10 Ways to Locate and Target Your Most Valuable Customers

The Internet, with the right mindset and the right tools, can be your most efficient, effective, and convenient means of generating quality leads and building your customer base.
Take a look through these 10 ways to locate and target your most valuable customers and try a few out.

1. Find and explore forums in your target market's industry/industries. These are also great places to target your Google AdWords campaigns.
2. Save searches on Twitter for industry keywords. Check these results often as they'll update in real time as conversations occur on Twitter. The people using these keywords could very possibly be potential customers for you.
3. Find and follow industry related lists on Twitter. Stay up to date with what frequent tweeters on these lists are talking about.
4. Use Facebook advertising: it allows you to very concisely and accurately target exactly who you want to convey information to.  You can direct users' clicks to either your Facebook page (even a specific section of the page) or a website address.
5. Take a look through your competition's websites.  Do they list their current customers?  Who do they link to?  Who are they talking to? ... The first step to beating your competition is to take a look at what they're doing and why they're doing it.
6. Does your business have a physical location?  Don't miss our on location based checkins and applications.  Make sure your business is registered on Foursquare, SCVNGR, Gowalla, Facebook Places, and Google Places.  Checkins allow your customers to do marketing work for you... reward them for this!
7. Subscribe to industry blogs and your competitors' blogs.  By keeping up to date with your industry as a whole, you'll no doubt be more likely to recognize potentially valuable leads and customers.
8. Scour LinkedIn.  See who you're connected to... See who those connections are connected to... See who they're connected to as well.  Start posting more frequently.  Run polls.  Join groups.  Get involved in LinkedIn and you'll be surprised at how many leads you can generate.
9. What businesses, hobbies, and interests do your customers have in common?  Find related pages on Facebook - using Facebook as your business' page, comment on those related pages you found.  Interact with the people who are posting on that page's wall.  Genuine and sincere interaction will lead to these people "liking" your page in turn.
10. Keep track of these methods, the leads generated with each, and your success rates! Measure, measure, measure and then keep doing the ones that work best for you.