How to Increase Your Customer Base

Analyze your current customer data to determine as many concrete details as you can about the people who already know and engage with your brand on a regular basis. The following details are good to gather:

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Marital status
• Income level
• Profession
• Education level
• Frequency of purchases
• Reasons for purchasing
• Other brands they love

You can collect quantitative information from company data sources such as your CRM, loyalty program membership profiles, customer feedback responses, or purchase records. 

If you don’t have much customer data available, consider reviewing case studies or interviewing your sales or customer support teams to surface insights. 

You also may need to gather new data. Conducting surveys, focus groups, or interviews with your existing customers can help you identify similar characteristics and start to develop a profile of your customer base. Audience intelligence tools like SparkToro, Brandwatch, or Audiense can also provide valuable insights about your customers. 

Once you’ve collected and reviewed data about who’s buying from you already, you can use your analysis to inform your next step: defining your target market.

Your target market is made up of your ideal customer—the group of people that you believe benefit most from your product or service. 

There should be a lot of overlap between the attributes of your target market and the existing customers you just researched, but they probably won’t be identical. You may identify customers that could receive a lot of value from your product but simply aren’t aware of your brand (at least not yet). 

Narrowing in on a target market isn’t just about customer preferences. Your market should also make sense for your business goals and objectives, so partner with your sales, product development, and customer support teams as you develop a picture of your target customers. 

Keep in mind that defining your target market is all about gaining a clear, shared understanding of who you’re trying to reach with your marketing efforts. And in order to reach an audience effectively, your messaging needs to be tailored to their specific needs and motivations. That’s why your ideal audience should be narrow enough that tailored campaigns will resonate with them. 

Bottom line: if your target market is too broad, you can’t develop targeted messaging.

Target Markets for B2C Brands

B2C brands describe their target markets as a segment of individuals. Target markets should be narrowed down based on demographic (who your customers are) and psychographic (what they value or care about) attributes. Your product should be a natural fit for both—that’s what makes these customers your target market. 

For example, consider how two very distinct airlines position their services to two very distinct audiences:

• Southwest Airlines targets cost-conscious travelers looking for a low-stress experience, including younger travelers and families, as reflected in their highly promoted “bags fly free” policy.  
• Virgin Atlantic targets higher-end or business travelers who value unique experiences and, for years, used the tagline “Flying in the Face of Ordinary” to appeal to that adventurous spirit.

B2B brands usually develop target markets in the form of an ideal customer profile, or ICP. 

At this level, brands identify the kinds of businesses that get the most value from their product rather than focusing on individual employees within that business. An ICP might include industry, geography, company size, and annual revenue.  

For example, here are hypothetical ideal customer profiles for two different SaaS brands:

• Mailchimp targets small-to-medium businesses that are interested in growing their customer base through digital marketing but likely don’t have experienced marketers or the budget for more powerful enterprise platforms.
• Salesforce primarily targets enterprise businesses that need a powerful platform to manage complex digital marketing, sales, analytics, and customer experience operations. (Although, we should note that the SaaS behemoth did launch an SMB-specific product, Salesforce Essentials, in 2017 to compete with Mailchimp and other lower-priced competitors.)

With your target market in mind, you can start to build your buyer personas—an incredibly useful tool that will help you tailor messaging and campaigns to increase your client base.

Buyer personas are generalized, fictionalized representations of the types of buyers within your customer base. You’ll likely have more than one persona in your toolkit. 

And buyer personas are just that—tools. You create those tools by consolidating and summarizing all of your research into your customer base, identifying common traits, and building a fictional biography of a typical customer. Buyer personas usually include:

• A name that, for some reason, is almost always an alliteration. 
• A photo or illustration to literally put a face on your fictional customer.
• Demographics like age, location, and occupation (gender is also common, but that can quickly become problematic).
• Motivations that relate to your product (like shopping habits or professional aspirations).
• Challenges or frustrations that relate to the problem your product solves or the buying experience itself.
• Brands or media they follow. 
• Quotes from real customers that bring those motivations and challenges to life.

Marketers use personas to reach their customers more effectively by developing more nuanced positioning and messaging. Personas make that much easier by literally putting a face on the customer segment you’re trying to reach and giving you a biography and personality profile that helps you empathize with their challenges and speak to their motivations.  

For B2B brands especially, personas help humanize the buyers behind the companies you identified as ideal customers. 

For example, an email marketer might develop different iterations of a campaign for each buyer persona, or a content writer might compose a case study intended to address a specific persona’s hesitations in subscribing.

Brands guard their buyer personas carefully—after all, as we’ve just covered, a lot of research goes into understanding who your customers are and what they care about. But here are some hypothetical examples of buyer personas to reference as you build your own.

When you have a solid understanding of your customer base and which communities may matter most, you can launch an identity marketing campaign in a matter of days. And in many cases, sharing the offer itself may surface new insight. 

For example, you could promote a military discount via email to your entire customer base, and surface customers that you didn’t know were in the service. (And with digital verification, you don’t need to worry about discount abuse or shared coupon codes.)

Here are a few examples of how brands have leveraged identity marketing to grow their customer base: 

• Meditation app Headspace offered a teacher discount that brought in 25k new subscribers.
• Arts and crafts retailer Michael’s integrated identity marketing campaigns into their existing loyalty program to drive ongoing engagement and deliver positive customer experiences. When they launched the new program, they verified 200,000 customers.
• Music streaming service Deezer saw a 21% increase in growth in student subscriptions after extending a personalized offer.

Ultimately, increasing your customer base comes down to understanding who your customers are and how you can add value to their lives—then meeting them where they are with offers that resonate. 

That understanding takes research and time, but once you’re ready, SheerID can help you launch an identity marketing campaign within days. Request a demo to learn more.