any customers yet then daydream a little about who the perfect customer would be and describe that person.
Three: Write down 3 things that make you different than your competitors.
This should be pretty self-explanatory. You might need to do some research if you aren’t very tapped into who your competitors are to figure out what they do and see how it differs from what you do.
You’d do these three questions for each of your product or service groups. Some of it might overlap and some of it won’t. This starts to ease the confusion about who you sell each type of service or product to.
by the way, if you found this helpful and want to do the whole One-Two-Three Ideal Customer System on a video chat with me, book a 15-minute no-pitch intro consultation call today by clicking here