Doug Farrick

Sometimes your ideal customer and your *actual* customer can be two completely different animals causing you much frustration. Here's a few thoughts on how you can "sync" these up so you can market smarter and more effectively.

On the surface it seems like a pretty basic question but if you dig a little deeper it gets more and more interesting.

For example, if someone asked you WHO your ideal customer is, how would you respond?

You could respond demographically by stating your customers gender, age, marital status, annual income, zip code, etc. and that information IS valuable but is only a part of the picture.

But what about your ideal customers psychology. That is, what they want, what frustrates them about your creative service, what they like best, what they would like to see you offer, etc.

Now we are getting a much more dimensional picture of your customer.

For the demographic info you can just request it via email or phone. And for the psychographic information a good way to obtain this information is to use a survey. Either do a phone survey or some type of online survey like SurveyMonkey.com.

Surprisingly, who you think is your ideal customer is, at times, quite different than your demographic and survey information proves.

As you might guess, this can cause some serious frustration in your business as your ideal customer is not matching up to your current "actual" one.

What to do? I would recommend first getting some detailed demographics and doing a customer survey.

You will receive two benefits.

1. You will actually get a clear understanding of *exactly* who your customers are and what they are looking for, etc.

2. You can now target market effectively to that customer or modify your products/services so that you are attracting the ideal client and not just whoever happens to show up at your doorstep.

Doug Farrick

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