Target customers by what they do online

Customer bases have always been diverse, yet when business owners picture their ideal customer they reach for one homogenous person described by age, gender, location and job title. Gerard argues that this throws away most of what modern marketing can do. There is close to infinite data available now, and the strongest signal is behaviour: the websites someone spends time on, the searches they run, what they actually do in their role and how they carry themselves online. Job titles can be made up and the same title covers very different work, so fixating on titles is a weak way to define a target market. Owners who have not spent much time on their marketing tend to be the most attached to title-based targeting. The takeaway: define your ideal customer by what they do, and the targeting available to you gets far sharper.