7 Easy Steps to Identify and Target Potential Customers

Potential Customer Explained

A potential customer, also known as a prospective customer or lead, is an individual or organization that has shown interest in a product, service, or solution offered by a business but has not yet made a purchase. In short, potential consumer is yet to try or consume a particular product or services. These individuals or entities have the potential to become paying customers if they are properly engaged, convinced, and nurtured through the sales process of any companies. Although these potential customers might purchase the same services or products from a competitor. That is why, identifying and understanding potential customers is crucial for developing effective marketing and sales strategies.

While starting your business, everyone will tell you to identify potential customers but forget to tell you how important your brand strategy helps in targeting your prospective customers. Brainstorming on an effective brand strategy isn't easy, but the moment you create one, your product will sell more than your competitor's. Your main goal is to conduct an effective brand strategy that will enable you to focus on precise targeting of potential customers by reaching new markets and converting your leads into sales. An effective brand strategy will help your young business develop a social media persona and reach your market competitors, making you gain and stand out from other companies.

No matter how appealing your product or services may be, it may not help market it to every customer; that is why you need to identify and target your potential customers. Whether you are starting on have been in business for some time, the success of your business is highly dependent on your target market. 

One of the most efficient ways that your business stays at the top of the industry and its competitors' is ensuring that you tap into the correct target audience. Before targeting prospective customers, you should know who it is because placing your brand out on the market can be frustrating if you directed it to the wrong target.

However, coming up with a strategic outline or plan to connect with potential customers is not easy. It involves making decisions and choices on who you perceive your target market as then spend money and effort gathering and analyzing information about their consumer habits.  Below, we take you through some of the easy steps to identify and target potential customers.

Use Social Media Strategy Best Practices

If you are new in business, then you might want to create an Instagram page or Facebook page for your business. What is the reason? Currently, most of the buyers or customers your business gets are likely to come from social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Social media has taken over people's lives, and so should you strive for your presence where people are. It is, therefore, needful for you to use social media strategy best practices to help you identify and target potential customers online. Your business needs an online presence on these platforms because you'll need the help of influencers to help customers buy from you; anyone who has bought from you is likely to refer their Facebook friends to your page. It's an opportunity to build your business community on social media.

1. Identify Your Customer Base

If you want to know who your target customer is, begin by identifying the people who really need what you are offering to the market. You need to refine your target market by identifying who or which customers have already bought your products or services. You also need to understand things that interest your current buyers and identify reasons why they keep coming back to you. Identifying a customer base also involves looking at the factors like what type of customers bring the most revenue and buy more products from your brand. These aspects will assist you in understanding how to take care of your current customers and reach out to more who show similarities, thus identifying your target customers.

2. Raise Awareness

Your brand awareness is a critical step in helping you identify and target prospective customers as it is crucial to how successful your business can be.  A well-planned and targeted awareness campaign can help you reach the right customers at a very low cost, unlike traditional branding strategies. About 90% of your potential customers are likely to make a purchase from a brand they follow online. In raising brand awareness, you may want to focus on ideas like, what benefits does my brand give the user? Even though this may take time, once you get used to raising your brand awareness, you build trust between you and potential clients, thus attracting them to your business and increasing sales and loyalty.

3. Brand Recall

As a new or existing brand on the market, it is your desire to connect with your target audience easily. However, due to competition in the market, it has become a daunting task. Therefore, you have to do more and put in much effort to win a customer's loyalty. You can do this by carrying out a survey to determine how many customers can recollect your brand. The brand recall will help you win customer loyalty and identify potential customers because it allows consumers to spread the word about your brand through word of mouth, which ends up working as a referral strategy. The positive brand recall will likely lead to repeated purchases through your customers' behavioral, emotional, and cognitive loyalty towards an existing product or service.

4. New Customers

Usually, your new customer comes in as an endorser, which you should capitalize on. Connecting with a new customer can be a considerable effort but feasible. Bringing onboard new customers will help you identify and target potential customers because you will get to learn about their buying behavior. First, determine why these new customers would want to buy your brand. Once you understand and know about their consumer behavior, it will be easier for you to make them return and loyal customers who end up being the brand's potential buyers. You can do this by identifying demographics where your brand is not familiar, reach out to new customers through marketing. New demographics will help you identify and target customers based on their background, marital status, age, income, among other aspects. Think of a niche as a hook that will help you capitalize on the potential customers that you have identified as the most profitable and likely prospects for your business.

5. Business Sales

How is your target audience shopping for your brand? You need to monitor and look at your business sales, are they fluctuating, steady, or rising when you sell to a particular group of customers? Having answered this question, you might want to identify and sell more of your products to the most valuable customers, those who make your business sales increase. In doing so, you can also identify an opportunity to sell the valuable customers' new products as your target customers. In the end, the ultimate goal is to identify customers who will regularly buy from you and increase your sales.

6. Existing Customers

Do not only think of new customers; instead, as a small business owner, think about existing customers because you can easily convince someone who has bought from you before to come back. You can identify and target potential customers using your existing customers. These are buyers who have formed a relationship with you or your brand as they keep buying your product or services. Ensure to find out what they buy, when, how much they spend, and what motivated or motivates them to buy and turn your existing customers into your target potential customers. You can use your current customers to provide you referrals who will turn out to be loyal potential customers because the information or marketing was done by a customer who loves your product on behalf of your company. The more you sell and offer after-sales services to an existing customer, they will be pleased to share the word about your brand.

Examples

E-commerce:

A potential customer in this context could be someone who has visited an online store, added items to their shopping cart, but hasn't completed the purchase yet. They may have also signed up for the store's newsletter to stay updated on future promotions and offerings.

Real Estate:

A potential customer in the real estate industry could be someone who has inquired about a property for sale or rental, attended an open house, or signed up for property alerts on a real estate website.

B2B Services:

In a business-to-business context, a potential customer could be a company that has reached out to a service provider for information about their services and pricing but hasn't signed a contract yet.

Besides, before identifying your potential target customer, it's crucial as a business owner that you thoroughly analyze your competition. You need to know who else is offering the same product or services that could prompt customers to buy from them and not your brand. Having this information will help you prevent your competitors from stealing customers from you. Knowing your competition will help you develop strategies that will outweigh what they offer, hence turning customers into return buyers and loyal customers. Also, it will help you identify where to locate your new business and how to reach out to your customers.

There may not be an easy or hard way to identify and target potential customers; however, if you follow the above explained seven steps, you will be able to put your resources in the right plan and make the right decisions for your business.