The easiest answer to this would be to say anyone could be an ideal customer. This is true for many small businesses but for your marketing to be most effective, it is best to filter down your target audience as much as possible. Many startups begin by spotting a gap in the market, where they can focus on a niche and dominate. If you can focus on the individual, you can create a customer profile based on their typical details and interests. This allows you to get to know your customer on a personal basis.
Market research is always a good place to start when it comes to understanding your audience needs. This may involve a survey about what they may be interested in buying but if you can also gather general details like age, location, gender through to general food and music tastes etc then you are able to paint an overall picture of that person. With positive results, you can begin to analyse and spot trends and similarities between the people within your targeted audience.
A good awareness of their interests, enables you to be creative and innovative when devising your digital marketing strategy. For example, usually particular images that are likely to attract that audience and setting up social media adverts that are only aimed at your niche. This method lends itself to the ‘right place, right time’ mentality of traditional marketing, especially as you can schedule your ad to only show when they are likely to be online.
If you are just getting started in business, it makes sense to open up your services to everyone but your line of work may be a particularly crowded marketplace. Sometimes this can lead to a ‘spray and pray’ style of marketing, which isn’t very cost-effective, as money gets wasted on advertising to the wrong audience, who are least likely to convert to sales. Therefore, rather than offer your business services to all types of businesses, your company could focus on those that belong to one particular industry, such as Health & Beauty. This may be a unique selling point (USP) but combined with other USPs, can be influential to that industry and you could even become a ‘thought leader’ and person that people in that industry will turn to first.
Jon Exton