What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned about identifying your ideal customer, and how has this lesson shaped your marketing strategy? To uncover practical advice and real-world experiences, we asked 17 customer service experts to weigh in. Here’s what they shared.
- Understand Cultural Nuances for Global Services
- Shift Focus from Early Adopters
- Solve Problems for Specific Groups
- Align Needs with Expertise
- Leverage Referral Networks for Ideal Customers
- Create Constant Feedback Loops
- Analyze Usage Data for True Champions
- Target Customers Who Resonate with Values
- Focus on Pain Points and Needs
- Use Search Query Data for Insights
- Engage with Ideal Customers Directly
- Listen to Transform Marketing Strategy
- Prioritize Customers with Biggest Pain Points
- Ask Right Questions to Identify Customers
- Test Marketing Messages with Subgroups
- Narrow Down to Specific Niche
- Identify Niche and Ideal Client
Understand Cultural Nuances for Global Services
Understanding cultural and regional nuances is crucial when identifying your ideal customer, especially in a global service like eSIM. People from different cultures have varying expectations and behaviors, which means marketing strategies need to be adaptable and personalized.
For instance, mobile data usage habits differ significantly between someone in Europe versus someone in Asia. Europeans might prioritize data for communication apps, while in Asia, music and video streaming could take precedence. This understanding allows us to tailor data packages that cater specifically to these habits, ensuring users feel that our service meets their unique needs.
Utilizing the cultural dimensions theory developed by Geert Hofstede can provide insights into these nuances. This framework analyzes cultures based on factors such as individualism versus collectivism, indulgence versus restraint, and power distance. Understanding these dimensions can help tweak marketing messages and product offerings to resonate better with specific audiences.
For example, in high-context cultures that value family and community, highlighting how our eSIM service offers seamless connectivity for family travel can strike the right chord. Adapting messaging to align with cultural values not only enhances customer satisfaction but also bolsters brand loyalty, effectively shaping our marketing strategy to be more inclusive and responsive.
Roy Benesh
CTO and Co-Founder, eSIMple
Shift Focus from Early Adopters
The most valuable lesson I’ve learned about identifying an ideal customer is this: your best customer is often different from your first customer. Early adopters are great for feedback, but they don’t always represent the broader market that will sustain your business long-term.
At Listening.com, our initial focus was students struggling with heavy reading loads. But through deeper analysis, we uncovered that PhD candidates and academic professionals—those with the most complex, time-intensive content—benefit the most from our service. This shift in focus allowed us to refine our messaging, emphasizing expertise and productivity, which resonated far more deeply with this audience.
This lesson shaped our marketing strategy by teaching us to regularly revisit assumptions, use data to validate user segments, and prioritize customers with the highest lifetime value. It’s been a compass for scaling strategically.
Derek Pankaew
CEO & Founder, Listening.com
Solve Problems for Specific Groups
The most valuable lesson I’ve learned about identifying my ideal customer is this: you’re not selling to everyone—you’re solving problems for a specific group of people.
This realization shaped my marketing strategy in several ways:
1. Start by Listening
Assumptions can mislead you. To truly understand my audience, I prioritized listening—through surveys, reviews, and social media interactions. Customers shared their challenges in their own words, giving me a clear picture of their needs and concerns.
Lesson: When you speak their language, your message resonates.
2. Build Personas but Stay Flexible
I created detailed personas covering demographics, behaviors, and motivations. However, I learned to keep them dynamic. Trends shift, and customers evolve, so my approach had to adapt too.
Lesson: Staying flexible ensures your message remains relevant.
3. Focus on Empathy Over Features
Customers don’t buy products; they buy solutions. Instead of focusing on what I was offering, I shifted to why it mattered to them.
Lesson: Highlighting emotional and practical benefits builds stronger connections.
4. Embrace the Micro-Niche
Trying to appeal to everyone diluted my message. Narrowing down to a micro-niche—a subset of my ideal audience—helped me create more targeted campaigns.
Lesson: Personalization attracts the right customers, not just more customers.
