Two Ways To Find Your Ideal Customer Profile In 5 Minutes Flat

Every marketing book and teacher will tell you that you need to know your ideal customer profile otherwise how can you be sure who you’re selling to?

If you sell maternity wear and your marketing is mostly being seen by men in their sixties you won’t be in business very long!

Now, I don’t want to encourage laziness.  There’s no real substitute for focus groups and well thought-out surveys, as long as the data received is accurately analysed when you get it back.

But those methods of tracking down your ideal customer profile take time and they also require that you have some place to start.  What if you’re entering a new market?  Suppose you need data in a hurry?

The two methods I’m about to reveal will only give you surface deep information, but they’re a great place to start.

Furthermore, you can use both in combination to give you a clearer picture.

With those caveats, let me show you method one.

1. The Magazine Method

Let’s suppose I want to enter the world of vegan living.  I’m not vegan myself so I have to understand something about their world and the issues they face.

But more than that, I want to know who they are.

So here’s what I do.

1. I go to Google and type in “vegan magazines” or “magazines about veganism” would have done.  Don’t use the quotes – those are just to show you what I type.
2. Very helpfully, up pops https://www.veganfoodandliving.com/. This is both a website and magazine.
3. I do spend a few minutes and make some notes of the headlines I see because I want to know the kinds of issues I can create content about later on.  There are topics like “how to throw a vegan dinner party” and “how to get vitamin B12 on a vegan diet” – amongst several other very prominent headlines.  These are clearly good “hooks” for this market.
4. However, what I’m really interested in is who the readers are.  Presumably, they’re vegans, but what else can I find out?  I want to know how to angle my promotions and advertising.
5. So now I type into Google, “Vegan Food and Living Magazine media pack.”  In case you don’t know, most major publications release a media pack for potential advertisers, (which I’m unlikely to be, but you never know).  The search takes me to this page: https://www.veganfoodandliving.com/advertise-with-us/ where I see this very helpful information:

Now, this is very helpful and, as it happens, laid out in an “at-a-glance” fashion.

I know that the readers are exclusively women with an average age of 35.  Also, only around two-thirds of them are actually vegan.  A significant minority are only interested in becoming strictly vegan.

(Question I ask myself: What’s holding them back?  Is it dietary doubts?  Is it lack of support from spouse or kids, perhaps?  Worries about social isolation?  On the other hand, why are they considering the commitment at all?  Health issues?  Moral or ethical matters?

To refine my ideal customer profile research further, I could Google fany of those topics and I’m sure I’d find blog posts and perhaps even magazine articles that would give me ideas for my own content!  There’s a significant niche within a niche there and it may be worth following up.)

From here it’s not hard to surmise more about my ideal customer profile.

Women in their mid-thirties are likely to have kids at school.  They’ll either be in a permanent relationship or divorced or separated.  They probably have a career and maybe some ambitions of their own too.  Their time is divided and there are many calls on it.  As their 40th birthday approaches, there will be some concerns about how they look – especially the desire to stay young looking.  So weight, skin care, hair colour and style … all these issues will be around somewhere.

Now, I don’t want to stereotype women in their mid-thirties, so if you’re a woman of approximately that age and those criteria don’t describe you personally, I apologise.  But I’m not likely to be far off the mark with most of those guesses for the majority of that demographic.

Again, I could Google search for “magazines for women in their thirties” and look at the cover headlines.

Hopefully, you can see that you can gather a huge amount of useful information for your ideal customer profile using the magazine method in hundreds of markets.

Now let’s look at method two, which is:

2. The Facebook Method

Ah yes – like it or loathe it, you can’t ignore Facebook.  And for market research it can be your best friend, especially when you want to discover your ideal customer profile.

The first thing you’ll need for this is a Facebook advertising account, but don’t worry, you don’t have to buy any adverts.  Opening an account is free.

Once you have that, go to “Manage Ads” from the dropdown menu which is on the right of the blue bar you’ll see at the top of any Facebook page once you’re logged in.  In case you haven’t seen it before, the menu has a very feint down arrow icon, which is slightly darker blue than the menu bar.  Goodness knows why Facebook chooses to make its icons almost invisible, but that’s one for Mr. Zuckerberg I suppose.

When you get inside your ads manager, you’ll see three little bars on the top left of the screen which opens up into a menu when clicked and from there you’ll see “Audience Insights.”

You can do a huge amount with Audience Insights, but I’ll just point out the useful stuff for our purposes here today.

Once I had mine open, here’s what I did:

1. I chose the “Everyone on Facebook” option
2. On the left side, where there’s a box that says “Interests” I typed in “Veganism.”  I was hoping the magazine itself would be there – many magazines do have Facebook pages with huge followings, but it didn’t come up, so I left it at Veganism.  You can only add something in that box if Facebook has it, (e.g. sometimes celebrities are big enough to have a following, although surprisingly, some are missing from the list, so you have to adapt).
3. Audience Insights always defaults to USA only, so in the “Location” box at the top left I added in United Kingdom because that’s where I am.

And that was all I did.  Here’s what I saw:

I couldn’t screen shot the whole page, so first let me tell you that above the image you can see, Facebook informs me that this audience size is 35-40 million.  That should keep anyone busy for a while.

77% – more than two thirds – are women and again, we can see that the age sweet spot is mid twenties to mid thirties.

But now we can also see that 47% are married whilst 29% are single.  We don’t know if that’s just not married yet or divorced.  Almost certainly a mixture of both, but we can’t be sure of percentages there. 

And in case you think that the numbers are skewed because there are men and women of all ages there, I ran it again but filtered for only women from age 25 to 40 – and the percentage of married to single changed only slightly – 48% and 25% respectively!

It’s a fair bet now that the readers of the Vegan magazine will be divided similarly.

Just below where my screenshot ends I’m also told that 22% of this audience is employed in health or medical care.   That’s by no means all of them, but here again I can speculate that there may well be a correlation between choosing a vegan lifestyle and a career in something health related – something else I could do more research into if I so wished.

The “Audience Insights” data will also show you the most liked Facebook pages by your selected audience, and even where they live.  (Well, not their addresses, but generally).  For example, with this audience, to my surprise, there were four times as many in London UK as there were in Los Angeles, California.

If I wanted to go deeper into the kinds of issues that vex vegans, I might well consider joining a handful of Facebook groups or liking some relevant Facebook pages and study what they talk about.

I hope I’ve shown you how transparent and immediate market research can be using simple – and free – resources on the internet.

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