Few marketing activities are as crucial to your success as building an ideal customer profile. At its heart, marketing is all about communicating the right message to the right people at the right time.

Developing an ideal customer profile is a fantastic way to ensure you’re conceptualizing the right people and messaging them accordingly. Brands work to create perfect customer profiles for very understandable reasons; the better they can identify their most profitable customers, the better their marketing!

An ideal customer profile is a way to identify the key types of customers you want to reach out to as a business. This could take several different formats.

Some businesses might name their different types of customers and ascribe unique names to them to personalize the research process. Others might divide customers into psychographic segments based on lifestyle interests. Still, others might use more firmographic and technographic modeling to define their ideal customer profile (i.e., “liberal arts colleges with over 1,000 students who need to modernize their IT.” to use one fictitious example.)

There’s no right or wrong format; what’s important is that the ideal customer profile helps your business understand your customers and helps you message them more effectively. Now that we’ve defined a perfect customer profile, let’s review the process of creating one!

Research

Research is at the heart of creating an ideal customer profile. Without spending the time to truly learn what you don’t know, you can’t effectively market to your customers. The means of research will look quite different from industry to industry and client to client, but the idea is usually the same. We always recommend returning to the SWOT analysis framework to begin.

• Strengths: Internal core competencies.
• Weaknesses: Internal areas of improvement
• Opportunities: External chances to grow
• Threats: External challenges.

This is one of the most universal ways to research your business model, but there are others. Research into your industry, the market at large, your competitors, and emerging tech can all be key areas to delve into here. The specific research will vary, but what’s important is that you gather as much information as possible before you move on to the second step of this process.

Find Your Best Customers and Analyze

Now that you’ve done your contextual research, it’s time to focus on your best customers. It’s important to note that this is a view of your BEST customers, not your average customers. Typically, a core set of clients will make up an oversized portion of revenue for most businesses. If you’re developing an ideal customer profile, segment your customer base and drill down further to find out the similar attributes that make up your top clients by revenue.

Remember that the attributes that bind your top clients together could vary. For example, if you’re a tech startup analyzing your top clients, you might find that your client’s industry is critical to your ideal customer profile and that you need to hone in on specific sectors for the best results.

The industry might be vital to this ideal customer profile, but it might be insignificant for an outdoor equipment store. Their ideal customer profile could be focused on customers with psychographic attributes, like mountain biking, hiking, skiing, and other lifestyle and hobby interests. Remember, it will vary from brand to brand. What’s important is that you find the customers you consider your top clients and then find the throughlines that bind them, regardless of what those may be.

Understand Their Pain Points

Now that you have a core set of clients, it’s time to put yourself in their shoes. The Ideal Customer Profile is usually viewed from the eyes of the business, and this vantage point is still helpful. However, understanding the specific pain points of your ideal customers helps you better understand what problem your business is solving for your customers. Understanding this lets you see other potential use cases for your product or service.

Let’s go back to our example of an outdoor equipment store. Our store has done its homework and has determined that they are perceived as being a higher-end sports store in their area. This works out well for them. Our store has also decided that its ideal customer profile is centered on avid outdoor sportsmen who hate low-performance equipment and want quality, even if they pay a little extra. Knowing this pain point helps our store understand how they want to position their brand in the market.

Understand the Buying Process

If Step 2 was about your best customers and Step 3 was about their problems, Step 4 is about what deals advance or do not. At this point in the process, you should have a strong understanding of your business, the clients who drive it forward, and their problems.

However, your work is not complete just yet. Now, it’s time to know what leads to successfully closed deals. We recommend looking at your data and seeing what you can glean from past deal cycles. How long does it take to close a deal? Whose sign-off is required to close a deal? The more you understand this process, the better your ideal customer profile comes into focus.

Let’s say you’re a restaurant looking to cater more business team-building events. You understand that local businesses of 100-250 employees are the most common customers here and that law firms, marketing agencies, accounting firms, and doctor’s offices are the most common industries. You also have data that shows that a company’s HR department usually instigates your typical catering job.

However, when you analyze the average deal cycle data you have, you realize that bigger catering jobs can stall before closing without sign-off from customer higher-ups, such as the Chief Operating Officer. This insight now equips you to use this information in your marketing strategy.

Document & Revise

Ideal customer profiles change. It’s just a fact of life. You likely will need to tweak your ideal customer profile over time. That’s okay! It doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong. Marketing is dynamic; your audience profile will need to be as well. We recommend that you never revise your ideal customer profile more than once a year. Too much revision can muddy the waters and make it difficult to see trends. Tweaking every few quarters isn’t failure; it’s a fact of life.

Marketing Research With JSL

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Marketing strategies can certainly be complicated. If you’ve ever tried to message potential customers, you’ve likely experienced how convoluted marketing can be.