5. Test and Iterate
Even with a strong customer profile, testing is crucial. A/B testing different campaigns, analyzing engagement, and experimenting with new platforms allowed me to refine my approach continuously.
Lesson: Marketing is an ongoing process of learning and improving.
Identifying your ideal customer means listening, empathizing, and adapting. When you focus on solving their problems rather than selling your product, your message becomes more authentic and impactful. This approach builds not only customers but long-term advocates.
sebastien Antoine
Marketing & Operations, The Policy Shop
Align Needs with Expertise
Early on, we focused heavily on attracting clients with the biggest budgets, assuming that meant bigger projects and greater success. But we soon learned a valuable lesson: the ideal customer isn’t just about how much they can spend, but also about how well their needs align with our expertise.
Chasing the biggest spenders sometimes led to projects that weren’t a good fit, resulting in frustration and less-than-stellar results. We realized that true success lies in finding clients who genuinely value our services and have challenges we’re uniquely equipped to solve. Now, we prioritize understanding a potential client’s needs and goals before discussing budget. This ensures we’re focusing on partnerships that are mutually beneficial and lead to long-term success. It’s not just about landing the biggest fish, but about reeling in the ones that are truly meant to be on our line.
David Abraham
CEO, Bluesoft Design
Leverage Referral Networks for Ideal Customers
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned about identifying ideal customers comes from understanding the power of referral networks. When I discovered that referred customers showed 75% higher lifetime value than those from paid channels, it wasn’t just a marketing metric—it was a revelation about who our ideal customers truly are.
This pattern taught me an important lesson about finding the right customers: your ideal customers tend to group together naturally. It makes sense that businesses that have similar goals, deal with similar issues, and run their operations in similar ways tend to work together. When one happy customer tells another about us, they’re basically pre-qualifying them based on traits they share that we might not have found through traditional methods of customer profiling.
I’ve learned that instead of starting from scratch to make detailed profiles of our ideal customers, we can learn more by looking at the traits of our customers who actively tell others about us. Most of the time, these customers have a better understanding of our platform’s value proposition, agree with our business philosophy more, and have successfully integrated our solution into their operations. They naturally know what kind of business would benefit the most from our platform, so they can help us find more of the right customers.
The way we identify customers has changed a lot since we learned this lesson. We no longer just look at traditional metrics like the size of the business or the type of industry it’s in. Instead, we pay close attention to how potential customers are linked to our current users. Businesses that come recommended by happy customers are more likely to have the qualities we’re looking for. For example, they’re more likely to work together, be more involved with our community, and be more dedicated to long-term success.
Michelle Nguyen
Product Owner & Marketing Manager at Uppromote, UpPromote
Create Constant Feedback Loops
The most valuable lesson I’ve learned about identifying my ideal customer is the importance of constant feedback loops. Early on, I thought I had a good sense of what people needed, but I realized assumptions only go so far. To really understand my ideal customer, I had to create ongoing opportunities for them to share their experiences, frustrations, and priorities.
We set up regular check-ins with users, whether through surveys, interviews, or even casual conversations. We’d ask questions like, “What’s taking up most of your time right now?” or “What’s one thing you wish this system could do better?” and it wasn’t just about gathering data; we were building a relationship where they felt heard. These feedback loops revealed gaps we hadn’t even considered and helped us refine our features to better fit their workflows.
Understanding your ideal customer isn’t a one-and-done thing but rather a continuous process. Staying connected and gathering feedback as part of a constant, ongoing cycle ensures we’re always adapting to their real needs, not just what we think they need.
Jamie Frew
CEO, Carepatron
Analyze Usage Data for True Champions
The real win was realizing that your best customers will tell you who they are through their actions, not their words. By analyzing usage data, we saw patterns that revealed our true champions—those who push the product beyond its intended use case. Listening to what people do rather than what they say is the key.
Our focus shifted from selling a tool to sharing a vision of what’s possible with better workflows and time management. We frame our campaigns around the transformation, not the technology, showing customers what their life or work could look like. It’s less about us and more about what they can achieve.
