Jamie Viggiano is Chief Marketing Officer at Fuel capital, an early stage venture capital firm investing in consumer, SaaS and infrastructure companies.
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Design successfully You need to understand your customers first for growth strategies, relevant marketing campaigns, and products that add real value to your customers. To do this, you need to study them, talk to them, and build target people to make them real to your team. Developing your customer profile is an essential part of positioning your brand and an indispensable part of your branding book.
Many founders are expanding their Total Addressable Market (TAM) to make the numbers seem more exciting on the fundraising decks, but effectively targeting customers requires you to surgically narrow down to a specific customer profile – down to a name, age, and even a face. Once you’ve identified your customer, articulating the demographic and ethnographic elements that define them is crucial. Demographic information (such as location, gender, marital status) is nowhere near enough, and to understand the customer you also need to understand relevant ethnographic elements such as their lifestyle and motivations.
Here’s how:
Make a list of your most engaged users for every metric that matters to your business, such as: Your goal is to create a list of customers, and the exact number may vary depending on your stage of business. For a seed company, I would recommend keeping a list of 15-25 customers. If you’re ahead of the game and don’t have customers yet, you can use external data from third-party apps and Google to create a list of the users you want.
By clearly articulating the preferences, pain points, and motivations of your ideal customers, you can approach the news in an informed and strategic manner.
Create a table that contains at least the following parameters:
- Unique customer number
- location
- gender
- Age
- Career / occupation
- Recommendation source
- marital status
- training
- Buying behavior (definition of first purchase, second purchase, third purchase, etc.) and / or engagement behavior (first interaction, second interaction, etc.)
- LTV
Since the above parameters involve both internal and external data, you will have to use third party tools or even cyber sleuthing (you will be surprised how much you can learn from a Google search). Use your own database for usage behavior and customer journey, but give the necessary strength to learn more about each customer.
