Why You Should Be More Picky With The Customers You Take On

Whether you are targeting consumers or businesses, chances are you are only going after a certain segment of the market. Only companies like Facebook, Google, and other massive companies have the luxury of being able to target the entire spectrum of customers in the world. For the rest of us, we need to focus in on a target market that can help us grow our business and stay competitive.

Why You Should Be Picky

You Can Only Service So Many Customers

Whether you sell a product or service, you can’t manufacture or service unlimited customers or even a massive volume in most cases. This means that you will want to maximize the revenue and profit of the amount you can, allowing you reinvest in your ability to service or produce more. Therefore, if the customers that you have take up a ton of your time or don’t pay a premium for your product, you might want to rethink who you are targeting.

Your Customers Build Your Brand

Your customer base will help build your brand via word of mouth, references, and potentially much more. You should be confident that your customers are helping you build your brand. Even consumer brands are relying more and more on social media, therefore your customers are more important than ever because they can literally advertise for you for free on major networks like Facebook and Instagram.

Bad Customers Can Cost You Money

There are many customers who will likely cost you money via returns, cancellations, requiring too much customer service, and many other reasons. Bad customers can literally cost you money and can become unprofitable, hurting your ability to service good, profitable customers.

What To Do

Evaluate Customer Lifetime Value of all Customers

The first thing you should do is evaluate the customer lifetime value of all your customers. For some people, this is not easy, and if it is not, it is something you should work towards being able to do more easily. This will help give you perspective on what customers are paying you the most and are the most loyal customers.

Create Personas for Ideal Customers

Once you have your customer lifetime values, you should have more insight helping you create personas for the ideal customers you want. I would try and stick to 3 to 5 personas so you are not targeting too many customers.

Develop a Plan to Increase the Volume of Ideal Customers

Increasing the volume of ideal customers will help you increase your bottom line and ability to reinvest in your company. Some things you can do to improve this:

• Evaluate Your Brand
• Evaluate Your Messaging
• Evaluate Marketing Channels
• Develop a plan for optimizing brand, messaging, and marketing channels
• Execute plan accordingly

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For help on creating a strategy to achieve this please reach out to me at Trellis at hello@trellis.co!