Defining an ideal customer is essential at the beginning of your startup, so you can save lots of time, effort, and money you waste by pitching the wrong customer.
Who is your ideal customer?
When I decided to write this book, I asked myself, who would be my ideal customers? To whom I want to serve? To whom this book can help the most? Hence, I narrowed down a few similarities that can be my target audience. Here are some that I came up with: Someone who wants to launch a business, Failed in the previous startup but wants to try again, To help them make fewer mistakes, who wants to be a better entrepreneur, who wants to launch without money, etc.
If you are currently reading this, it means you fall into one or more categories from above. 'Consumers want and expect messaging that speaks directly to them, or they will likely ignore you. As modern humans, we are subconsciously forced to screen out anything that doesn't directly apply to us. A dog food commercial may not even register on a cat owner's radar, even though your store sells cat food,' wrote by Russell Brunson, in his book DotCom Secrets. That's why you need to figure out who you want to target, and their pain point, and by doing so, you can speak your message in a way that can directly hit them.
Your main job is to dig deep into your ideal customer's life to frame the story that can struct them. What problems do they have? What stops them from moving ahead? Are they happy with current solutions? Where can you find them? For instance, for this book, I researched a few startup forums and Instagram pages. I discovered their problems and narrowed down most commons. I noticed that they want to launch a startup but don't know where to start; they want to quit the job but don't know how to launch; they want to start a business but don't have money; they want to be financially free. Therefore, I decided to write this book, revolve around these topics, and the mistakes I made in my first startup so that they can save time and effort.
While considering your ideal customers, you must go in great detail of their preferences, their desired results, the journey they can take, their likes, and dislikes. For the same fitness app, you should mine out what they are eating, what diet they would follow, how you motivate them to take actions, do they have any health conditions, are they using any solution, did they try in the past to solve it, what food they are allergic to. When you know your prospect well, you can frame your story in a way that can hit them.
Where can you find them?
With knowing the pain points, and problems of your ideal customer, it's time to find out where they hang out. When you figure out where to find them, you hit the jackpot, because then, you don't have to spend your money on paid ads. It becomes easy to track down your ideal customer's hang-out place in the era of social media. Now you just need to type your niche related hashtag or keyword, and you find many accounts on social media. Also, it's easy to find an influencer and their followers list to whom you can send your offer directly into their inbox. With the right keywords typing on google, you can access your ideal customers.
To illustrate this, let's suppose you want to build a fitness application that provides a custom workout session based on the user's fitness level. You already have zeroed down to your ideal customers, who are looking for a workout that suits them. Where can you find them? One of the best places I will look at is the Instagram fitness page. When you are an expert in your niche and create an attractive social media page, people will follow. You can become an expert by reading more on the topic because not everyone will do. Let's stick to your Instagram; you can follow the people who are commenting and liking the posts as they are the most active people in fitness and are likely to follow you back if they find value in your account.
The magnet to attract them.
Here is the fun part. With you zeroed in your ideal customer, and discovered where to find them, but how can you attract your ideal customers? How can you make them listen to you amid all the noises? It's not you only who tries to sell them something. There will be plenty of others who are screaming for their attention. So, what can you do differently, so they stop and listen to you? By leveraging the work called FREE, perfectly bind with your magnet.
The magnet is your FREE product or service you provide them, to capture their attention. Your magnet can be a free ebook, DVD, free webinar, free medical checkup, blogs, or podcasts in your skills. Here is where people make a mistake by not providing their highest value. Your focus should be on building a relationship with them by providing your capability best values. If you want to be an information entrepreneur, give your best content free, or teach them about your business, or give free check ups. Your aim should be providing the content they can't say no and get attracted by your magnet.
For instance, suppose you want to sell a course that can help people be more productive. So you set up a website where you give a free webinar about being productive. The content of this webinar provides massive value, and your purpose with this webinar is to drive them to your full productivity course. You drove traffic (your ideal customer) to this webinar page and captured their Name and Email Address before letting them access your webinar content. You can encourage them to buy your full productive course from the webinar, or you can email them occasionally with more valuable content. The more FREE you give, the better relationship you will form. We will cover more about this in the upcoming chapters.
When you know your ideal customers, the next thing you must do is to start engaging them through social media. Building a list while keep working on the development of the product can be useful in your launch. Also, it gives enough time to build rapport with prospects. So, when you launch your product, they queued up to buy your product/service.