A customer profile is a semi fictional representation of who your ideal customer is.
I couldn’t think of a better way to explain why it matters so much than with these words: “As painful as it is […] nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares about you or your product. You’re not entitled to any sales or clicks or shares or love simply because you made a thing. Nobody cares about your thing.” (source)
What people care about is themselves: what they like, what they need, what they want.
I said that not to hurt your feelings but to make sure you understand that you have to spend some time defining who your ideal customer is. You need to know who will care, and who will pay for your products. You need to know who you are making your product for so you can align your products and marketing efforts and make more sales (or any sales at all!).
So, if you want to know what you need to think of in defining your ideal customer profile, keep reading (and don’t forget to download your FREE workbook!)
Grab this free ideal customer workbook
This free ideal customer workbook, made specifically for handmade shop owners, will help you find and attract your ideal customers, so you can make more sales!
Your ideal customer profile is made of two main categories of information about your best potential customers:
– Demographics, which is factual data : how old are they? how much money are they making? where do they live? what do they do for a living? are they married? have kids? etc.
– Psychographics, which is information about their attitudes and aspirations: what do they do for fun? where do they travel to? where do they wish they could on their next holiday? where do they shop? what do they do in their free time? what movies/shows/bands influence them? what do they wear? etc.
It’s a common mistake to stop at the demographics level when trying to define your ideal customer profile. You’ll here people say: “my target customer is a female aged 25 to 40, earning around 70K a year, with 1 or 2 kids, living in a major city”. Even if it’s better than nothing, it really isn’t enough. Is she vegan? Does she like hard rock? Or is she more of a jazz person? Does she like swimming? Does she takes cooking classes?
You know where I am going with that: you have to dig deeper, which is why I need to tell you about the “focus on one person rule”, and below, I will do exactly that!
The reason you HAVE to focus on one person and one person only when defining your ideal customer is because if you don’t you are defining your target market, or niche, not your ideal customer.
Going through the process of thinking about this ONE person and this one person only doesn’t mean that you won’t sell to anyone else. But it forces you to go real deep into understanding your customers habits, preferences, and needs so you can serve them better.
If you stop at the demographics level, you are probably doing an OK job at defining your market and your niche but you are still missing that tiny little bit of extra information that can make a big difference to your online shop and business.
This is what I mean:
Ready to define your ideal customer profile? Here are the steps I recommend you take:
STEP 1 – Download the workbook from the free resource library, it will make things much easier for you as you can just follow the steps and fill in the templates 🙂
STEP 2- Start with your products. Make sure you know what their benefits (not their features!) are. List them.
Eg. Go from “100% pure aloe vera” to “detoxifying and hydrating”
STEP 3- From this list of benefits, what main problem do your products seem to be solving? What desire are you fulfilling?
Eg. “I looooove bubble baths!” or “I would love to invest in a beautiful dog bed, but my dog will chew it out in a day so it’s not really worth it!!“
STEP 4 – Who actually has this problem or this desire? What group of people could be interested? Think demographics.
STEP 5 – Time to “focus on one person”. Narrow this group of persons down to ONE and try as well as you can to answer these questions:
{I am using ‘she’ but of course if your ideal customer if a man, you should replace with ‘he’}
– what does she do for fun? does she have a passion or hobby?
– where does she spend her weekends?
– what music does she listen to?
– what’s her favorite movie/book?
– who influences her/who does she look up to (artist, political leader, writer, actor, etc.) ?
– what does she dream about? wish for?
– what websites does she visits daily? weekly?
– what magazines does she read?
– where does she spend her holidays? Where would she want to spend her holidays?
– what are her personal values?
– whats does she eat? (special diet?)
– how does she get to work (car, bus, walk, work from home?) ?
– what does she look like (hair, clothes, general style)?
– does she live in a house? an apartment? a farm?
– is she married? single? divorced? 2 kids? no kids? 1 kids? how old?
+ write down anything that you feel can help you describe her with as many details as possible!
STEP 6 – Name it! Give her/him a name. Sounds a little bit crazy but it makes a real difference. Why? Because whatever you are working on in your business, you can use this ideal customer profile to answer this simple question:
“Would {insert name here} like this?”
If yes, then keep it on your to-do list. If not, forget about it right away: it won’t help grow your business.
A great podcast about defining your ideal customer profile I recommend you listen to is this one with Amy Porterfield and Jasmine Star. Great stuff!
The bottom line is: Everything you do needs to be aimed towards making this single one ideal customer happy. It actually is the best way to attract thousands of happy customers and fans to your online shop!
Who is your ideal customer? I’d love to know what you came up with. Let me know in the comments!
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This is a really good idea! I especially love the part where you mention having a “name” for your ideal client. Being able to ask yourself, “Would (name) like it?” That would make choosing products and sticking to your niche much easier! Thank you.
Thank for reading Nyah! I am glad this was useful. If you need help coming up with your ideal customer profile, you can grab a free workbook with activities in the free resource library => http://www.tizzit.co/free
I’ve only just come across Tizzit lately and I am SO excited! I have followed so many blogs, read articles, and yes I’ve even wasted money on courses from so called professionals. The thing is non of them so far have even covered a tiny bit about being a HANDMADE product seller online and I’m left usually more confused than I was before. So I can’t wait to dive into all of your tizzit resources❤️
The one thing I am stuck on and have been for years, is HOW do I know who my ideal customer is? I love creating jewellery because it’s just what I love doing and I guess I don’t have a particular person in mind when making it. So how do I work out who my perfect customer is and how do I find them? This has been a question I’ve had since forever and I’m never any closer to finding out. I am trying to streamline my shop a little more so it’s not so much full of jewellery for all tastes, but I still don’t know where I will end up because of not knowing how I find out who my customers are.
Hi Victoria! Pleasure to have you here! Tizzit is most definitely ALL about handmade sellers 🙂 I am very excited that you are looking into finding your ideal customers. Many people don’t know it’s even a thing nor want to spend the time doing this VERY important work, so congrats! Now, as to HOW: Have you downloaded the Ideal Customer Workbook in the Free Resource Library (it’s at http://www.tizzit.co/free)? This is a good starting point. The next one would be to take the full course about this inside Tizzit HQ (walks you through exercises to, for example, find this person in real life using social media). The HQ is a paid membership but you can join for just a month and cancel after that if you don’t want to stick around. More info here: http://www.tizzit.co/hq 🙂