Finding your ideal customer may be the smartest marketing thing you ever do. Here’s why:

I was working with a new client this morning and she was telling me about some of the marketing opportunities/challenges in front of her. There are so many potential types of customers, so many potential sources of business—where should she focus her energy? I suggested that she work this week to identify her ideal customer. If you feel like you have too many choices, I would recommend that you identify your ideal customer as soon as possible.

As Perry Marshall explains in his book 80/20 Sales and Marketing, the fact is about 20 percent of all your customers will generate 80 percent of your income. That is because the other 80 percent aren’t totally in line with your ideal customer. There is a way to improve your income exponentially, and that’s by hyper focusing on your ideal customer so that you can attract more ideal customers and fewer who aren’t ideal.

Here are the steps I suggest you take to identify your ideal customer:

1. What Benefits Does Your Product or Service Offer? – Make a list of all the benefits that your product or service has. When you are thinking like your customer, you will always think about “what’s in it for me?” Your customer wants to know why they should use that product or pay for that service.

2. Identify Pain Points That You Can Solve – What sort of pain points does your product or service solve? Does it free up time? Does it end boredom?

3. Determine Who Needs These Issues Solved – Once you’ve gathered a list of benefits your product offers and pain points that your product solves, you need to figure out who needs those benefits and has those pain points.

4. Determine Your Customers’ Potential Characteristics – Once you have a list of those who might benefit from your product or service, you can make a list of demographics and other factors that people in that group share.

5. Determine Your Customers’ Behavior – Find ways to research the list of people you made above so that you can get a better idea of the type of behavior your target audience displays. I know a man who has made a fortune extrapolating behaviors from pain points then buidling products to meet those needs.

6. What Career Does Your Ideal Customer Have? – Can you determine what type of career your ideal client has from the information you’ve gathered above? For some people, their career will have an enormous effect on their behaviors and choices.

7. What Price Point Can They Afford? – Once you know what type of career your ideal client has, you can also determine a fair price point for your product or service based on what they can afford to pay and the value of your offering.

8. Test Your Assumptions – Once you have a fair idea of who your ideal client is, you can test your assumptions by identifying some influencers within your audience and asking them to try your product or service.

9. Repeat – Take the answers you get from the information above and the test and improve upon your offerings so that you can truly please your ideal customer.

Using the information learned from all of the above actions, you can focus your marketing efforts toward your ideal client. In addition, you can use the information to retain the right customers in order to take advantage of repeat customers and a high level of customer satisfaction.

If you’d like more information on finding your ideal customer, you should also check out this article on discovering your perfect target customer by John Jantsch, creator of Duct Tape Marketing. He’s super smart and his advice is always actionable.

My Challenge to You Today

 1) go through this list of 9 steps and hone in on your ideal customer. 2) Write your answers down and 3) share them with a co-worker, friend, or trusted advisor. You will have an enormous marketing advantage over those who’ve never taken time to identify their ideal client.