Do you know your ideal customer? How well do you know them?

This is so important because if you don’t know your ideal customer, you’re not going to able to find where they are online and bring them over to your shop, so you can start making sales.

In this post, I’m going to talk about how knowing your ideal customer is going to help you in some business decisions that are going to attract them to come over to your shop and I’m going to share with you my proprietary technique for learning more about your ideal customer in less than 30 minutes.

So how does knowing your ideal customer help you?

Now, if you’ve done any research online about the ideal customer you’ve probably come across a lot of questionnaires, pdfs, and question prompts that ask you to come up with the ideal customer’s name, her age, where she lives, whether she has kids or not blah blah, out of thin air .

And honestly, I don’t find a lot of practical need in knowing my ideal customer’s first name. Like what do I do with that information?

Instead, I want to share with you how knowing your customers can help you grow your business in some practical ways.

Branding

The first way is: with branding. If you don’t know your ideal customers, you won’t know how to brand your shop and your business in a way that is going to attract them.

So, in very simple terms:

• Do you know what colors to use in your brand?
• Should you be using highly saturated colors or less saturated colors?
• Should you be using a lot of colors, to begin with, because maybe your ideal customers are kind of a black, gray and white kind of girl.

Pricing

Another very practical thing that this helps with is: knowing what kinds of prices they are willing to pay for your kind of product. This includes knowing what things your ideal customers prioritize or values in life.

For example, I have a lot of parents that buy my handmade jewelry at tinyhandsonline.com.

There are parents that love spoiling their kids, that love buying treats and toys and fun things for their kids. But then there are also some parents who don’t do that because they think it’s gonna be a waste of money because the thing is going to break in a couple of days.

When you know what kinds of prices your ideal customers are willing to spend, you can be smarter about the kinds of products that you will launch.

Where Else Do They Shop

The third thing that I found that is hugely helpful in understanding my ideal customer is knowing what other products and what other brands they buy from.

How was this helpful?

Well, if I knew what other brands they buy from, I can go to those brands’ websites and just do a lot of competitive research.

I can see what popular products they’re selling and I can see what products they’re going to launch soon. I can take that as a hint for what new products I want to make in my own shop next.

No, I’m not suggesting that you copy exactly, but you take some inspiration from it. There is a difference.

When you do know what other brands your ideal customer likes and buys from, I recommend you join their email list and to follow them on social media.

By doing this, you’re going to learn so much about how they do their marketing:

• How they write their social media posts
• When they do a giveaway what kinds of prizes are used
• How do they write their email newsletter
• What do they talk about on their email newsletter
• What kinds of subject lines do they use and in their product copywriting or their social media copywriting
• If they put a lot of emojis or use a lot of exclamation points

This is all data that you can use on your own business.

If this works for that brand and it attracts that customer, then it’s going to work in your brand in attracting that same customer to you.

My Secret Technique

Now, I know you might probably be thinking right now.

Well, Mei, I have no idea how to find any of that information. It’s great that you’re putting all of this out there, but I don’t know if they like colorful colors or more subdued colors or if they are price conscious or if they are very affluent.

Well, now, I’m going to share with you my proprietary technique that I call my “coattail technique.”

And if you follow this simple five steps process, you’re going to be able, in the next 30 minutes, to learn so much more about your ideal customer than you’ve ever known before.

This is a process that I created myself through a lot of trial and error.

1. Make a List

I want you to make a list of other brands that are similar in style as you and who are really really successful.

So, don’t go looking into Etsy for making this list because that’s not going to work.

So, I make cute handmade jewelry. I don’t necessarily have to look for other cute handmade jewelry brands. If you can think beyond the type of product you make that’s going to make this process a lot easier to do.

So say, for example, you make boho-chic spiritual jewelry. You can go into google and search for those keywords boho-chic jewelry and what comes up on search results.

If you want to expand beyond jewelry, you can type in boho-chic spiritual clothing, boho-chic spiritual wall art, and then whatever search results come up you wanna click as many of them and check out those websites.

What you’re doing at this point is just to see if they check out. Do they really sell a product that is similar in style as you?

This is going to be a little bit more of a subjective, it’s gonna be your call. There’s not really a hard and fast formula to follow with them.

Start building up your list, and once you have that, then you can move on to step two.

2. Check Out Their Social Profiles

So, you’re on these brands’ websites. I want you to go on and check out their Instagram, and Facebook profiles.

3. Read Their Posts

You’re going to start reading their posts.

4. Check Out Their Comments

When you find a comment that sounds like it’s from someone who was a customer or seems like they have the intention to buy from this brand.

5. Click on That Person’s Profile

Just as a heads up, a lot of these profiles are gonna be private because these are going to be normal people who are using Instagram as a personal account, but there are going to be a lot of them who do have their profile set to public.

Trust in this process and have patience with it because you’re gonna find so much golden information about your ideal customer that is going to determine a lot of business decisions that will attract them to you.

So, you’re gonna repeat this process as many times as you need until you can start to see a pattern form.

When you’ve seen enough of these peoples profiles, people who have bought something from this brand who share a similar style as you before. You’re gonna know exactly:

• What things they love in life
• What things they’re passionate about
• What magazines they read
• What TV shows they watch
• What kind of colors they like

This is all gonna show and come through the photos that they post on Instagram.

You can do the same thing on Facebook too.

This is how you can know exactly who your ideal customer is: what they like; what they don’t like; and then apply that to your business.

I want you to let me know in the comments whether this was helpful for you or not, and if you have any questions, post them in the comments too.