What You Need to Know About Your Customers

Don’t look for a service to sell. Look for a market you can help.

This is the shift in mindset that turns a glorified hobby into a business. It forces you to remove yourself from the internal domain, even temporarily, and focus on the external.

Because the goal is to link what you can do to what someone is willing to pay for, and people don’t like paying for things that don’t give them utility.

In marketing, utility means one of two things: it brings them closer to pleasure or further from pain.

In other words, what you sell must either a) help them get something they want or b) help them overcome something they struggle with. These two questions — What do they want? What do they struggle with? — are at the core of any customer or market research activity.

Key Motivational Questions to Answer About Your Ideal Customers

Here are the questions every business should seek to answer about its target customer’s motivations. I wrote these examples with a graphic designer in mind.

Ideally, you will write down a short list of short answers to each question (as they relate to what you can offer):

What do they want?
E.g., A bold new logo for their business.

What do they struggle with?
E.g., Knowing which fonts and colours to use.

What hesitations might they have about hiring me?
E.g., “Have they done this for a storefront business before?”

What might trigger them to seek a solution like mine?
E.g., They’re opening their first storefront.

What have they liked about working with other businesses like mine (positive differentiators)?
E.g., Regular updates and transparent communication.

What haven’t they liked about working with other businesses like mine (negative differentiators)?
E.g., Revisions weren’t included in the cost

Once you list your answers to those questions, you should identify their “Main Job to Be Done.” This is a one-sentence statement of the single most important, overarching need you can satisfy for them.

Main job to be done: Design a new business logo that looks great both online and on signage.

Making Use of It

Now, as a graphic designer, this information might form the basis of your target buyer persona or ideal customer profile (ICP). If so, here are some things you might consider adding to your website — each bullet is informed by the answers to the above motivational questions. Further, they all support the designer’s positioning as someone who can complete the Main Job to Be Done:

• A web page dedicated to storefront logo design services

• A testimonial from a past client mentioning how you found the perfect colours to bring their brand to life.

• Another testimonial citing your trustworthiness and transparent communication.

• A detailed service description outlining your policy on revisions.

• Examples of past clients’ logos and pictures of their storefronts.

• Headings using keywords that people might search on Google when seeking someone to design a storefront logo.

And if your ICP accurately represents enough people in your service area to sustain your business (or at least, that service), then you could have just created a pretty effective web page.

But we risk our internal biases clouding our judgment. It is very easy to dream up an ICP of someone we want to exist rather than one representing a viable market full of people who actually do exist.

This is why we need customer research.

Some Notes on Customer Research for Messaging

Here are my thoughts on customer research for messaging, which I’ll expand on in a future newsletter:

• Interviews are better than surveys or purchasing market data.

• What people say they will do is often very different from what they will actually do.

• Find interviewees who have previously hired/worked with a service like yours and ask questions about that experience.

• ‘Mining’ online reviews of other businesses like yours is a great way to find positive and negative differentiators.

This will help keep your persona/ICP grounded in reality. Whenever you update it, you seek to provide a better answer to the most important question in business:

“What is the monetizable customer pain?”

Not everyone likes to do this sort of work, but it’s critical. You can hire someone (like us) to help, but you should still plan to be involved.

Customer insights must be held close to a company’s core. They are part of the nucleus of your business strategy.

And as the market shifts, they can and will change. Now more than ever.