Choosing Your Ideal Target Client

“Anyone with a Pulse” is not a target market

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to a great group of Small Business Owners at the Little Rock Regional Chamber about building Marketing Systems for small businesses.

It was fun to be back at an in-person event and the group asked some great questions.

As always, any talk I give about small business marketing starts with Strategy First.

And Strategy starts with your ideal target client. But how do you figure this out?

Really, it can be pretty simple; and it applies if you have 1,000 customers or 10.

Simply think about your customer base and segment them based on their profitability to your firm and whether or not they refer new customers to you. (Referring to you is pretty much the ultimate indication of customer loyalty and trust)

You clearly want more of the Profitable + Referring customers, and fewer of the Detractors.

You don’t have to spend tons of time doing this – if you have concrete data, great! But, your gut instinct will be good enough.

(though, if you’re not sure if your customers are profitable to you, I strongly recommend you get on that analysis quickly)

Even with this quick segmentation you now have a clearer picture of the types of customers you want to attract more of…and some customers you should probably prune from your business.

The next step in building your strategy?

Call your “ideal” quadrant customers to discuss your value to them…

• What problems do you solve for them?
• What is an example or story of when you’ve really come through for them?
• Why do they continue to buy from you?
• What other companies do they know who could benefit from your services? (yes, that’s asking for a referral)
• What don’t you do for them that you could? (maybe they don’t even know what all you offer!)

The answers to these questions fill in the 2nd step in building your marketing strategy – your Unique Value Proposition.

More on that in the next post…