Alari Aho
CEO and Founder, Toggl Inc
Target Customers Who Resonate with Values
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve gained about pinpointing your ideal customer is the importance of truly grasping your business identity and connecting with clients who resonate with your values. My sister Diane and I initially launched our company with the aim of attracting a diverse array of businesses. Shortly, we came to understand that it is better to concentrate on individuals with aspirations to progress, rather than on everyone.
This lesson has significantly influenced our marketing strategy by assisting us in pinpointing our target audience and directing our attention towards individuals who will genuinely benefit from our branding and communications expertise. Instead of trying to do too much at once, we are now focusing on engaging directly with businesses prepared to enhance their brand. This strategy has resulted in significantly increased involvement and improved outcomes for both ourselves and our clients.
For me, the focus is not on targeting every potential customer, but on reaching those who truly benefit from our offerings and establishing a genuine connection with them. It all falls into place when you grasp precisely whom you are catering to and how to address their requirements.
We believe that branding goes beyond a mere logo or website; it revolves around fostering genuine and significant relationships.
Kevin Connor
CEO, Modern SBC
Focus on Pain Points and Needs
Over the years, I’ve learned that the ideal customer profile doesn’t only mean demographics or a job title. It’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s their pain points and needs that you should focus on. For us, this means that our ideal customer is not just someone in sales or marketing. It’s someone who’s specifically struggling with lead generation, outreach, and wants to automate sales operations. And that’s exactly what we can help them with.
This mindset did indeed shape our marketing strategies. We gave up the idea of trying to appeal to everyone within a broad demographic because it just wasn’t sustainable. Instead, we focused on clients who are actively looking for solutions to the issues I mentioned before. That’s why, part of our content marketing, for instance, revolves around providing educational content with tips on how to improve lead generation or email marketing techniques. This is something that our users value and need. And it provides a more meaningful in-depth approach rather than if we were to focus on wide appeal.
Oleksii Kratko
CEO at Snov.Io, Snov.io
Use Search Query Data for Insights
Understanding search query data is a goldmine for identifying customer intent. Analyzing the specific words and phrases people use when searching gives insights into what they’re really looking for—beyond surface-level interests. For example, someone searching “best grant management tools for small nonprofits” likely has different needs than someone searching “how to apply for a grant.” The former might be ready to invest in a solution, while the latter could just be starting to gather information.
Leveraging this data has transformed our marketing strategy to focus on hyper-targeted content and advertising. Integrating these insights with the marketing team, we shifted our content to directly address different stages of a buyer’s journey, aligning our ad campaigns to hit these pain points. The result has been not just more traffic, but more qualified leads who are already partway down the funnel when they find us.
A technique to refine this process is using negative keywords in pay-per-click campaigns. This helps to eliminate irrelevant traffic and ensures the budget is spent where the intent aligns with our mission. Analyzing phrases that don’t convert can reveal misconceptions about customer intent, allowing adjustments to target only the most promising queries. This fine-tuning drastically improves return on investment and tightens focus on high-quality leads more likely to convert into customers.
Will Yang
Head of Growth & Marketing, Instrumentl
Engage with Ideal Customers Directly
Understanding your target audience is the age-old cliched answer for marketing. But it’s a cliche for a reason—marketing without customer awareness is meaningless. That’s why the marketing strategies we build always begin with an in-depth analysis of audience personas. Plenty of research and data goes into these personas. But nothing replaces a face-to-face conversation with these ideal customers.
Pick the people who represent clients you’d like more of. Take the time to invite them to coffee or a brief phone call. Ask them questions about their professional goals and decision-making process. Why do they appreciate working with you and how can you find more people like them? Your best customers are eager to talk about this. These conversations take time, but are invaluable to creating a marketing strategy rooted in reality rather than just educated guesses.
