How to reach the right target customers

Mental health isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a legitimate business variable. Whether you’re flying solo, and it’s your own mental state, or you are far enough along in your business journey to employ staff, you need to take employee wellness seriously.

As an expert consulting brand in SMME marketing, communication and business management, we’ve been around long enough to know that most founders make the grave mistake of ignoring or overlooking HR. It’s a shame, especially with most founders being product experts and not always having the experience and skills to run entire businesses or manage high-calibre staff.

Know Your Customer

The KYC initiative is a common tool for establishing and implementing a process that gathers details about leads and customers. It’s another framework that often appeals to small business leaders and it becomes a fad, to use for a while but it fades away into the background again at some point. We know: we see it happening before we help turn things around.

What you really need to do is be your own customer for as long as it takes to understand how they actually buy what it is you’re selling. People will default to demographics, which are useful, and some people are slowly catching on to psychographic targeting which we’ve been educating small businesses about since 2019, through our CAFB fashion business programme. You’ll never truly get your full ROI on your marketing budget without establishing the right customer connections.

Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

You should know who your product is for from the moment you first dream it up, at least at a high level. Think about the nature of your offering and which industry it belongs to; do your research to see who else offers something similar and think about why people would specifically choose you over any other available options. When you’re defining your customer, you need to focus on how their actions lead to the value exchange between them and your company:

Demographics form only one part of this – age, location, interests, political viewpoints etc. but there’s a lot more to a person than demographics.
Psychographic targeting is also just another layer – how do people think or feel when they buy your product?
How the two values dynamically evolve is what you really need to concentrate on. Understand the end-to-end spectrum of how somebody moves back and forth between the first time they see something about your brand, down to the decision to stay loyal to you.

Buyer behaviour is no longer defined by a straight line. It gets messy sometimes, folks, and the degree of mess will depend on what they’re buying. For someone buying a spa voucher, the location of the person redeeming the voucher, at a specific time, will drive that purchase. For a parent buying their young adult child a first car, safety features and after-sales service might be more important than finding the cheapest option available.

One of the easiest ways to get inside the mind of the customer at each and every step of the buying cycle is to get closer to your sales team. Marketing and sales must work together and enable each other. Your customer profile isn’t just a list of characteristics and emotional states: it’s a dynamic blend of how people constantly evolve their decision-making frameworks.

Spend quality time with your target audience

Between 2000-2010 many media brands emphasised what ‘a day in the life’ of celebrities and prominent business people was like. When social media exploded across the modern communication landscape, suddenly consumers no longer needed the media as intermediaries in their effort to explore the day-to-day existence of their favourite public figures. Today, even politicians are openly engaging with their stakeholders through digital channels and trying to connect with their supporters in new ways.

Once you establish your idea of your ideal customer profile, you need to verify if you really do understand them. Direct engagement and observation are the most accurate methods we have used, in obtaining data about ICPs for our clients: surveys and studies. You have to understand which brands, products and services your ideal customer interacts with, ignores, adores and talks about: daily, weekly, monthly and annually.

More importantly you have to understand the way your customers substitute their choices and how they make decisions about that. When something goes wrong in their lives, where do they turn? Small business owners often ignore the value of psychology in marketing and sales so don’t make that mistake. Be the business that ‘gets it’ as far as your customers are concerned. Make the effort.

Listen to the people

Ignoring customer feedback is stupid. It’s business suicide. People are literally giving you the information that will help you generate more revenue and you’re a fool if you don’t take that on board at least to some extent.

If you decidedly reject a customer suggestion, you’re making an active decision (which is different from ignoring a suggestion entirely). The uncomfortable truth is that the customer is not always right and they don’t always have the answers, but that’s why you should have a corporate communication plan in place, to deal with situations that arise through your relationship with less-than-ideal customers. There’s an appropriate way to handle inappropriate customers and ignore therapy is not the solution.

Don’t yet have a structure in place for collecting, storing and processing your customer feedback? We can help with that. Use our contact form to get in touch.

It never ends

It really shouldn’t. Your customers, today, are not the same people they were five years ago. Maybe your product or service is something they eventually outgrow (think of a private school or college where the programmes come to an end).

You need to constantly evolve your understanding of your customers so that they can evolve their understanding of you. As your customers grow, so should you and your offering. Even if you’re focused on helping people through a very specific obstacle, like driving lessons, learning methods will inevitably evolve over time.

Discipline yourself, stay hungry for knowledge about how you can better serve society and take action to apply that knowledge. This is really what it takes to reach and connect with your ideal target customers.