Easily the most important first step in establishing any type of business is to define your customers. This gives you the information you need to attract the right audience. One of the most practical ways of defining your customers is by building customer profiles that represent the typical types of customer you’re aiming for. As a result, you’ll be able to hone in on a more specific target audience, communicate with your audience in a more relevant and personalized manner, and ultimately, generate more revenue while driving meaningful
connection.
Every business caters to a specific demographic, and while some audiences might be extremely broad, it is still essential from a marketing perspective that you know your customers and how to reach out to them. Beyond traditional marketing goals, this understanding can help businesses align their offerings with their broader purpose—whether that’s environmental sustainability, community empowerment, or solving critical societal challenges.
Attracting values-aligned customers
Whether you’re a lone entrepreneur or you’re planning to start a small business with multiple employees or partners, you’ll want to define your purpose and come to fully understand your products and services through a social impact lens. Consider how your business can contribute to solving community problems or supporting meaningful social goals.
Also, consider how that commitment to societal impact can help you attract values-aligned customers and build customer loyalty. When you know your brand, and it has a clearly-defined mission that goes beyond profit—one that addresses social needs or creates positive change—you’ll be ready to start segmenting your customers and tweaking your approach to marketing as necessary.
Seek feedback with social consciousness
Seeking feedback is a critical ongoing process, but you should also start by doing plenty of research before you can even hope to get your marketing strategy off the ground. Your business will inevitably need to adapt over time to the needs and desires of its customers— particularly the increasing expectations of consumers around a business’ social and environmental performance.
Seek out feedback from your customers at every opportunity, considering not just their product preferences, but their social values and expectations. Many customers are now looking to support businesses that demonstrate genuine commitment to social responsibility. Encourage feedback that goes beyond transactional concerns and explores how your business can create broader social impact.
While many customers won’t have time for extensive surveys, you can offer incentives like promotional codes for completing short surveys featuring questions about social values and community priorities.
Create your customer personas with social purpose
Create a profile of your perfect customer, considering not just their demographic and purchasing behaviours, but their social values and aspirations. If your business has a broad reach, segment your target audience and create personas for each customer category that reflect diverse social backgrounds and motivations.
When defining your customer profiles, expand your questions to include social dimensions:
- What social causes are most important to them? How do they define community responsibility? What environmental or social challenges concern them? What type of positive social impact matters most to them? How do their purchasing decisions reflect their social values?
- Every day, millions of people turn to businesses not just for products, but for solutions that align with their vision of a better world.
- Avoid basing your customer personas on a real customer, since no single individual can completely represent your target audience. Instead, a customer persona should be reasonably broad, and should characterize your perfect customer.
Next steps
With comprehensive customer profiles that integrate social purpose, you’ll be able to match each area of your marketing strategy to the individual characteristics and values of your customers. By targeting specific audiences with authentic social commitment, you should be able to not only increase the number of paying customers, but create genuine social value.
Ultimately, remember that today’s successful businesses are about more than getting prospects—they’re about creating meaningful connections that contribute to positive societal change.
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This content is for general information purposes only. It is not to be relied upon as financial, tax, or investment advice or guarantees about the future, nor should it be considered a recommendation to buy or sell. You should consult your own professional advisor for specific financial, investment, and/or tax advice tailored to your needs to ensure that individual circumstances are considered properly and action is taken based on the latest available information.
