This is the third episode of my investigation of the Shopify Compass course. We will sharpen our vision about target audience.

If you want to find you ideal customer, first of all you should try to answer the question “Why should a customer buy your product?”.

Simi Kular says, that she participated in some local food craft events, testing her business idea of Indian dishes sale. During these events she found that there were a lot of positive feedback from the customers, and it could be a perspective business niche, and she could start selling food in retail stores.

Finding loyal customers should be the backbone of your business

Simi Kular

Simi refers to the Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor. He says that your goal, being a product creator is to find what exactly your product performs for your customers. By the way, Clayton Christensen is known for his theory of “disruptive innovation”, and you can check a short book summary here:

“The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen

Buyers persona

Buyers persona is a generalized character, that forms a figure of your ideal customer.

By building this character you will be able to find how big your potential audience is. It consists of customer age, location, income, interests, reasons of buying, concerns, e.t.c. Don’t get too serious with that figure, because it will evolve along with the growth of the research you make.

The second reason to form a vision about target audience is the fact, that knowing your customers helps find where they are.

Answer these questions:

  • Who is your product for?
  • What specific niche or market are you serving?
  • What are the interests of your clients?
  • What sites do your customer visit? What apps and tools do they use? What are the social platforms of your customers?
  • What’s your customer location, gender, age, income, status?

Shopify offers a free example of Buyer’s persona guide, but I’d prefer to have a spreadsheet for this:

Recap question: “What your target audience Buyers persona characters are?”.

Author

Front-end engineer