What qualities should you think about for your ideal client?
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When working on defining your target audience, you should be thinking about one person. If you were able to pluck one individual from your target audience that would use your product or service, what would that person look like? What would they do? What do they want from your business?
You may have no clue what they make in a year or if they’re married or even what they do for a job.
But you should.
You should know every possible aspect of their personality and aspirations before getting into business with them. Knowing and connecting with them helps solidify your business and allows your customers to develop trust in your capabilities.
You might know your target niche and who you vaguely want to do business with. That’s great and a step in the right direction.
Now dig even deeper.
While I completed CREATE An Intensive Biz Playbook & Planner: Scale Your Online Business, Create Explosive Growth and Build a Brand You Crave, I was able to dig more into my ideal client and what I wanted to focus my business on. It’s not enough to have a great idea; you’ll need to know how your idea will help someone. Marketing your business to one person is easier than marketing your product to the masses.
Related Content: CREATE: How to define your target audience and niche for your small business start-up
How to identify your ideal client
There are a few things that can help you get started with identifying your ideal client. Just like with your target audience and niche, you might, and should, do some research around your potential ideal client. You might not find your ideal client when researching but this will help you identify if your ideal client might have alternative characteristics than you might have believed.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when determining your ideal client.
How old is your ideal client?
Age range in your target market and niche might make this an easy question for some. Despite it being easy to find, you might have a hard time pinpointing how broad or narrow you might need to be.
For example, say you are looking for mom entrepreneurs within your marketing group. You’ll have to be even more specific about what type of mothers you want to approach. Motherhood tends to be anywhere from 16 or older so determining if they are moms with empty nest syndrome in their 50s or new mothers in their 20s or even adoptive parents in their 30s could all be a range of options for that simple term.
Remember to be as specific as possible with this exercise. Your ideal client is ideal and would most likely be within a 5-10 year bracket of that ideal age.
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What’s your ideal client’s home life like?
What type of home does your ideal client live in? Do they live alone in an apartment? Maybe they rent a house with 4 other friends. Or maybe they’ve just bought their first 5-bedroom house with their spouse.
Knowing where your client lives and who they live with will allow you to see brief glimpses into their finances, marital status, ideals, aspirations, etc. These might be brief glimpses but they will help you identify various aspects about who you will be marketing towards.
Starting with what type of home your ideal client has is a great way to dig deeper into this question. Once you know their living situation, extend the question like a 2-year-old would: why? Keep asking yourself why someone would live in an apartment at 30 with their spouse. Ask why someone would need a 5-bedroom house. Keep going until you can’t anymore and all possible questions have been answered.
Where is your ideal client at?
In extension to the question above: where does your ideal client live? Now that we know they live in an apartment, we need to ask where are they living in that apartment. Are they in a small town or a thriving city? Maybe they just moved to a metropolis from a rural community. Maybe it’s the exact opposite.
Determine what region your ideal client lives as well. You might have a lot of business in a rural community for rustic chic wedding decor but not so much in a modern city. Each community you insert yourself into as a business owner, you’ll need to know you are marketing your style of services or products to the right niche.
I’d also look into the age range of your community. While you might be in a rustic town, it might be centered around a college or industry that will play well with or hurt your ideal client characteristic.
What experience(s) has your ideal client been through?
This can be as vague or specific as you need it to be for your ideal client. For intents and purposes, I’d be as specific as possible. You can branch out once you determine the specifics out.
Life is made of experiences so your ideal client will have certainly gone through a few things that extend to others. I’d start with a timetable and work my way through certain experiences chronologically. Did they attend college or receive a degree? Did your ideal client get married or have had a divorce? Have they traveled and, if needed, where do they tend to travel?
Every person, while experiencing different things, can have a similar roadmap for their decision making, despite different choices. You might have to adjust when and in what order some people went about things, but you should still be able to walk through certain experiences that will help your ideal client stand out.
What career aspirations does your ideal client have?
Determine what your ideal client does for a living. By determining this, you might also determine their education as well as their financial well-being.
What if your ideal client crosses a few industries or is starting their own business? Look into how they are starting a business and which industries they are prioritizing. If someone wants to start freelancing versus if they want to start an agency, that will be a big determining factor of how you approach different people.
Your ideal client doesn’t have to be the business owner persona either. They might just want to move up towards management or acclimate more towards a new role. These are all great aspirations for their careers, you just need to know how your service or product will help them.
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What does your ideal client need help with?
You might have determined what your ideal client needs help with when conceiving your idea to start a business. But it’s important to dig deeper when looking into your ideal client.
So, what does your ideal client need help with? Are you solving a problem for them by making it easier or are you rendering it non-existent? Will you be helping with a portion or all of the problems your ideal client faces? Maybe you’re only offering a tool to help aid them rather than do everything for them.
While determining what your client needs help with is a great start, you need to be able to look on all sides of your assistance to make sure you know how and why your service or product is needed.
At what point should you offer your services to your ideal client?
You might think the answer to this question is as soon as possible. And to a point, you’d be correct.
But what you should be thinking about is, at what point in my ideal client’s life and career should I be offering this service or product?
Determine when your product or service would be most effective for your ideal client. I might not want to offer a financial service to a person with a steady income and their debt paid while I certainly would to the broke, recent college graduate trying to make a living.
Every ideal client has a timeline, you just have to determine when to step in to make their lives easier with your service or product.
Now that you’ve determined your ideal client we’ll see who you don’t want around your business.
You’ve probably determined every feature that your ideal client possesses by now. If not, you’re on your way to determining it.
So, what should you do now that you have an ideal client in your mind? Turn the tables and identify who your negative persona is.
What is a Negative Persona?
Just as you should have an ideal client, you should also have a negative persona. A negative persona is exactly as it sounds: the opposite persona of who you would want for your business.
A negative persona isn’t just negative in the name. They’re essentially the people you do not want as ideal clients for your business. This isn’t just people who slightly skew from your ideal client, but clients who are opposite of your ideal client.
You might go through all of the steps you went through on your ideal client to determine exactly who your ideal persona is, however, it might not be as extreme as your ideal client research was. Your negative persona might not be as rigid as your ideal client is, knowing that a complete opposite wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for your business.
Marketing is a big portion of your small business. You want to retain clients, but you want them to be your ideal client, rather than a flake-y customer who doesn’t value your services. By using CREATE An Intensive Biz Playbook & Planner: Scale Your Online Business, Create Explosive Growth and Build a Brand You Crave, I was able to retain and grow my business and blog to help other business owners grow and make an impact.
Setting your sights on one type of person compared to the masses you were targeting before, will help grow your business with dedicated and invested clients. By appealing to less people, you are able to solidify your business and grow faster.
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