3 Questions to Help you Find your Ideal Audience

Are you a Startup founder, business owner caught up in the bazillion advice out there on how to find your ideal customer?

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The information and advice offered out there are majorly from companies that have raised millions in funding round or even gone ahead with an IPO.

You'll hear words like demography, income level, age, married or single and even name your persona.

As good as that may sound, it doesn't serve a small business owner in the moment or a start up who hasn't made a single sale.

It doesn't mean that their advice isn't great and won't serve a business well. But it can be pretty overwhelming, tasking and has a tendency to launch entrepreneurs to a drift sea of procrastination because it takes having a lot of data at your finger tips to make these ideas work for you. What's worse, these ideas craft a 3-10 page customer persona guide, questions and checklist.

You don't want to get consumed spending days and night figuring out who you should be selling to.

Here are the only three questions that truly determine if you have a monetizable market, marketable idea and can offer up the best solution you can to the right audience is what you should rather be asking.

After you've landed some clients and grown your business to a certain degree, you can then begin to implement the 1001 questions of a customer profile. Because then you know enough about your market. Has worked with a variety of customers, observed patterns and can now confidently understand and screen out your ideal customer.

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So how do you understand your ideal audience, so that you know you're spending time with the right people and generating the kind of sales you desire?
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The must have a staunch resolve before you ask these three questions: And these are:

1. You must resolve that you know a problem that needs solving and you can do a good job at providing solution.

2. That you have the right skill, tools, expertise, knowledge and competency to solve the problem.

To help you frame answers to these questions let me put it this way:

What problem do I have the skill, expertise, knowledge and competency to solve. ___ identify the problem you want to solve first.

After you've gained clarity on the problem you solve, the next thing you do is determine who your ideal audience is by finding answers to these core customer persona questions:

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1.  Who has the problem I intend to solve?

Already you know the problem you want to solve, now it's time to find people with the problem. To discover the answer to this, it leads us to the next question.

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2. Are they willing and ready to seek help for this problem?

In other words, it's like saying, are they willing and ready to invest money to make the problem go away? Is the problem big enough, bad enough, challenging enough that it motivates them to put money into it to make it go away?

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3. Do they have the right BMC to make it happen?

BMC stands for Budget, Mindset and Commitment.

Let's distill this a little bit more.

Budget:

Can they work with you based on the monetary requirement you want? As a marketing strategist, a business may have the problem I solve and willing to invest money to make it go away. However, they may not have the budget to hire my services. That doesn't make them my ideal customer.

Mindset:

Is their mindset and culture framed to support seeking help and having you provide that solution?

This is very important. The popular story about a village with people without shoes is incomplete. An external factor made the sales of shoes a success. Someone's mindset can keep them from getting maximum results that you provide and if they are unable to get maximum results they think your solution is lame, which may end up creating a poor client-business relationship.

Commitment:

Are they willing and able to commit to the process of getting results? Some people are just paying lip service to needing their problem go away.

For example: If you need your clients to send you certain documentation to get their work done, but they don't make it priority, only to keep procrastinating until you get fed up, that's not an ideal client!

And ideal client makes your service a priority and doesn't allow procrastination be a cog in the wheel

When you find an audience who can answer yes to these questions then you've found your customers.

Stop struggling trying to build a long form customer persona when you don't already have one sale out.

Whatever you come up with is pure theory, it doesn't matter how many analytics tools and research reports you consult.

There is this quote, I love to say.

"Consider all marketing strategies an assumption until you try them within your business and have clear results, whether good or bad."

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Because nothing beats real life answers that come from working with real people, serving them, gaining experience, learning the lessons and using all that insights to come up with your ideal customer profile.

With your observation you can say, "Oh this category of people are a pain to serve as against another category that pays more and demands less customer service and I prefer to serve the latter."

This is where you need to get to and the quicker you get there, the better.

To find your ideal customer these are the only three questions that need asking especially if you're just starting out. Don't get buried in customer persona, audience profile and all those time consuming activity that doesn't even guarantee sales. There's another HACK though if you still choose to ride this one our that will limit your brain raking time and set you up for clarity using existing marketing research and analytics. I hope to share that in a future post. However, for now. Rather than, wasting time on a ton of customer persona questions, solve that using these three questions so you can get moving and cranking the profit bell.

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