Find Ideal Customers with other People's Content

Finding ideal customers is really what marketing is all about. It sounds so simple and, yet, it is one of the most challenging pieces of work people in businesses need to do. If your marketing plan does not identify your ideal customer, then your marketing plan might as well be thrown in the bin.


When you have identified your ideal customers, you need to make sure you know quite a lot about them. Where do your ideal customers live and work? What do they read? What are your ideal customers interested in? How much money do they have spare to spend? What are their key problems which need solving?


These are key questions which your marketing plan should address if you are to have a chance of being successful.


How are you now going to reach these ideal customers? Are you going to use advertising? Are you going to use inbound marketing using great content to bring you leads? Are you going to use email marketing? Will you need to attend conferences to network with them? How about social media?


The chances are that, if you are running your own small business, your marketing plan includes an advertising budget which is not likely to stretch beyond the amount of money you need to buy a two week holiday in villa in Spain (which are quite cheap these days). How are you going to find these ideals customers?

Thank goodness for social media

One great way to find ideal customers is to use other people's content. If your advertising budget is virtually non-existent, a great way to find them is by using a combination of free social media tools including Twitter, Google Alerts, and Twitterfeed. I suggest adding these tools and this approach into the strategy part of your marketing plan.


Firstly, Google Alerts is a service which will hunt down content that interests you but, more importantly, interests your ideal customers. You start by creating an alert. You, then, choose search terms or keywords which you know are interesting for your market. For instance, if you know they are interested in Chinese intellectual property information and news, type in 'intellectual property china' into the box when Google Alerts prompts you to do so. Google Alerts will then track down news from websites and blogs which contain this search term.

You now have the choice of whether you want to receive the search from Google Alerts in an email or as an RSS feed. I use the RSS feed option because I can send the results directly into another free social media tool called Twitterfeed. This tool takes individual news items from Google Alerts and turns them into tweets on your Twitter account automatically. The tweets contain the headline of the news item found by Google Alerts and a shortened hyperlink to the article.


Your next job is to use the search function in Twitter to find your ideal customers. Use a similar search term to those you have used in Google Alerts (e.g. 'intellectual property china') to find who is tweeting using that term or similar. When you found them in Twitter, click the 'Follow' button for appropriate looking people which you can judge from their Twitter profile.


You need to search regularly on Twitter for your ideal customers to build up the number of people who look like suitable candidates for the service or product your business provides.


A funny thing now happens. When you follow people on Twitter, they, generally, follow you back. When they follow you back, they get to see your tweets which are links to other people's content. Because you have targeted those people because they tweet about things you know about too, it's highly likely that they will spot your tweets and they will either read them, share them (retweet) or both.


Start adding a few original tweets into your Twitter account which link to your latest blog posts or news items, but don't add too many because it will look to much like spam. When your new followers begin to share your original tweets, you are getting close to turning your new found ideal customer into someone who might be interested to learn more about you and your business.


The great beauty of these social media tools is that you can specify who you want to find as a potential customer. You can then start to provide them with interesting information. When they become interested in what you send to Twitter, they are highly likely to be interested in you.


All you have invested in this method of finding ideal customers is a little of your expertise and some of your time. That's perfect for a small business.