The Ins and Outs of Attracting Your Ideal Client
When a person goes into business it can be frightening to learn that they should target a particular segment of their potential audience. It can feel like you’re going to miss out on a larger audience, and maybe even pigeonhole yourself. But, the fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. When you create marketing materials for a particular segment of the audience you will be able to create better marketing materials, attract the very best customers to you, with fewer headaches while creating more powerful marketing as well.
Why You Need to Focus on Your Ideal Client
There are many reasons to focus on your ideal client. You’ll be able to create marketing that works better than generic marketing, crafting materials that will bring in the right audience will get more results than marketing without focus. Some of the reasons that you should focus on your ideal marketing are listed below.
Create More Powerful Marketing
Creating advertisements, email marketing messages, and pay per click advertisements that attract the right people takes a little thought and effort. You have to know who you’re speaking to in order to make the work stand out while attracting people who want what you’re offering. Generic ads and information just don’t work. If you want very powerful marketing that gets people excited about your product or service, you must choose a particular audience to create the materials for.
Create Effective Marketing Materials
When you think of targeting a particular audience, take a look at Dove for a good example. Dove makes body wash, soap, shampoos and beauty focused products. If you think too broadly you can see that Dove can be used by anyone and of course the company wants anyone and everyone to use their product. But, by narrowing down their audience to a particular normal woman and girls they can ensure that their advertisements and other marketing materials, even the packaging, resonates with their audience.
Attract the Best Customers for You
This is especially important if you have a niche product or service because you don’t want to attract the wrong customers to your business. They won’t be happy with what they buy, and they will likely leave a bad review for you anyway. If you focus on the perfect one and only customer that is just right when creating materials for marketing, you’ll ensure that your audience is pleased in an exceptional manner.
Fewer Headaches
Why work with people who aren’t the ideal fit for you? If you can narrow down exactly the type of customer you want to work with you’ll be able to come to work each day happy, relaxed, and unconcerned about having to put out a million fires. The truth is, not everyone is right for you and you’re not right for everyone. That’s okay. There are enough people who are right for you out there to make your business a success without going after the wrong ones.
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Creating marketing materials becomes easier when you have a picture in your mind of exactly who you’re creating them for. Plus, your marketing will become more effective and powerful when you know exactly who you’re speaking to through your materials. Having a picture in your mind of exactly who will buy and use your products or services is truly one of the most essential elements in your marketing campaigns.
How to Determine Who Your Ideal Client Is
The first order of business is figure out who your ideal client is. When you figure that out you’ll be able to create better products and services, based on exactly what they really need and want. There is an easy way to get started with market identification.
- Niche It Down – You want to start with the tiniest potential market that will think what you are offering is perfect for them. While this feels strange to find the smallest market, counterintuitive even, the fact is you can expand later. But right now you want to identify the smallest market who wants what you are offering and get to know them.
- Understand Your USP – Next work on understanding your unique selling point also called a unique value proposition in other words – why you. Why are you the one to provide this product or service to the small narrow audience you determined above? Work on explaining that while also keeping in mind that the audience needs everything couched in how it helps them.
- Offer Free Samples – Gain access to your audience that you’ve identified by offering a free sample of what you can do for them. Ask for feedback on your free sample from this audience so that you can make your offerings better. Knowing what they feel and think can help you develop better products and marketing materials in the future.
- Sketch Your Customer – After you’ve tested your niche audience with your free sample, and received feedback, you should be able to get a good idea of exactly who your customer is enabling you to create a persona of your ideal customer. You want to know, their demographics, what do they do on a Sunday night, and more. Anything you can learn to help you create a complete customer sketch or avatar is helpful.
- Repeat – As you go through the motions of niching down, defining and understanding your USP you’ll be able to improve your customer sketch over time. Keep doing it, and keep learning because no group stays completely the same. Their values may change over time as a group.
Your ideal customer, as identified, will become very important going forward. As you continue to learn about them, you’ll be able to identify more problems that you can solve within your expertise, thus, creating a very powerful product creation cycle that works in concert with your marketing plans.
