Business Solution: Identifying Your Customers

The best perspective for quickly developing a successful business, is to develop a business solution mind-set. When you’re just beginning your small business, or coming up with an idea for your possible enterprise, you must ask yourself: "How do I know who my potential customers are going to be?" And, "What needs will my business solution address?

The product or service that your business solution represents must be eliminating a concern that your customers have, whether it is related to time, money, or materials. However, customers are not always able to identify their specific needs, as they frequently have become used to just "making do". Successful businesses anticipate what their customers want or need, and then provide a valuable business solution. You have to learn to think like your customers and to imagine what they want or need. This is not always as difficult as it sounds. You may have anticipated the needs of your spouse or family members in the past, because of your awareness of their daily concerns and difficulties. Your business solution should be similar in that you should focus on the various difficulties and concerns that your potential customers could possibly have. No matter what your business is, you will develop loyal customers by anticipating their problems and providing a valuable business solution.

Your business solution should be predicated upon learning as much as possible about your potential customers, and then envisioning the potential problems they may have associated with their various experiences. Many marketers build a customer profile of the many attributes associated with their customers in order to develop their business solution. The following is a list of many of the more popular demographic attributes:

Customer base: Does your product or service have widespread appeal or does it need to be targeted toward a particular audience?

Geographic location: What are the buying needs and preferences of people in particular areas? These needs can be recreational as well as practical.

Educational level: People’s educational level dramatically influences what media they read and watch. This is crucial to know when you’re deciding how to reach potential customers through advertising.

Gender: Women buy 80% of everything their households consume, down to their husbands underwear. And in each age category, men and women have very different attitudes and habits when it comes to researching and making purchases.

Age: This goes hand-in-hand with income and stage of life. Young parents starting out are usually much more strapped for money than empty-nesters.

Lifestyle: What people spend their money on, is not always consistent with how much money they have. Often people who aspire to a certain kind of lifestyle, are very interested in acquiring items that can help them achieve that lifestyle, or at least parts of it, at a price they can afford.

Heritage: Ethnic background shapes the purchase of everything from rice to financial planning services. Immigrants are usually far more interested in things from their home country than later generations are. By the third generation, people usually have assimilated into mainstream American culture.

If you add a thoughtful analysis of how your business solution will consider these demographic attributes and provide for the needs and solve the problems of your potential customers, you will have the essential elements for a successful, growing business.

Information from Barnes and Noble Basics: Starting a Business

Web page and Start Your Own Small Business Course by Paul Susic MA Licensed Psychologist Ph.D. Candidate CEO/President Susic Psychological Consulting P.C.

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