There’s an infinite number of tactics you can use to message your potential customers, and it can be easy to feel overwhelmed, especially if you don’t come from a marketing background. Unfortunately, marketing terminology can also be filled with jargon. With so many variables and terms to learn, it can be easy to get a little lost.

The best way to deal with confusing terminology is to define the term you’re struggling with! That led the JSL Marketing & Web Design team to lay out some of the most common marketing strategies you might run across to ensure you fully understand these terms when evaluating your business strategy.

It’s important to note that these marketing strategies are not all mutually exclusive; savvy businesses might use several techniques in tandem for the best results. However, knowing a few of these marketing strategies as you think through how to grow your business is worthwhile.

Competitive Conquesting

Competitive conquesting is a marketing strategy where businesses go head-to-head against their competitors. This is at play in most marketing, but a competitive conquesting marketing strategy takes it up a notch and places the difference between you and your competition front and center.

If you’ve ever done a SWOT analysis and evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, you’ve likely begun the foundations of a solid competitive conquesting marketing strategy. Knowing what separates you from the competition is the first step in conveying that difference to potential customers. Competitive conquesting can be worked into many different marketing tactics.

There are many ways to incorporate competitive conquesting into your marketing, whether developing content on your website around what separates you from a competitor, targeting keywords around your competitors on Google Ads, or sending emails to customers who left your business for a competitor.

Some businesses might not want this bold confrontation in their marketing, and that’s fine. Others, however, might see the value in knowing how to speak to potential customers about the competition.

Recommended Tactics: Pay-per-click advertising and email marketing

Recommended For: Businesses with small lists of competitors and distinct value propositions compared to those competitors.

Cross-Sell/Up-Sell

Selling is hard. Anyone who has spent time in sales or revenue operations knows this. That’s one of the many reasons brands consistently see better success reselling to core and profitable customers. After all, these customers are already familiar with your solution and often will buy quickly. The result is that you put less resources and time into marketing and see quicker success!

Recommended Tactics: Email marketing, sales collateral, and social media

Recommended For: Businesses where renewal conversations could be highly lucrative. For instance, cross-selling and upselling will only go so far with a fast-food restaurant. A manufacturing firm, however, could see a massive expansion if they could win a new job from a new business unit for their largest customer.

Brand Awareness

Thinking of the marketing funnel or buyer’s journey when conceptualizing brand awareness is essential. Every purchase, whether a new coffee or home, begins with understanding, moves on to consideration and then ends with a purchase.

There are more complicated and industry-specific paths, but this is true at a high level for all brands. Brand awareness marketing aims to make quick contact with potential customers and educate them about the problem your brand solves. You can’t purchase from a business if you know nothing about the company!

Recommended Tactics: Advertising, whether via broadcast television, print marketing, or digital marketing through tactics like display or YouTube, is typically how brands increase their potential customer’s brand awareness of their solution.

Recommended For: All businesses should use some element of brand awareness in their marketing. However, it is most impactful for brands with short sales cycles. Knowing and recognizing your brand increases the odds of a spontaneous purchase, especially when the product is a commodity.

Educating The Buyer

All marketers should look to educate their buyers about their solutions. That’s just good marketing. However, specific industries need to educate more than others. If you’re a neighborhood coffee shop, you likely don’t need to educate your prospects about what a cappuccino is and why they should want it.

If you’re a manufacturing firm looking to highlight a new type of production, you might need to educate about your solution. This type of marketing will likely focus on technical and well-written content about the problem your buyer faces and how you can help solve it.

Recommend Tactics: Whitepapers, blogs, case studies, and other well-written and designed pieces of material.

Recommend For: Brands with long and technically complex buying cycles. Business-to-business companies, in particular, should focus on education as a critical linchpin of their marketing strategy.

Plan Your Marketing Strategy With JSL Marketing & Web Design

These are just a few marketing strategies brands can use to reach customers. However, as mentioned previously, not all marketing strategies suit all businesses.

What works well for a local coffee stand might not work well for a more prominent manufacturer. Indeed, two businesses in the same industry might see vastly different results from the same strategy based on their unique region, company, and strategic situation.

For help developing your perfect marketing strategy, turn to JSL Marketing & Web Design!

We offer:

• PPC Advertising
• Web Design
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Brand Collateral
• & More!

Marketing is a challenging discipline. Knowing the pain points of your potential customers, the pertinent industry trends, and marketing best practices takes time.

In comparison, selling to existing customers sounds relatively simple. After all, they’re already customers of your business, so convincing them to buy should be more accessible. Marketing can be nixed entirely, right?

Indeed, convincing current customers to buy more or a different product can be easier. Many businesses recognize this and dedicate resources to grow existing customers into top-dollar accounts.

