Your Ideal Customer (With Download!)

Remember when you used to print out a map before you drove somewhere?

Mapquest was my jam in High School.

Or even before that when you would use a fold-out map or one of those crazy huge books that your dad still has in the trunk of his car even though he uses GoogleMaps on his iPhone 5?

Where it used to be that you would read through all the steps before going somewhere, and make your 3rd-grade teachers proud, we now just listen to our app and turn when they tell us to. Hopefully with a great Australian accent.

Marketing works a lot better with Mapquest than it does GoogleMaps. Who you are marketing to works in the same way. In marketing, we call this a customer profile. It asks the question, who exactly are you serving?

This is the simplest and the most complex question of your business because we want to serve EVERYONE. But in the specific, we serve the universal. Like when I talk about my dad having an old map in his car and working with an iPhone 5. That was specific but I bet 90% of you related in some way even if your dad uses an Android or it was your mom that is like this.

Through the specific, you acknowledge the universal and that’s the most important marketing lesson I could ever teach you.

So who is your customer? What is their name? What do they do? How big is their family? What college did they go to? What Netflix shows do they watch? Where do they live?

The list of questions goes on and on.

By understanding who you are marketing to you can ask yourself if they’ll care about a post you are creating, if they’ll like the new packaging you designed or what kind of sale would benefit them.

Take Stephanie, she’s 35 and lives in Portland. Married to her business partner, Ryan, they have 1 kid and two dogs and run a fair trade clothing line online but are opening up a store in the coming months. They love to travel around the world and actually met abroad in Africa. Stephanie is a busy woman caring for her family and growing a business that she is passionate about. She doesn’t always have time to take care of herself but is always reading up on the latest marketing and business news. She and Ryan love to be outdoors and when the weather is nice usually go hiking or find themselves outside. Stephanie wants to make the investment in commercial photography for her business to show her clients just what their future could look like with her fair trade clothes in their life but isn’t quite sure how to go about it.

Stephanie doesn’t exist.

She’s my ideal customer. Someone I’ve made up in my head to represent the business I want to build and the people I want to serve.

Does this mean I only work with fair trade clothing brands? No!

What this does mean is that I see what her needs are and what her passions are and I design content around that. Others will relate and find value and see the same needs that she does. She needs photography that will show her customers what the future holds, not just a pretty product.

I want you to be SO clear on your customer that I’ve designed this simple questionnaire for you to start asking questions about who your customer is? Download it and print it out and work with your team or just by yourself and start painting the picture of who you serve. Get specific. You might serve more than one person (A men’s line and a woman’s line) but start with one. It will help you get a clear idea of where you need to go from there.

As always, if you have questions don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m just an email away and want to help your business in any way that I can. And if you’re like Stephanie and ready to invest in the photographs that will make you the business you’ve always dreamed of but aren’t sure where to start, it’s really time we talked. I want to make those dreams come true and will show you the Mapquest map of how to do it!