The Customer You Think You Know vs. The Customer You Actually Have

• It’s a common marketing challenge to determine if you should target an ideal customer profile (ICP) you created or an audience that naturally gravitated to your product.
• The most successful brands often find their true audience after launching and then pivot their marketing to meet that audience’s needs, leading to increased sales and long-term customer loyalty.
• Rather than guessing who your customers are, the most effective strategy is to use data to understand your existing customers—specifically, the top 20% who generate the most sales.
• Once you’ve identified your best customers, you can build lookalike audiences based on their profiles to improve prospecting efforts and acquire more loyal, high-value customers.

The Customer You Think You Know vs. The Customer You Actually Have

Marketing has a long-standing chicken-and-egg problem: do you determine an ideal customer first, or let your product determine your customer? This is how to use B2C data to solve it.

One of the major things every marketing team does is determine an ideal customer profile. It’s an essential page in the classic marketing playbook, and choosing one lays the groundwork for a wide swath of a company’s marketing efforts.

But the thing is, many brands have found better audiences other than the one they started with. Take Slack, for example, whose team initially built its messaging tech for players of their failed online game startup.

Or Play-Doh, a product that was initially aimed at housewives as a wallpaper cleaner. 

Or Crocs – which, despite initial impressions, weren’t designed for casual wearers and fans of ironic fashion, but for fishermen and boaters.

Eventually, these companies pivoted their products and marketing to newer, truer audiences they discovered along the way – not the ones they initially built their product and marketing for, and not ones they could’ve predicted, either.

Let’s look at another case study – LEGO. Though created for an initial audience of children in the 1930s, LEGOS eventually began to appeal to nostalgic adults. 

The company initially tried to shut out these adult mega-fans, and it wasn’t until the late 1990s – facing a decrease in sales – that the company began experimenting with products and packaging meant for an older demographic. 

In 2020, LEGO finally launched a dedicated branding category for adults – 18+, “Adults Welcome” sets, with packaging and marketing to match.

Not only did LEGO increase their customers’ lifetime value – adults buy more expensive sets, more consistently than parents of young children – but the company also became the biggest global toymaker by sales. While adults don’t make up the majority of their audience, they’ve become an important complementary ICP for the company and boost the company’s reputation and company culture.

So how do you find your real audience – especially if it’s one that found you first?

What comes first: the marketers or the customer?

The chicken-and-egg dilemma – do you stick to your initial ICP, or pivot based on existing customer data? – is made much easier when you have the data to know your existing customers – and deeply, at that.

There’s always been a need for companies to have a deep, accurate understanding of their existing customer base. Without data on the current customer base, there’s no way for companies to develop a loyal customer audience — or even know which new prospects to target, for that matter.

Marketers should take great care to find and develop their current, best customers – the ones who make repeat purchases, follow company updates, and serve as brand advocates.

Using the data on these best customers, marketing teams can then create hyper-personalized retention campaigns that keep high-value customers loyal.

Through a robust lifecycle marketing strategy, these customers can be nurtured to stay best customers – and then additional audiences can be modeled on these “best-of” segments, keeping the acquisition-to-retention cycle going.

First: keep customers loyal

If you’re an existing business, you need to figure out how to keep your existing customers loyal. After all, these best customers – your top 20% of purchasers – typically form the bulk of any company’s sales (60 to 80%, by some estimates) – and, of course, it’s less costly to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

That means determining who those customers are, what motivates them, and engaging in lifecycle marketing to keep them around.

Second: find lookalike audiences

Based on the profiles of your most loyal customers, you can find lookalike audiences and prospect segments who buy and operate the way your best segments do – and are the likeliest to become long-term customers, too.

Using detailed customer profiles taking into account the demographics, intent, interests, and behaviors of your audience of best customers, you can begin targeting lookalike audiences in your prospecting efforts and nurturing them through the same process.  

Ending the chicken-egg debate

Many marketers may iterate between both hypothetical guesswork and determining their ICP based on existing customers – but the existing customer strategy works much better when you have robust consumer data to back it up.

Rather than relying on hypotheticals or ideals, using a customer-first strategy goes straight to reality: finding out who your best customers already are. It’s a bit like working backwards, but it’s the simplest way to drive companies forward.

How Stirista helps you find and understand your best audiences

Leveraging Stirista’s B2C data can help you build rich, detailed profiles of your best customers – empowering you with a deeper understanding of your existing audiences, so you can retain the best ones and improve prospecting efforts, too.

Once you know your best customers with data that’s validated and updated in real time – whether nostalgic adults, creative kids, or both – you can build lookalike audiences based on these existing detailed customer profiles to target more of the same individuals who are drawn to what you offer — the audiences that are most likely to convert and become long-term customers.

You can’t build a LEGO set in the dark. You don’t need to build your prospect audiences in the dark, either.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can a company find its “real” audience?

The most effective way to find your true audience is to use B2C data to understand your existing customers. By analyzing detailed profiles of your current customer base, especially the most loyal and high-value customers, you can identify who is already drawn to your product and what their behaviors, interests, and motivations are.

What is the “chicken-and-egg” problem in marketing?

The “chicken-and-egg” problem refers to the dilemma of whether a company should first determine an ideal customer profile (ICP) and then market to them, or let the product find its own audience and then pivot the marketing strategy. 

How does identifying your best customers help with new customer acquisition?

Once you have a deep understanding of your most loyal and high-value customers, you can use that data to create “lookalike audiences.” These are new prospect segments who share similar demographics, interests, and behaviors as your best customers. By targeting these lookalike audiences, you can improve your prospecting efforts and acquire new customers who are more likely to become long-term, loyal buyers.