Using your understanding of your customer to find more people like them

Once you know what kind of person really loves your product and why, you can start to work out how to find more people like them.  Let’s go back to the example of vegan cleaning products.  The reason I’ll use it as an example is because it is a real live company who I helped create customer profiles.  They sell vegan household cleaning products – kitchen cleaner, bathroom cleaner, floor cleaner and the like – online through a website direct to customers.  This means they only ever got to see someone’s name, delivery address and what they bought, and nothing else.  They were running paid online adverts aimed at people who were vegan, and although they knew their adverts were getting in front of lots of people they were not generating many new customers.  They had a handful of really loyal customers who ordered regularly and wished they had more like them.  They had exchanged a couple of messages with these customers just through basic customer services, but they couldn’t tell you anything about them.

Step one for them was picking and emailing five top customers, stating that they were trying to grow the business and asking if they had a spare 20 minutes to get their feedback on the products.  All five responded positively and three agreed to a phone call.  From talking to these three customers they found that all were female, between 40-55 and – this revelation completely changed their business – all practised yoga.  Their top spender was a yoga teacher.  

This fascinated them; what did practising yoga have to do with buying their brand of vegan cleaning product?  Well, one was the smell.  Because the cleaning products were made from plant oils and not chemicals, the yoga teacher used it in her studio because it cleaned without leaving it smelling like a hospital.  She then also discovered that it was really good for cleaning down yoga mats, again because it was natural and chemical-free.  They had never considered this; they thought the market for their products was people using it at home, but they discovered that the problem that their product really solved was public places that needed to be regularly cleaned but not smell clinical.  The cleaner was also safe – you could actually drink it if you liked and suffer no harmful side effects.  This made it perfect for nurseries, nursing homes, yoga studios and the like.  So they created their first customer profile, or type of customer, and named her ‘Yana the Yoga Instructor’ and set about filling in the details about how old she likely was, what her pastimes would be and where she spent time online.

It might be that you don’t have any customers at all yet, or maybe not enough to see any real trends.  In this case you can also gather useful information using online surveys aimed at potential customers.  It’s not as good as speaking to someone one-on-one, but it may identify people you want to contact to learn more.  Create a survey to ask people what they think about your product and gather some details about them at the same time.  Find out someone’s age, gender, location, what their job is, how long they have been vegan, why they are vegan; then get them to answer questions about your proposed product or idea.  Make it easy to complete, keep it reasonably short, make the questions yes / no or multiple choice where possible.  Also give them the opportunity to write longer feedback if they want to at the end.  And then finally, if you are pre-launch, give specific pricing options and ask people if they would pay for it.  Ask them if they want to be notified as soon as you are taking orders and use this as an indicator that they are the kind of person who would be a customer. 

Look for commonalities with other people who have also said they would likely buy, and start to group them together to build profiles of the kinds of people your product connects with.  Are they all a certain age, profession, gender?  Getting people you already know to fill out a survey can be hard.  Getting people who don’t know you yet to fill one out is even harder.  So if this is the way you need to collect information, lean on your vegan credentials.  Offer ethical incentives for people to complete it – for example, let people know you will give a £1 donation to the animal sanctuary you support for every person who completes the survey.