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Who is the ideal customer for your home service business? While any homeowner could benefit from your services, you need to be a lot more specific to find who your ideal customer is. It might take some initial work, but understanding your ideal customer is worth it to determine who you should market to and even what products you should offer.

Understanding Your Customers to Increase Your Profits

Understanding your customers will ultimately increase your profits. It might seem far fetched, but knowing which customers are the most profitable means you can focus on the customers who spend the most money the most frequently. You can apply this to all aspects of your business, especially marketing. The benefits include:

• More effective use of  marketing dollars
• More return on investment
• More understanding of what homeowners need

Once you understand who your ideal customer is, you can even predict what services they need or want. This not only allows you to provide your customers with better value, but it means you can market to them more effectively as well. 

To start figuring out who your ideal customer is, ask yourself:

• Who will find value in my products and services?
• Who will become loyal to my brand?
• Who will advocate for my brand?
• Who will spend more money more frequently?

Targeting Your Ideal Customer

Those questions are a good starting point, but you’ll need more information to truly understand who your ideal customer is. You’ll need to know their traits, which is where market segmentation and customer persona come in. These techniques will allow you to create an in-depth understanding of your ideal customer in order to market to them better.

Market Segmentation

Using quantitative and qualitative data you can take everyone who could be your customer and divide them into smaller groups. It’s called market segmentation and it’s important to do this so you can target your marketing to a smaller segment. Market segmentation is done using the following characteristics:

• Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, family status, occupation.
• Geographics: Neighbourhood, city, region, country. 
• Psychographics: Interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, lifestyle.
• Behaviour: The how, what, where, when, and why behind their purchase.

You might have a general idea of the demographics and geographics of your customers already. Psychographics and behaviour traits usually require a bit more thought, but it’s absolutely worth it to create a deep understanding of your ideal customer. It’s also information you’ll need to know to build your customer persona.

Customer Persona

By this point, you should have a good understanding of your ideal customer. To give you an even better understanding, we’re going to create a customer persona. Your customer persona is the physical embodiment of your ideal customer. If you could create a real person out of your ideal customer, that’s your customer persona. 

Building a customer person is not only beneficial to help you understand your ideal customer, but it will help you with your marketing strategy as well. A customer persona will allow you to create a marketing message that reaches your ideal customer through their likes, their location, and their behaviours. 

To create your customer persona, you’ll need to determine the following:

• Personal background: Values, personality types, motivators.
• Career info: Education, income, industry, title, business goals.
• Challenges: Daily pain points or objections.
• Goals: Aspirations, inspirations, personal development.
• Decision making: Shopping, criteria, behaviour.
• Daily influence: Their car, house, neighbourhood, responsibilities, what they eat, activities they do.

The more detailed you can be when building your customer persona, the more useful it will be. A better customer persona will give you a better understanding of your ideal customer. You might even want to search for images online to create a visual representation of your customer persona.

Customizing Your Marketing to Your Ideal Customer

Now you should know who your ideal customer is. Using this information, you’ll be able to customize your marketing messages to focus on your ideal customer. Focusing on your ideal customer will allow you to choose the right method, place, and timing for all your marketing messages. 

These questions can help you begin to build your marketing strategy:

• How does their behaviour influence what kind of messaging will speak to them?
• Where do they live, what do they do, what kind of hours do they work? 
• When is the right time to reach them and where? 

In a nutshell, you need to think about where your ideal customer finds their information. For example, if your ideal customer is a retiree, you shouldn’t try to reach them through a SnapChat ad. On the other hand, if your ideal customer has a young family, you shouldn’t be taking out newspaper ads. Your ideal customer should be the basis of every marketing decision. 

If you need help understanding your ideal customer, we’re ready to assist you. We have home service clients across North America and we’ve helped them improve their marketing through understanding their ideal customer. Give us a call at 1-888-861-7769 or book a demo online and start understanding who your most profitable customers are today.