OVER the past few weeks I have been writing about how to look at your business to ensure that you stand out from the crowd and that you know exactly what it is you offer to customers.

But, in reality, no matter how much you know about your business if you don’t know who to sell to you will not succeed.

Marketing is not simply about advertising or putting updates on social media, it has to start at the beginning; knowing what it is you do and who you supply. This is true whether we are talking about a service or a product.

And the most important person in your business, the person the business will not survive without, is your customer.

The aim of marketing is to take away the pain of selling. This isn’t possible in all cases, but the better and more targeted your marketing, the less you will need to sell.

For your business to be successful you must get more customers and also ensure that you get more from them.

So how will you get more customers and how do you know what to offer them if you don’t know what they want, who they are, or how to reach them?

Who is your ideal customer?

The secret to finding your ideal customer is to look at your current customer base. Or, if you are just launching a business, look at your competitors’ customers.

You will need to research your competitors, watch what they are doing on social media, look at their websites, sign up for their newsletter or email marketing, see how they are talking to their customers and see if it fits with your ideal customer.

This is a great place to start. You must know what your competitors are up to.

Then you need to look at every detail of your customer – this will help you market to them and not waste any of your marketing activities.

Look at every detail. Are they male or female? What is their age? Where do they live? How much money do they make? What newspapers do they read and where do they hang out online?

Put together a simple spreadsheet identifying the demographic, psychographic, lifestyle, and economic details of each of your customers.

You want to focus your efforts on just a few profiles or niches that are most prevalent and, more importantly, those that bring in the most money.

By knowing who your customer is your marketing to them will be successful.

And you will save money.