Last week in the first article of the five part series, "Getting your First 100 Customers," I explored the critical first step: defining what your business stands for. This week, I’m focusing on the next step: understanding your target market and building meaningful connections with your potential customers.
From Foundation to Connection
Once you have established the foundations of your business consisting of a brand story, mission statement, vision statement, core values, and brand identity, it’s time to shift your focus outward. Identifying and understanding your target audience is essential to connecting your business with the right customers and ensuring sustainable growth.
Your target audience is a specific group of potential customers who share similar characteristics, such as behaviors, interests, and demographics. For example, Zwift’s audience might be male cyclists between the ages of 25 and 45. Understanding your target audience helps guide key business decisions, such as:
Attracting the right customers.
Spending marketing budgets effectively.
Expanding and refining product and service offerings.
Shaping investment strategies.
To do this successfully, businesses need to define buyer personas (detailed customer profiles), target audiences (groups of personas), and target markets (broader regions or industries). This process requires research, analysis, and a blend of empathy and community building. While gut feelings are valuable, validating them with data ensures a more strategic approach.
Four Key Steps to Understanding Your Customers
1.Understand Customer Needs and Pain Points
Every great business starts by solving a problem. As mentioned in last week’s article, most founders identify a pain point or unmet need—often one they’ve personally experienced. This realization inspires the creation of a solution, which becomes the foundation of their product or service.
Take Taskrabbit, for example. Founder Leah Solivan created the platform after a snowy day left her wishing she could hire someone to buy dog food for her pup, Kobe. Her pain point? A lack of time and an inconvenient errand. By recognizing that others faced similar frustrations, she tapped into a shared need, creating a service that connected people with taskers for various small jobs.
It’s crucial to validate and expand on these needs through research. Tools like surveys, focus groups, interviews, and analytics can uncover deeper insights about your audience’s problems and priorities. Questions to ask might include:
What are your biggest challenges with …. e.g. the current TV offering (if you are Netflix)? ?
How do you currently solve this problem?
What would an ideal solution look like for you?
What would you be willing to pay for this product or service?
The people who constitute a target audience might also have other needs and pain points you might be able to expand your product and service offerings for. In the case of Airbnb, for instance, the people who were renting Airbnbs were also in the market for tour guides who knew the city well and could provide an authentic experience. Understanding that, Airbnb launched the Experiences product.
To truly understand the needs and pain points of your audience, it’s important to validate your assumptions. This involves engaging directly with your market through qualitative research such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews. These methods help uncover the depth and peripheries of the needs you aim to address.
If you have a web presence, data and analytics tools can further refine your understanding. Engaging your audience through feedback forms, online polls, or even fun contests can yield valuable insights. Keyword analysis is another useful tool—for example, if people are searching for "looking for someone to build my IKEA cabinet," they’re explicitly communicating their need (assembling IKEA furniture) and their pain point (lack of time, skillset, or patience to do it themselves).
2.Understand Customer Lifestyles and Philosophies
Once you’ve mapped out your customers’ needs, delve deeper into their lives. Who are they, and what do they care about beyond the problem your business solves?
Start with demographics: age, gender, profession, income, marital status, and location.
Then, move into psychographics: values, goals, fears, interests, and motivations. This comprehensive understanding enables you to align your business with what truly resonates with your audience.
Tools like customer profiles and journey maps (find free downloadable templates in Leadrise Resources) can help visualize this data. For instance, mapping out a day in the life of a persona—what they read, worry about, and value—can reveal opportunities to meet them where they are, both emotionally and practically.
Let’s go through a sample exercise together:
Start by choosing a customer, give them a name, say Emily, you might also give them an avatar.
Start with Emily’s demographics profile.
How old is Emily?
What gender is she?
What does she do for a living?
How much does she earn?
Where does she live?
What is her marital status?
Where is she from?
What languages does she speak?
What schools did she go to?
Then, think about a day in the life of Emily:
What time does she wake up?
What does she do when she first wakes up?
Then what?
What time does she get to work or her first activity?
When does she work out?
What does she do after work?
What time does she go to bed?
What does she do before she goes to bed?
You might do a few separate day profiles for e.g. weekdays and weekends.
Then jot down Emily’s values and causes she cares about and is interested in.
What does Emily read about?
What does she think about?
What does she worry about?
What gets her excited?
What are her core values?
What does she fear?
What does she love?
What does she care about?
What keeps her awake at night?
What are her goals and future aspirations?
What makes her tick?
What causes is she interested in?
At first read, you might think,"Why should I care about Emily’s values and fears if I am selling a toothbrush unless they are related to toothbrushing?" While that question makes sense, to really be able to build a bond with your customers and to meet customers where they are mentally and philosophically (where you believe your values and philosophies align naturally), it’s important that you get to know them as a whole, as opposed to only be interested in their market awareness, intent, and purchase behaviors. If you find that your target audience is worried about the environment and is interested in sustainability and climate action, for example, and that naturally happens to align with your founders’ and business’ values, you might look into building a community around environmental protection or you might decide to switch to sustainable packaging and market your practices so your consumers know to choose you over a competitor on the basis that you align to their values and preferences.
Another way to dig deeper into customer lifestyle preferences is to zoom into web analytics to see which social media outlets, industry blogs and professional forums your site / social media traffic comes from. Then, apply this information to your buyer personas so you can find out where and when to reach them more effectively.
3.Understand Customer Whereabouts
Mapping your customers’ physical and digital whereabouts helps identify key touch points for engagement. Ask questions like:
Where do they live, work, and play?
Which websites, social media platforms, and forums do they frequent?
What locations or contexts are most relevant to their daily lives?
For example, if your product is a reusable water bottle and your customers frequent yoga studios, a partnership with those studios could be a natural fit. Similarly, analyzing your audience’s digital footprint helps refine strategies for online engagement.
4.Understand Competitors and Complementors
No business exists in a vacuum. To succeed, you need to analyze both competitors and complementors.
Studying the industry as a whole as well as other competitors in the wider context (e.g. in the case of Taskrabbit, shared economy - and not carpentry - is the industry, where carpenters may very well be included in the competition knowing how popular IKEA furniture assembly ended up becoming for the service) will be critical to what else your customers buy as well as what and why other people who are in your target audience buy. E.g. Hellofresh’s customer base are most likely also interested in food delivery from restaurants. Hellofresh, therefore, also competes with Ubereats and Doordash, as well as the likes of Blue Apron.
As important as competitive analysis is, it is as important to find your complementors and study their business models. For example, if you are Ryan Air, Budget Car Rentals are your complementor. The people who fly to other destinations often also rent cars. Think about what lateral businesses to yours there are and who their customer base is.
You might ask these questions:
Competitors:
What are other people out there doing that is similar to your business?
What are they doing well?
What are they not solving for?
What do your customers like and dislike about them?
How are your product and service differentiated?
How do your competitors connect with the target audience?
Complementors:
What are lateral businesses complementary to yours?
Who are their target audience?
How can you collaborate with them?
How can you leverage their existing customer base to appeal to and attract them?
What kind of partnership would they be interested in?
Looking Ahead
Congratulations—you’ve taken critical steps to understand your potential customers! Next week, I’ll dive into the third article in this series, focusing on how to nail your products and ensure they resonate with your audience. Stay tuned!
Hi! I'm Merve. 👋 I help leaders build high performing teams, amplify their business impact, and advance their careers.
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