Define Your Ideal Customer Persona
For marketers and business owners with an innate sense of their target market and audience, pinpointing their ideal customer isn’t always straightforward. To simplify the process, they should examine their existing customer base and answer the basic questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how.
What is Customer Segmentation?
Customer segmentation may sound complex, but business leaders and marketers can simplify it by breaking the process down into four basic categories (i.e., demographics, behaviors, geography, and psychographics) designed to group current and prospective customers by shared characteristics and behaviors. This approach enables marketers to develop an effective market positioning strategy and drive more sales to the right customers.
“Customer segmentation is the process of grouping customers according to how and why they buy. It allows organizations to create more specific sales and marketing strategies for customer groups. These segmentation strategies help improve seller effectiveness and increase customer understanding, specifically around buying behaviors and unmet customer needs.”
The Four Categories of Customer Segmentation
Individuals can be grouped according to their demographics (who), behaviors (what, when, and how), geography (where), and psychographics (why). Identifying specific characteristics shared by current or prospective customers across these variables will improve the assessment of their needs and refine the positioning of solutions to customer pain points—or the problems they are trying to solve.
These four distinct categories are relevant for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies. Business is mostly still conducted with a human point of contact with specific concerns and needs. For example, manufacturers and suppliers still need to know their end consumers’ goals, objectives, and use applications to sell a product or service to their B2B customer (an intermediary) more effectively.
Demographic (Who)
To determine who the target market is, business leaders and marketers should first evaluate their existing customer base according to demographic characteristics such as age, income, education, geography, gender, marital status, family type and size, and social class.
The goal is to define groups of people who share similar characteristics to make marketing campaigns more effective by reaching their target market.
For example, a car manufacturer launching a futuristic, premium prototype may have more success selling the high-end vehicle by appealing to a segment of affluent executives rather than more price-sensitive entry-level workers. A tropical vacation resort offering a unique winter holiday travel package targeting retiring or retired generations with disposable income (as opposed to younger generations graduating from college or landing their first jobs) is most likely a more effective positioning strategy to generate bookings.
Behavioral Patterns (What, How, and When)
Evaluate what products and services current or prospective customers are using, how and when they’re using them, and the frequency of use. Do they combine the use of your product or service with other complementary products and services—or do they sometimes substitute it with competitor offerings? How do your current and prospective target customers communicate and share information with their networks? In which social channels are they most active (i.e., Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc.)?
Business leaders and marketers should convey the value of a product or service on the social platforms and media channels where their target market is present. Understanding the behavior of a specific customer segment provides an opportunity to demonstrate product value on those social channels by meeting unmet needs or solving current problems.
Geographic (Where)
Whether or not your target market is located in one area or spread across the globe, geography is critical. Where your customers are located will drive your financial, regulatory, and marketing strategies—and allow you to distill your target customers’ cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, religious, ethnic, and political idiosyncrasies based on their geographic location. Geography can be as specific as a postal code or as broad as global.
Psychographics (Why)
Psychographics describe a customer’s lifestyle, values, interests, hobbies, and personality type. These characteristics will inform why a customer uses a product or service. Is the ideal customer loyal to a brand or brand-indifferent? What needs or motivations drive a person to avail themselves of a company’s product or service solution?
What is an Ideal Customer Persona?
After defining the four categories of your target market segment, you’ll have a base upon which to build your specific ideal customer profile. You’ll already know who and where your target customer is, what, when, and how they use your product or service, and why they use it.
“Simply put, a customer persona, or buyer persona, is an extremely distilled version of your target customer.”
Developing a detailed customer persona is similar to profiling a criminal suspect. A detailed profile improves the chances of closing sales—or catching a thief. Business owners and marketers can supplement and further refine what they already know of their existing customers (e.g., through personal interactions and internal reporting) with third-party market research. Depending on the industry structure and the number of offerings, marketers may decide to develop more than one customer persona.
Who is Not an Ideal Customer?
Within a group of individuals whose geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics align with a company’s product or service value proposition, some individuals may have personality traits (psychographics) that are counterproductive to engaging in productive business relationships. Creating a distilled ideal customer profile will enable marketers to avoid engaging personality types incompatible with company culture.
Optimize Your Marketing Communication Success
Developing an ideal customer persona requires resources, so keep it simple and start with one. If you’re content with defining the four basic categories of your target market and stopping there—that’s perfectly fine. Use the best approach for your business and tailor your marketing communications to your target market’s motivations on the social channels where they’re most active. Finally, make it a habit to regularly refine your target market definition—and especially the more specific customer persona profile—to accommodate changes in trends, regulations, and other factors impacting the industry and customer base.
Download a Complimentary Customer Persona Template
Subscribe to Elevated News to access our complimentary Ideal Customer Persona template, a valuable resource designed to help you pinpoint and connect with your target audience.
Any customer-facing role is at risk of landing a toxic client. Business leaders and marketers must evaluate prospective customers as they would prospective employees during the hiring process. They should assess the individual for cultural fit and identify undesirable personality traits and mannerisms contradicting their organization’s values and growth objectives.