Why Knowing and Sticking to Your Ideal Customer is Essential to Start-up Success

Are you targeting the right audience? Finding your ideal customer is important especially for start-up businesses as it will help you to learn about your customers and retain loyal customers. The end of the year is a good time to look at your customer base to evaluate your business plan. Read on for more info.

Find your market to drive your business growth

Finding the right customers for your market will have to increase sales. Once you learn about your target market, you can find out what they like and what adverts and products will help you to drive growth. You need to do your research to get to know your customers before launching a product or service. One way to do this is to look at your competitors and the tactics they use to drive customers to their website or to buy a product.  

Let’s point out a few great resources with considering your target market:

1. SBA Business Guide Page “Market research and competitive analysis”
2. Your local library such as Fairfax County’s https://research.fairfaxcounty.gov/business 
3. Verizon Small Business Digital Ready platform has great learning opportunities such as their course “Defining you brand: Connecting to customers”

Knowing your market will help you to launch the right products/services

When you have a start-up business, you may not see much profit. Don’t assume nobody wants to buy your product or service. Don’t assume everyone wants to buy your product or service.  You must make sure you have done thorough research on your market and a competitive analysis (we can help) is a great tool! This means understanding the demand, market size, market saturation, pricing and more! You need to research the market to find out if there are enough customers interested in the product. 

Tips To Retain Your Customers 

Knowing your customers is important and retaining your customers will especially help you to get your business off the ground. Here are some tips you can use to stick to your ideal customer:

• Offer your existing customers incentives on products that they purchase the most. You can find these customers by the use of emailing marketing tools
• Advertise and promote your products to customers through email marketing, print, and social media marketing channels
• Make samples available to your buyer or give them a chance to test out a service for a trial period
• Hire a good customer service team to address any concerns or queries your customers have

Finding and retaining the right market can be difficult but we can offer you tips and workshops to help you and your staff to get it right. 

Contact our team today for help with finding and retaining the ideal customer!