How to Find Your Ideal Customer Profile for Your Contractor Business
By Katherine Oakes
One of the first and most crucial steps in establishing a successful small business is to define and find your target audience. No matter what kind of industry you work in as a small or independent professional, you simply cannot compete with big businesses by being everything to all people. Don’t let this discourage you but, rather, motivate you to find your ideal customer and keep business booming all year-round.
As a contractor, it’s important to identify a specific market with enough potential profit for you to succeed. While this may sound intimidating, you don’t need to be an expert marketer to do so.
Instead, you might be surprised to find that identifying your ideal customer helps you to better define your own skill set as well.
To help you get your contractor business off the ground here are the top ways to find your ideal customer profile.
Get Clear About Your Offerings
To attract the right customer, it’s important to know what you can do for them first. While you may not be a writer or a marketer by trade, this is a necessary part of the job. Spend some time thinking about your own experience, skill set, and capabilities. What do you have to offer that others may not? Do you specialize in anything? How long have you been actively working in the field and how does this help you find new business opportunities? Though they may seem obvious at first or even tedious, your answers help you craft a compelling language to draw new clients in. Who knows, some of your answers might even surprise you! So sit down, grab a pad of paper and a pen, and get writing—taking the time to parse through things is a worthwhile task that will ultimately serve you best in the long run.
Collect As Much Information As Possible…
And then some. To find out who is in need of your services and how you can best meet their needs, do a little digging! While you may already be able to collect some information based off what you already know, it will help you to do some further investigating. Start by sending out a professional and well-written email to previous clients asking to learn a bit more about them. Their answers will help you gain a better understanding of your existing clientele while effectively carving out somewhat of your own niche in the market. Some helpful questions to include in your email are:
- Marital status
- Annual household income
- Do they have any children?
- What future projects might they be interested in doing?
Make sure that you record all of this data and look for a pattern (if any) in their answers. Doing so will help you craft an effective marketing plan and help attract future potential clients.
Pinpoint a Need in the Market
As mentioned above, it’s impossible for anyone—especially a small business—to meet every kind of client’s needs. To help you further hone in on your target audience, consider a specific job or aspect that isn’t fully being met. Look for these gaps and see which ones align with your skill set. Once you have found a match, narrow it down and include these services in your marketing plan. You can feature them on your website or highlight them in an advertisement so that potential customers are already made aware of your best offerings. Knowing how to leverage your business’s most unique services will help you get a leg up on the competition and position yourself as a knowledgeable professional.
Katherine Oakes is a writer, yoga instructor, and vocalist living in Northern New Jersey who loves writing for Modernize Solar Leads with the goal of helping homeowners connect with qualified contractors for their home improvement projects.
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