It puzzled new client Jess why she wasn't attracting clients to her new offering, considering she had a wealth of experience to share. She'd refined her sales page copy more times than she could count. She'd tried numerous marketing campaigns on multiple social media platforms. And she'd spent hundreds in Facebook ads.
For Jess, marketing felt like "spinning plates" and none of those plates seemed to land where they should.
A good first step is defining your ideal client. This helps you to get clear on how to find your ideal client and then know how best to connect.
"I've already done that work a few years ago. I'll just send you the files," she said.
I know that it's easy to push this exercise aside. It's not the most exciting of tasks. But it's something I do in my business every year, as my clientele continues to evolve and I gain more clarity around who it is I most want to work with. It also gives us more clarity around our offerings too.
Early in my business I worked with clients who weren't the right fit for me, purely because I needed the income. I didn't care too much about an ideal client avatar. That was until I landed a client who was so wrong for me it had me falling out of love with my business.
When we talk about being burnt out from our businesses, it's not only the online marketing systems we need to focus on. It's who our ideal client is and where they're hanging out. Once we have clarity around this, our marketing message becomes much clearer and we attract people more effortlessly.
We can finally do away with spending hours on platforms that achieve no results. We don't throw darts with our words hoping something resonates.
Whether you've new in your business or been in business for quite a while, the time you invest in defining your ideal client will pay you back tenfold.
Are you ready? Let's get started.
How to define who your most aligned client is
Before we dive into creating a profile of our ideal client base, we first need to do some research and gain clarity around who this person is. There are a couple of ways we can do this.
Existing Clients
If we've been operating for a while and we have someone in our business that we would just love 10 more of, that can be a great place to start. Sit down and interview that person or set up a virtual coffee date and start asking them about their day, their pain points and what they most want to achieve. More on this soon.
Surveys
Another way to do it is to send out a survey if you already have a database built up or an email list of people. When sharing surveys like this out to groups, be conscious of not just sharing it out to different Facebook groups that don't include your ideal clients. Otherwise, you'll end up attracting answers from people who aren't actually your perfect customers. This is where your email list can often be a better quality audience. You can use tools like Survey Monkey, where if you have less than 10 questions, you can use the platform for free.
Your own habits
Don't forget to look at your own habits. Often we get into business because we're trying to solve a problem for ourselves. So if you were your ideal client five or 10 years ago, look at your own habits.
Online and offline watering holes
Whether it's visiting a Facebook group or going to an in-person networking event (if that's possible for you in the current climate), listen to what your potential clients are saying in these groups. As I mentioned above, be really careful about who you're listening to when it comes to social media groups. But if you can trust that a particular place online is where your ideal client is hanging out, then reading through past threads can be helpful to understand who your ideal client persona is.
Hypothetical
Sometimes none of the above help, so we have to opt for a hypothetical client. This means we have to throw a dart to make a start. Over time, we get more clarity around our ideal client. So just remember, as you're creating this, that we're not chiseling out an ideal client in stone. They will evolve over time. I know mine has. As I've worked with more clients, my ideal target customer profile has shifted and I've gained more clarity about who I enjoy working with.
If you struggle with this step because you're unclear on what it is you're offering your clients or you simply don't know who it is you want to work with, I often encourage clients to do a branding exercise that looks at who YOU are first. This works to ensure you attract people who are in alignment with your values and vision, without having to focus on who your ideal client is first. For some clients, this allows them to keep moving forward with their business, instead of staying stuck spinning their wheels trying to come up with an ideal client.
How to understand your ideal target customer
Now we have an idea of who our ideal target customer is, we need to start really understanding them. This will allow us to better connect with them through our marketing messages and ensure we're targeting them based on their habits and behaviours.
To start developing our ideal client profile, we look at their demographics and psychographics.
Demographics
With demographics, we're putting a face to our customer. To do this, we're looking for an
- age range (or a specific age is more helpful to allow you to truly SEE the person in your mind),
- gender,
- relationship status
- whether they have children
- location
- job, business or study
Now it's not to say that if your ideal client is a married woman with 3 children that you can't work with a single man. What we're trying to achieve here is that when we get to the marketing part, we have a clear picture in our head of who it is we're writing copy for.
This will shift you from writing to a group of email subscribers to writing to a very specific individual with a specific pain point and goal.
Repeatedly throughout my business, I've had people say, "how did you know that's what I was thinking? It's like you're inside my head".
And that's where we need to get to with our marketing messages, because we're so clear on the person we're talking to and what they care about.
It helps us in two ways:
- When we write, we can see that person in our head and we shift from speaking to a group to speaking to an individual we feel we know deeply.
- Our advertising targeting has more clarity, because we understand what to include in our targeting. And our marketing has more clarity, because we understand what a typical day looks like for them.
Psychographics
This area allows us to see whether the person is going to be a good fit for us. Plus, it will allow us to understand how we can best help this person and their buying habits.
You can look at things like:
- personality
- hobbies and interests
- beliefs and values
- lifestyle
- buying habits
When it comes to whether the person is a good fit for us, we can start by understanding their values and beliefs. What's important to this person and how does that relate to your own value system? When values clash, it can be difficult to work with someone long term. I know because I've been there!
It's also important to ensure you're not targeting a Kmart or Target buying with a Louis Vuitton style product or service.
What are your ideal client's pain points, problems or aspirations?
Next, we want to know what their pain point or problem is. What is keeping them up at night RIGHT NOW? Adding those two bolded words to the end of your sentence is more important than you think. The perception of your offer may change over time, through different world situations (like a pandemic, for example) or through different seasons (winter versus summer).
Some questions to ask include:
- What is their pain, problem, challenge or aspiration right now? What's robbing them of sleep?
- What's holding them back from finding a solution or taking action?
