Knowing your customer is the bedrock of marketing. Think about it, if you don’t know who they are, how can you find them? If you don’t know what motivates them, how can you help solve problems for them? If you don’t know where they live, how can you specialize in a certain type of construction? Ex: Where is the high-end market? Where is the volume market?

In order to know their customers, marketers create customer profiles and you should too. Let me share an example:

Simplified customer profiles.

	Primary Customer	Secondary Customer
Age	50-70 & up	30-40
Background	Retired from high-level profession	Starting a family with career
Living	Vacation away during project	Work away/long hours during project
Location	Uplands, Oak Bay, Fairfield, James Bay, Cordova Bay	Fernwood, Cedar Hill, Oaklands
Children	Moved out with grandchildren	1-2 young/new/expecting
Finances	Fixed though substantial	Good borrowing power
Goal	Increase comforts, demonstrate status	Expand from first-time home purchase
Obstacles to Goal	Disruption of life, fear of choosing a [bad] contractor	Lack of knowledge, fear of choosing a [bad] contractor

 

This isn’t hard information to come up with. But knowing it gives you a real edge. From this information you can start to imagine where these people hang out, what their values are, how you can appeal to them and how you can reach them.

Know your company and how it can service that customer

Think about what you would like your company values to be – they should match up with the values of your customer and ideally help to overcome their buying obstacles.

If you are targeting the high-end market you need to know what is important to high-end buyers, how to treat them and the job site, how to communicate properly and lots of other things, right? So put it in your policies – no smoking or swearing on the job site, clean appearance and a positive helpful attitude. Whatever you think will appeal to your customer – build it into your company policies.

Often it can be best to do this before you name your company (although it often doesn’t work out that way). If you decide that your company is a mid-market service plumbing company and your main customer is going to be families you might want to include some of your values right in your company name.

Friendly Joe’s Plumbing – Professional Plumbing, You Can Trust!

Sounds cliché and it is, because it’s just an example – but you can see the point. There is no confusion about what the customer should expect here. Whether the brand delivers on its brand promise is another issue.

It’s very hard to come up with a compelling name and tag line if you don’t know anything about who you are. And in order to know yourself, you have to think about who your customers will be and how you can best serve them.

This is the first step in thinking about marketing. It is vitally important to know who you want to target (marketing word) so that you can find them and craft messages that will appeal to them.

Here is a free template for you to use to develop your main customer profiles. You shouldn’t need to spend more than 15 minutes.If you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments below.

Next time we’re going to discuss your brand message and why it is one of the most important things you need to figure out.

LINKS:

http://dyggz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/DyggzPersonaTemplate.pdf

– Article by Andrea Butterworth

Andrea Butterworth is the owner of Dyggz Marketing; a company focused specifically on websites and marketing for construction (AEC) and trades. With over a decade in corporate leadership roles in web publishing and marketing, Andrea started her own company helping businesses big and small develop and implement successful online strategies. After working with varied companies in the construction industry she decided to support this segment explicitly and constantly work to deepen her understanding of the most effective ways to market them.