Every successful business starts with a clear understanding of its customers - who they are, what they value, and why they choose you. Yet, for many small business owners, marketing often feels like a guessing game.
That’s why it’s one of the key areas covered in the Help to Grow: Management Essentials course, with several sections devoted to it, including an overview of digital marketing and social media basics, as well as the importance of customer targeting, segmentation and positioning.
In this article, we'll explore some of the learnings from the course around defining your ideal customer, why it is so important and how to do it.
The importance of insight
When you’re new to owning or leading a business it can be tempting to power ahead with promotion without taking the time to develop a proper strategy.
If you’re proud of your product or service and you’ve worked hard to launch it, it’s natural to want as many people as possible to know about it. But, as a small business, attempting to market to everyone all at once can be a waste of your already-limited time and resources.
What you need is insights into the mind of your ideal client – what they think, feel, buy, and what their challenges are right now. Once you have this deeper understanding you can target your marketing so that it speaks their language, making it much more likely that they’ll connect with what you have to offer.
You’ll often hear this information referred to as an Ideal Client Profile (ICP). It’s a concept referred to in more detail in the Help to Grow: Management Essentials course, and is an essential exercise which then allows you to explore the concepts – also touched upon in the course – of segmentation, targeting and position.
How do I know who my ideal client is?
An Ideal Client Profile is not just about age, gender or location. It’s a detailed description of the type of customer who gets the most value from your product or service - and brings the most value back to your business.
For example, if you’re selling to other businesses, your ICP might include industry sector, company size, turnover, decision-makers and buying process. For consumer businesses, you might think about lifestyle, income, interests and personal values.
Creating an ICP helps you focus on whether a customer is the right fit and ensures you’re expending your marketing efforts on customers who genuinely need what you offer and are likely to stay loyal over time.
Strategy not scattergun
Effective marketing is always underpinned by strategy and having an ICP makes developing this strategy so much easier, allowing you to:
Focus your resources: Spend your marketing budget where it will make the most impact.
Refine your messaging: Speak directly to your customers’ needs and motivations.
Attract the right customers: Build relationships with clients who value your expertise and are more likely to recommend you.
Differentiate your business: Stand out by offering a product or service that truly meets your ideal customer’s needs.
This strategic focus is exactly what the Help to Grow: Management Essentials course helps business leaders begin to understand — a more structured way to think about who their customers are, what they want, and how to serve them better. It’s covered in more detail in the full Help to Grow: Management Course.
The link between ICP and segmentation, targeting and positioning
In marketing, understanding your customer isn’t just a one-off task, it’s an ongoing process. The Essentials course introduces three fundamental tools that underpin effective marketing: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP).
Your ICP sits at the heart of this approach.
1. Segmentation – means grouping customers by shared characteristics such as location, demographics, behaviour, or needs.
Examples include:
Geography: local vs national customers
Demographics: age, gender or income
Behaviour: buying frequency, preferred channels
Needs: problems your product or service solves
Segmenting helps you understand who buys from you and why so you can tailor your services and marketing messages to each group, and make sure your value proposition is clear.
2. Targeting
Once you’ve segmented your market, the next step is to decide which groups to focus on. This is your target market.
Targeting means tailoring your marketing efforts to specific customer segments based on what you know about them. You develop messages that speak to their priorities, and you choose the most effective ways to reach them, whether that’s social media, events, or email.
To target effectively, you need to understand what value you offer and what benefit it brings your customers. Are you offering higher quality, better design, or better value for money than your competitors?
3. Positioning
This is how you differentiate your business from competitors in the eyes of your target customer. It’s about clearly communicating what makes you unique: your promise, personality, and value.
A great example of positioning in action is Ooni, the portable pizza oven company. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as more people cooked and socialised at home, Ooni spotted an opportunity. By positioning themselves as the go-to brand for high-quality, home pizza ovens, they offered something distinctive: a quality product at an accessible price, backed by strong branding.
You can hear more about their story – and the business lessons they’ve learnt along the way - in the Help to Grow: Management Essentials course.
Finding the right information
Researching your ideal client and target markets doesn’t need to be an expensive process. Lots of valuable data is already available for free. There’s more information on this in the course but sources can include government departments, trade associations and business support organisations.
From insight to action
When you understand your Ideal Client Profile, your marketing stops being guesswork and starts becoming strategy. You know who you’re talking to, what they care about, and how to show them the value you bring.
That focus helps you build a stronger brand, attract better-fit clients, and grow with confidence.
If you want to take your understanding even further, the Help to Grow: Management Essentials course offers a deeper look at customer segmentation, targeting and positioning — plus practical tools to apply these ideas directly to your business.
The fully-funded course, which is backed by some of the UK’s leading business schools, takes just two hours to complete, and can be done at your own time and pace. Other topics covered include getting to grips with finance, goal-setting, operations and HR.
You can sign up here.
