Your ideal customer description or ideal client description help you focus your marketing and brand positioning on who is most likely to buy from you.

It is a phrase that will be part of your Unique Value Proposition. Within your Branding Compass workbook, follow these guidelines to write it in the best format.

• Don’t capitalize at the beginning or put a period at the end. It is not a complete sentence.
• It should describe a group of people, in other words, a plural noun.
• It can be helpful to insert the word “who” into your phrase to write it correctly.

For example, for a mini donut bakery that offers very unique flavors, it might be: foodies in Portland

For an HR consulting firm is might be: business owners of professional firms in competitive industries who want to retain staff by improving their work environment

Find the motivation to buy

Sometimes, B2B firms tend to focus on demographic details like annual revenues, the number of employees or industry sector. While these are helpful pre-qualifiers for your marketing efforts they are probably not enough and may not even be that critical.

For example, if you have an IT consulting firm, you may find that your typical clients have more than 50 employees and annual revenues of $10 million or more. But, a smaller firm—say with 25 employees—but who relies heavily on technology may be more motivated to spend on your services than someone who matches your employee and revenue count, but could easily handle a brief disruption to their technology platforms.

Try to describe the core reason that motivates someone to buy from you. Think about what these people have in common about the pain they are feeling or the gain you can provide them that motivates them to buy from you without a lot persuasion. For an IT consulting firm, it may be something like, technology-driven companies who demand little or no downtime to their operating systems.

Use Branding Compass to develop your ideal customer description

As you progress through your Branding Compass workbook, there are multiple times you will answer questions about your ideal customer. You’ll be asked about their greatest pain points or the greatest benefit you can help them with. You’ll be asked about demographic and psychographic details. You’ll be asked to answer and then rank the importance of these traits. Once you have completed all of these, think back to all the questions you just answered and write a short, descriptive phrase that really identifies who is most likely to buy from you.