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This is a serious question that I see freelance web designers failing to answer all the time – who is your customer? If you had to draw your customer on the office white board – location, description, income, interests, aspirations and motivations – could you do it?

Most small businesses operate in a reactive state – the telephone rings and hopefully there’s a customer wanting a new or updated website. That’s a pretty cool way of working hand to mouth, kind of like an itinerant fruit picker, but it isn’t very effective. Your problem is that the customer, in this perspective, is everybody.

If you take one thing away from this article it’s that you have finite resources and are incapable of effectively communicating with everybody. No small to medium service industry business should try to serve everybody. You would just spread too thin and it would get too time consuming and expensive. Unfortunately that’s how most freelance web designers operate.

The answer is to find a niche, a serviceable segment of the web design pie nobody else is giving due attention. Some section of the community with money and the desire / need for a web solution. This is what marketers call segmentation. You will need to do serious research (not just cruise the net) but if you can find that group of people then you know who to communicate your message to and you know they have the interest and cash to employ your skills.

This is an important point because once you know your niche, which segment you are focusing on, you can start to answer those questions in the opening paragraph. What are your customers location, description, income, interests, aspirations and motivations? Because that’s the other part… the more you understand these people the better you can service their needs, build relationships and enhance their business objectives. This is where you have an opportunity to build your brand.

And the better you understand them the more they will gravitate toward your value proposition – the other web designers touting their backsides to everybody can have everybody else, who cares? If you’re really lucky and pretty good at what you do, you have the potential to own that niche because the intangibles like brand and relationships and tacit knowledge about their niche provide a competitive advantage.

It’s much cheaper to focus your entire conversation at that smaller group of people and businesses in your segment, rather than the entire world. OK you might pick up some other work and that’s fine… that’s icing on the cake. What I’m talking about is focusing the core of your enterprise onto a section of the market where you have the potential to turn a profit. Why waste effort pursuing everybody – let the buzzards eat that roadkill while you dine in the deeper more serviceable pockets of the customers you know intimately?

So you might make that your goal from here on in… finding a niche and getting to know their needs and interests better than every other web design firm out there. It’s time to stop talking to everybody and follow the money.

And remember, a niche without money is like owning a toothbrush at a football game… pretty much useless. You need to be able to access these customers and they need to be cashed up and ready to pay. Don’t get sucked into a niche without that incentive.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 10:04 am and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.