Robert Carnes
Marketing Manager, GreenMellen
Listen to Transform Marketing Strategy
Our biggest lesson in customer identification? Listen, don’t assume. By diving deep into customer feedback through surveys and analytics, we discovered our initial assumptions were often wrong. This insight transformed our marketing strategy from broad messages to highly focused campaigns that directly address specific customer pain points. The key is simple: truly understand your customers’ world, and your marketing will naturally resonate.
Andrew Burak
CEO at Relevant Software, Relevant Software
Prioritize Customers with Biggest Pain Points
The most valuable lesson I’ve learned about identifying an ideal customer is to focus on those with the greatest gap to fill or the biggest pain point to solve. Whether it’s a business in the B2B world or an individual role with significant accountability, the ideal customer is either the one who will derive the most delight from your solution or the one who has the most to lose by not implementing it.
This understanding has profoundly shaped my marketing strategy by emphasizing value and urgency in our messaging. By identifying where our solutions can make the most impact—whether through measurable ROI or by addressing critical challenges—we can prioritize efforts on the customers who are most likely to benefit. This approach ensures that we’re not only meeting immediate needs but also building long-term relationships with clients who see our offerings as indispensable to their success.
At its core, this lesson reinforces the importance of alignment: aligning our solutions with customer needs, and our marketing strategies with the roles or organizations that feel the most acute pressure to act. This focus has allowed us to craft campaigns that resonate deeply, driving meaningful engagement and fostering trust.
Kelly Nuckolls
CMO, Jeskell Systems
Ask Right Questions to Identify Customers
Data is king and I learned far too late to use the right tools and techniques to collect data faster and with better quality. I think the key is to ask the right questions and to do that you need to formulate the right hypothesis. I had a lot of agencies in my past and we managed accounts from small SMEs to large multinationals and for me, coming from the digital side of things, I had to form the right hypothesis and then test it at scale.
I built dozens of landing pages, created large scale tests and found the right messages, talked to customers, asked for feedback and more. That helped to narrow down the message, but also the ideal customer. Because sometimes you need to test the message with different people, then find the right “trigger” and then suddenly you identify the right ideal customer, just by asking the right questions at scale.
Benjamin Talin
CEO, MoreThanDigital Insights
Test Marketing Messages with Subgroups
Identifying your ideal customer starts with testing your marketing messages with smaller subgroups. This approach involves careful segmentation of your audience to create diverse mini-groups, representing different customer profiles you might suspect are your target. Instead of launching a broad campaign right away, trying out messages and strategies on these smaller groups allows you to gather data on which messages resonate best. It’s like running controlled experiments to observe what drives engagement or conversion. By observing these interactions, you become aware of what makes specific audiences tick without investing too heavily too soon.
An essential tip for this process is deploying A/B testing. For instance, if you’re running a campaign for a law firm targeting potential clients in the personal injury space, craft a couple of different headlines or testimonials. Send these variations to small segments of your mailing list and watch which version generates the most clicks or leads. This trial-and-error method doesn’t just affirm your assumptions but reveals unexpected audience preferences. Often, you may find that elements you thought were minor—like choice of words or imagery—can substantially impact effectiveness. Use this data to refine your broader campaigns, ensuring the message aligns with what truly engages your ideal customer.
Casey Meraz
CEO, Juris Digital
Narrow Down to Specific Niche
Most companies, especially young entrepreneurs, make the mistake of casting a very wide marketing net, especially if they have a product or service that can be applied to many different groups. However, the best thing you can do is narrow your ideal client down as specific as you can, and find your niche.
They say “the riches are in the niches,” and that statement is as true as any statement in business. Niche down as much as you can and focus on that group.
People are attracted to and want to work with companies that are specific to them and what they do.
Allan Langer
CEO/Founder, The 7 Secrets Sales Academy
Identify Niche and Ideal Client
The first step in my business was identifying my niche and then my ideal client. Without this step it would be impossible to communicate the value of my services. By identifying my ideal client I was able to put together a service package, build a reputable brand in the mental health industry, and put together an effective marketing funnel that quickly filters out the wrong clients for my business.
Avivit Fisher
Founder, REdD Strategy