- What's the deeper pain underneath what they're experiencing? How is that affecting their world right now?
- What is the transformation, outcome or result they want to experience or achieve?
If I think about my own ideal client, they're
- struggling to get a consistent flow of leads and clients into their business. They hate the rollercoaster of some months having a good number of clients and then the next month having nothing. They want more systemisation.
- what's holding them back is they don't have the knowledge of skills to make it happen. They don't really know what they're doing with their marketing and feel like they're throwing darts at a marketing map. It's the ol' "you don't know what you don't know". They also don't want to come across as a sleazy sales person.
- the deeper pain is they want to go on holidays, but they know their business will fall apart if they do. They want to contribute to the family finances in a meaningful way, instead of this gig being a hobby.
- the transformation they want is to spend more time doing the things that light them up, like spending time with their family and travelling. They want their business to be providing for their family.
If you look at my website, you'll see I use all of this copy within my sales pages, blog posts and even on my home page. When you understand deeply who your ideal client is, the copy flows better.
Another way to think about it is to break it into three parts.
1. Pain Island
Pain island is where they are now or the "before" state - this is the state they're currently. What's it like for them in that place?
2. Pleasure Island
Pleasure island is the place they most want to get to. That's the transformation that they want to experience or the result or outcome they want to achieve.
3. Canoe
And then the canoe. That's you and your offer. You're the piece in the middle that takes them from pain island to pleasure island. What are you offering them to help solve their problem and lead them from their before state to their after state?
These are the sorts of questions you can ask your ideal client when you're undertaking an interview or doing your research.
How to find your ideal customer
The next part is where they're hanging out so you can meet them where they are. This is the second part of your interview process or investigative work in learning more about how to identify your ideal customer.
The question you want to know the answer to is "what does a typical day look like?"
Have a virtual or in-person chat and ask them what they do on any given day. We don't care so much about when they're eating or when they shower. We're interested in when marketing messages are being displayed to them.
As an example, they may reach for the phone on the bedside table at 6am to scroll through emails and Facebook. That's an opportunity for you to market to them.
They may listen to the radio on the way to take the kids to school. If this is the case, ask yourself whether to include radio advertising in your marketing mix.
These are the things that give you clues for your marketing platform mix and what days and times to schedule content.
Instead of throwing out a bunch of messages on different platforms, we're now showing up to meet them where they are with a message that resonates perfectly with where they are in their life.
Our marketing is more purposeful.
- So what does the day look like?
- How many times and at what times?
- What are the different platforms they're visiting throughout their day that allows you to meet them at the right time?
I find a lot of my ideal clients log onto Facebook and Google search after 7pm or 8pm after kids have gone to bed. So I always schedule social media posts after that time.
With COVID-19, people's habits have shifted. A recent graph from the New York Times showed that after the first recorded COVID-19 death in the US, there was a significant increase in people's online usage like Facebook and YouTube during their day. Likely because we were stuck at home.
We need to be conscious of these sorts of pattern shifts during global events and even seasonal shifts. I see more people scrolling on social media platforms during winter as they hibernate, but scrolling decreases and posting increases during summer. Ensure you keep on top of those changes as they happen.
And please, don't just look at social media, as it's just one piece of the puzzle. We want to look at the bigger picture. Are they reading particular websites or blogs? Are they searching particular keywords? What podcasts are they listening to?
Blogging and SEO are a big part of my marketing strategy, because I know people are searching and trying to solve the problem of
- not having enough leads and clients in their business
better systems to ensure everything flows - ways to use storytelling to avoid coming across as a sleazy sales person
- strategies that actually work to create consistency in their business.
I want to make sure I have content to help them answer those questions so I become the trusted source and first option to work with to help them achieve their goals.
Many clients who struggled to define their ideal client inspired the blog post you're reading, for example.
How to find your ideal client within the platforms
Now we know who our client is, what messages we need to share with them and where they're hanging out, we want to go even deeper on those platforms.
We can no longer answer "Facebook" when we talk about how to find your ideal client. We need to look deeper into the platform. It's no longer just Facebook, but:
- Facebook pages
- Facebook profile
- Facebook ads
- Facebook Stories
- Facebook live video
- Facebook groups
- Facebook Messenger
- Facebook Watch
We need to think about not just the platform they're hanging out on, but what they're doing on that platform.
It's the same on LinkedIn and Instagram.
If you want to target me, for example, my YouTube viewership has increased during COVID-19. The girls and I often use YouTube as a search engine to find good content to watch. You could capture my attention through either YouTube ads or keyword optimised videos.
However, if you're doing Facebook or Instagram Stories, you likely won't connect with me as I rarely look at Stories.
However, you can leverage your content across multiple platforms. We spend so much time crafting great messages, that often we don't get enough people hearing that message.
To do this, we want to think about how to adapt our message so we can share it across different platforms.
Take the blog post, for example. It's journey has been:
- A video was created on the topic and uploaded to YouTube
- The video was transcribed and formed the basis of this blog post. The video will be embedded into the blog post.
- This blog post was shared to social media platforms, including Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, Twitter and Google My Business.
- The YouTube video was shared to Twitter
One message, but shared on multiple platforms and in multiple ways to reach far more people than if I'd kept it simply as a YouTube video.
What's next?
So what's next? Make sure you first
- do your research to define your ideal client.
- dive deep to understand who they are and what matters to them to help craft messages that touch them
- determine how to find your ideal client by knowing where they're hanging out so you can meet them where they are.
You can now take this information to craft strong marketing campaigns, to laser target your Facebook advertising and to write emails that motivate your ideal client to reach out.
If you've never done this exercise before or you haven't done it in a little while, the best place to start is with the Ideal Client Profile Worksheet. Download your copy.
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