However, many businesses don’t provide adequate marketing support when they are looking to grow their current customers into repeat brand advocates; their account teams can struggle. Marketing to existing customers differs from reaching out to net new contacts, but marketing is still required.

Consider What You Know

Focus on building this relationship in all marketing elements for best results. Feedback from your sales team or account team is crucial for best results, and you should consult with these teams to understand how to best market to this client. What are the client’s goals? What’s happening in their industry or business model? Do they have new products or business units coming down the pike?

The example above focuses on a B2B example, where you might have a salesperson or account manager to consult with since the accounts are larger. However, the basic idea holds for B2C marketing as well. If you run an online store, you likely have done segmenting of your customers based on what they have purchased or their expressed interests.

Even if you don’t know the unique identifiers of any given customer, you likely do know your existing customers’ overarching aggregated pain points and profiles. Focus on this when you develop your marketing strategy for existing profiles.

There are various ways to implement this knowledge. Maybe it’s sending new product launch emails to customers who have purchased similar products or styles. Perhaps it’s developing sales collateral that highlights a unique value proposition of your brand vs a close competitor.

Maybe it’s taking research from questionnaires answered by existing customers to develop new products and services and then announcing those new products and services on social media. Regardless of how you do this, just be sure you incorporate what you know about the customer into your marketing for the best results.

Consider Tactics

Not all marketing tactics are excellent methods of reaching existing customers. Advertising, for instance, is usually a costly and inefficient way of reaching current customers. Advertising can work wonders for acquiring new customers, but we don’t recommend it for messaging to your current customer base. Consider these marketing tactics when reaching out to existing customers.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to stay on the top of your current customers’ minds. Someone who follows your business’s social media platforms is likely aware of your brand. Using their attention on your social media platforms is a great way to stay top of mind.

It is important to remember that social media is not the time and place to push for sales and sales only. Promoting new products and deals on your social media platforms is perfectly alright, so long as you don’t do it incessantly.

Remember, your customers follow you on social media to learn about your brand, and while that includes promotions and deals, it shouldn’t only include self-promotion. We recommend emphasizing interactive forms of social media. Polls, brand videos, and announcements of new products make great social media content.

Photos of your business and staff can also be a great way to humanize your brand and show off the human element of your business. Office parties, company volunteering outings, and staff birthdays can make great social media posts for your business.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to engage your past and current customers. For one, you have contact information to use when reaching out about new sales, products, and promotions. Email marketing is also highly automated, low-cost, and quite efficient regarding Return on Investment. If done right, you can utilize your CRM and automated email marketing to keep your top customers aware of important opportunities and trends with your brand.

For best results, be sure that you’re keeping track of what matters to your existing customers. Knowing your customers’ services, past purchases, and preferences is critical for effective email marketing. Let’s say that you run an e-commerce store that sells sports jerseys. The effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns will be diluted if you announce every new jersey, regardless of the sport or team, to the entire database via email marketing. Maybe you’ll get some traffic and sales, but you will likely send out irrelevant emails to your base, which only increases the odds that your customers will slowly stop responding to your emails, and that’s the last thing you want.

Instead, a better action would be tagging every customer contact for the team and sport they purchased for. You could then use this information to send information about new rugby jerseys only to those who purchased rugby apparel in the past and so on for hockey, baseball, and basketball. This approach lets you serve only relevant information to your customers and increase the amount of opens, clicks, and sales you drive.

Sales Collateral

Your sales and account teams, if your business model includes these client-facing teams, offer you some great opportunities. These teams can be an excellent vector for personalized messaging to relevant stakeholders at your client accounts. If you have the resources, consider developing relevant and engaging sales collateral to support these conversations.

Sales collateral can be used for educating prospective clients. Still, suitable types of whitepapers, battle cards, and case studies can help market to current customers considering a new product or service. Creating compelling and visually appealing content helps educate the relevant buyers and increases the odds of a sale.

Focus On the Relationship

One of the most significant advantages when marketing to existing customers is that you already have a relationship with your contacts, whether it’s a face-to-face relationship through Sales or a digital connection through their patronage of your e-commerce store. Focus on building this relationship in all marketing elements for best results.

This will vary from brand to brand and customer to customer. It might make sense to invite a large B2B customer to a sit-down fireside chat about your industry to build a relationship with key decision-makers at that account. This highly personalized approach might not work well for B2C customers.

However, sending out an email to your most loyal online store customers with a flash sale as a thank you for their patronage is an excellent way to build that relationship. Again, the approach won’t see universal execution,  but it is essential that you still focus on the trust and rapport you have created with your customer.

Their positive feelings about your brand are one of the main reasons they’re likely to purchase again; highlight that relationship and trumpet it in your marketing to existing customers for the best results.

