How to Profile Your Perfect Customer

Greetings fellow SEO copywriters and content marketers! As foretold, here is the fourth of the five crucial steps you need to walk through before putting fingers to keyboard, pen to paper, voice to recorder — whatever your chosen method — and yes, it involves RESEARCH! But as you know by now, research is not a dirty word.  On the contrary,  it is your friend, confidante, and informant.

I know your fingers are itching and your mind is twitching, BUT if you take the time to do the groundwork laid out here first, you will save yourself untold fruitless hours, wasted energy, client frustration, and botched work!

So let’s do it right the first time:  Measure twice, cut once!

If you’ve been following this SEO copywriting and content marketing how-to blog series, then you’ve already checked out your competition, noted the latest social buzz about your product/service, and have completed a productive and insightful “SWOT” (strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats) analysis of your content.

Now, we have two more essential research steps to go.

First, in this post, we are going to profile your perfect customer.

All of the brilliant SEO copywriting you’ve created will not accomplish The Goal — Conversions –if you fail to capture the attention, imagination, and buying impulse of your target market.  Can you define your perfect customer?

Take the example of a relatively simple product, like a digital camera.  Now, let’s take a closer look at your prospective buyers:

• The senior citizen may want an easy-to-use digital camera with minimal features, simply to take pictures of the grandchildren

• The college student may want an inexpensive digital camera with which  s/he can readily upload videos to YouTube

Another example, cosmetic dentistry:

• The high-powered female executive may want cosmetic dentistry to enhance her image

• The  “weekend warrior” hockey player may want cosmetic dentistry to repair a chipped tooth

It should be clear by these examples that, while we would like to appeal to every customer, the most effective marketing message will target one perfect one.

Why?  Because at the end of the day, your prospect wants to know:  What’s in it for me?

Ask yourself theses questions, when constructing the profile of your perfect customer:

• Are they men?  Women?  Both?
• How old are they?  Does your product or service appeal to different ages?
• How much money do they make?
• What kind of work do they do?  Are they retired?
• What are their main concerns and pain points?
• What books and magazines do they read?
• What websites do they frequent?
• How do they spend their discretionary income?
• Is “OK and cheap” what they crave?  Or do your clients require only the best — and are willing to pay for that exclusivity?

The deeper you dig, the more defined your perfect customer, the more refined your market niche, the more targeted your copy, and the more effective your SEO and content marketing efforts!

Next Monday, we will pull it all together to address the crux of the matter: defining your unique selling proposition, See you then!