WHO IS MY CUSTOMER?

When running a business, everybody cannot be your ideal customer.  If you target everybody, you’re going to lose limited resources available to you. I was speaking to a friend who's an IT expert, and he shared with me this wonderful idea of his, and then I asked him, who are your customers? And he replied he is targetting everybody who has a smartphone. Ask great as this idea was, I told he should look for a niche to sell his idea and from there grow and expand. As my mentor usually says "Targeting Everybody is Targeting Nobody"

You might ask, how do I find my niche?  What is a niche you might ask? A niche is a small area of the industry you are covering.  Let me give you an example. Agriculture is an industry on its own, and I haven’t seen any farmer who focuses on everything agriculture. They will wreck themselves and the business as a whole. However, In the Agriculture industry, a niche can be rice production. A farmer who focuses on rice production alone, is likely going to succeed than someone who focuses on rice, beans, poultry farming etc.

1.       Build an avatar/a buyer persona of who your ideal customer should be. In fact, give the avatar a name.  Highlight their job description, their gender, their economic status, and also their age description, if possible, the challenge they are facing (which your product intends to solve). For Example- Name- Paul, Age- 30-40, Gender- Male, Job description- Accountant, annual income- $10,000. As you can see this illustration above gives you a clear picture of who your ideal customer is.

2.       Research your industry and most importantly, your competitors. Every business has a competition either directly or indirectly. Research what your competitors are doing and reengineer it to work for you.

3.       Invest in knowledge. You can’t build a business with limited information about that industry. Read books, attend webinars, listen to podcast, go to networking events, ask questions from experts in that field. As my boss always say, ignorance is not an excuse for failure. On social media, you can follow people who have succeeded in your field whether locally on internationally, and learn from them without necessarily meeting them in person.