Contact JSL for Marketing Strategy

If you need help managing your existing strategy for marketing to current customers, call JSL Marketing & Web Design! We’re an award-winning marketing agency based in Dallas, TX, and we’re ready to put the pedal to the metal for your marketing strategy!

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Many small businesses are laser-focused on gaining new customers. This is certainly a linchpin part of marketing, but it is only one piece of a successful marketing strategy. Many small business owners neglect marketing outreach to their current customers, and that can be a big mistake. A well-oiled customer marketing strategy can actually increase contract size, duration, and client retention, often at less of a cost than net-new acquisition.

However, customer marketing is a different beast than outreach to potential customers, and you need to carefully pair your marketing efforts with other teams to successfully grow current customer accounts. JSL Marketing & Web Design got together and came up with these recommendations to help you grow your accounts with marketing.

Learn More About Customer Marketing!

Support Your Account Team

The customer service or client success team is one of the most valuable tools you have at your disposal when trying to grow a current account with marketing. If your business has the account team bandwidth to have recurring check-in calls with your client, you have a line of sight into the pain points, situation, and goals of your client. You need to align with that team and work to develop collateral to support common objections, questions, and requests for information from your clients.

Well-branded and informative collateral is a great resource for the account team to have at its disposal. These pieces of beautiful and informative content allow the account team to leave behind marketing collateral with the client for the best results. Sometimes, the spoken word can only go so far; well-written content can help inform and educate your clients about the benefits of your solutions to their problems.

We recommend…

• One-Sheeters
• New Product or Service Announcement
• FAQ Pages
• Written Case Studies

Air-Cover Your Top Accounts With Your Message

Many small businesses don’t continue to send marketing materials to their current customers, and that’s a mistake. Your current customers are much likelier to purchase than a net-new business, so continuing to market toward current customers is a great strategy.

Email marketing is a great way to continue to keep your current customers engaged, but other marketing tactics can be successful as well. LinkedIn Ads, encouraging your customers to follow you on social media, or printed mailers to the customer’s headquarters all have their place.

Oftentimes, small businesses are reluctant to use air cover messaging at a current account, as it’s viewed as a waste. This is a mistake, in our experience. Yes, you want to find the decision-makers at your top accounts for the best results. However, other customers at your top accounts can still help influence the decision-making process, so the greater their exposure to your brand messages, the better. Continuing to send emails, printed mailers, and ads to your current customers is in no way a waste of budget or effort. Keep your accounts engaged and aware, and continue to air-cover them with your advertising; your bottom line will thank you.

Use Other Top Accounts in Reviews

Customer testimonials are a surefire way to entice new customers, but they also are great for current customers as well. People, as a rule, don’t enjoy being sold to and are often always looking for social proof or evidence that your business is the real deal. Customer testimonials are a surefire way to demonstrate this.

Find your top accounts and encourage them to share their experience via a testimonial, whether it’s a written testimonial or a video. These testimonials then become a great piece of content to share with other customers, particularly those customers who are up for renewal or contemplating increasing their contract size.

We also recommend asking for client testimonials from the accounts you hope to grow. Getting feedback from some stakeholders at a customer account and documenting it in a customer testimonial can be a great resource when it comes time to push for a larger contract at that account.

Research Pain Points

Upselling or renewing a customer account isn’t simply an extension of a current contract. Savvy companies are constantly identifying and penetrating into different business units, locations, and services. Your account team will naturally be a great resource for uncovering these opportunities, but we also challenge you to research and understand the brand’s pain points as well.

Market research is a difficult subject to master, but if done right, you’ll understand your customer’s situation, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats well enough to utilize this information in your marketing. Maybe you’ll uncover that one of your top accounts is prioritizing working with vendors that meet some compliance guidelines. This could be a great opportunity to highlight your compliance with said guidelines in your email marketing outreach to the client.

Maybe you’ll learn that your top account is looking to implement a new system or process in the future, and you can start developing web content for the account team to leave behind with the client for further education. The more your marketing team understands the specifics of what your top accounts need, the better you can tailor your marketing to the customer in question.

Grow With JSL

Running a small business is hard. If keeping the lights on and the business running is preventing you from growing your marketing presence, turn to an award-winning Dallas marketing agency to help out!

We offer…

• Brand Development
• SEO
• Paid Media
• Email Marketing
• Videography
• Content Marketing

Our process is simple; we treat each client as a unique and specific business with specific needs. Our marketing strategies are never cookie-cutter or off-the-shelf. By working with you to understand your unique needs and goals, we’re able to more effectively use your strengths to help you grow. What works well in one industry or context will not always work in others, and that research into your specific situation allows us to treat you as an unrepeatable business.

Contact Us Now for a Free Consultation