Current & Future Prospects: Who is your customer?

This question is one that surprisingly few businesses are able to answer in specific terms. Sure they may have a general idea of the demographic of people who usually buy their products or services. But if asked to define their ideal consumer it’s not something that immediately rolls off the tongue.

As mentioned in our prior post, being constantly on the mind of your prospect with social media will give you a huge advantage. But if you don’t know who your current and future customers are and what they want it will be hard to gain any sort of media traction. In this post we’ll look to address this and hopefully convince you why it's important to know the difference between current and future prospects.

The main objection we hear from small business owners about using social media is that it won’t directly correlate to an increase in customer demand. Their patrones either aren’t on social media or don’t care what the business has posted about. This is where actually knowing who your customer is comes into play. While current prospects may not be super active on social media what about your future ones? If you’re in real estate and trying to sell houses to those in the 30 - 50 age range, they may not use a media platform aside from Facebook.

Future prospects however, those in the 20 - 30 age range, tend to be using a much larger range of social media sites. These are the people who will be starting new jobs, new families, and most importantly for you, buying houses in the next 5 to 10 years. Now maybe you’re not planning to stay in real estate for the another 5 years but if you are, it’s in your best interest to start reaching this younger market. That is unless you plan to sell homes to retirees.

To define your customers think in current and future terms. Any attempt to reach those future prospects now could be a huge win for you in the next couple years. This type of thinking is an investment and not completely without risk. But it opens you up to a future market instead of placing all your resources within a single age demographic.