How to Determine If a Client Is the Right Fit
If you have a service based business over a product based business you may have to work a little differently to get the right clients. You’ll do “all of the above”, but you’ll have the added step of speaking directly with the client and working with them one-on-one. You can do this in a few different ways.
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We discussed a freebie, and if your client liked the freebie and now wants to move forward to working with you, it’s best to start with a small or short term project. During project ask yourself the following questions.
• Is This Your Area of Expertise? – Even if you think you’re a jack of all trades, the best way to work is to choose a particular area of expertise and market those skills. Don’t too much of everything will dilute your worth and actually work against you. Choose an area to focus on and stick to that with your clients.
• Does The Client Accept Your Terms? – As a contractor and not an employee, it’s imperative that a client accept your terms and your process as how things will be done. It should all be spelled out in your contract and understandable to you both. This will be a big sign as to how well you’ll work together. Don’t feel compelled to make changes if it’s something that will make you miserable or interrupt your systems.
• Are the Client’s Expectations Realistic? – As you interview the client, you’ll be able to tell if their expectations make sense. The best way to find out is to ask them what they expect the results of your relationship to be. If they have pie in the sky unrealistic notions you can correct them before you start.
• Does The Client Follow Your Process? – If you’ve developed systems (which you should have) then when you try to explain them to the potential client is it easy for them to understand? Do they want to follow it? For example, if you use Basecamp, are they willing to sign in and learn it and use it?
• Are You Invested in Their Success? – When you talk to the potential client and get an understanding of what they are doing, does it excite you? Do you want them to succeed? This is an important component in ensuring that you’ll be happy working with the new client. If you don’t like what they do, don’t respect it, and aren’t excited about it, it will be hard to be invested enough to do a good job.
Taking this time to test the client’s responsiveness and the overall fit between the two of you is an important way to ensure that taking on the client long term will pay off for both of you. If you start with a short term project you can get through it well, probably even earn a good testimonial out of it even if you don’t move forward and work with the person long term. If you’re finding that you don’t’ mesh with the people you’re attracting you may want to create a customer avatar to help you hone in your marketing.
How to Create a Customer Avatar
One way to help yourself learn more about your audience so that you can create the best marketing materials in order to attract your ideal client is to create a customer avatar. A customer avatar is just a detailed profile of your ideal client or target customer taken a step further to making an actual picture or cartoon character of that audience member.
With a customer avatar you’ll be able to create advertising that works to attract only the best customers and increase conversion rates. It will help you hone your marketing message down to a single customer. This may seems strange but it truly works to bring your marketing messages to life not only for your audience but for you or your copywriter.
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To create a customer avatar you’ll need to:
• Identify Customer Demographics – Write down their gender, lifestyle, profession, income and age. This may start out as a guess. You can use information you already know, or you can use a direct competitor’s information. The important part is to gather the information about the type of people you want to work with.
• Conduct Client Research – Use the demographics and information from a direct competitor or if you already do business check with the metrics you already produce in your email marketing software or other stats. One caveat is that if you don’t enjoy the clients you work with now, you can research the type of people you want to work with instead.
• Identify Client Experience – What do they aspire to be? What are their fears, frustrations, and what keeps them up at night? What are they talking about around their dinner table? What books and magazines and newspapers do they read? What social media networks do they use? What do they do during their free time? How do they make decisions? The more you can narrow this down the better.
• Understand What They’d Say – What are their main objections when they are looking to buy something? What is the self-talk in their head as they look at products and services? Knowing what they say to themselves at each juncture will help you say the right things in your copy to encourage purchasing.
• Know Their Values – What makes your audience tick? Is it church, helping people, football? What is important to them and what judgements do they place on issues that they care about? Ethics, moral code and standards matter when it comes to knowing how to market to someone.
• Know Everything Down to Hair Color – It might seem silly but it’s valuable information to know whether or not they color their hair, wear makeup and so forth because it tells you something about their lifestyle. If you know what’s important to your audience, you can not only create awesome marketing that attracts them but products and services they want in the first place.
If you want to develop a method for bringing in clients who spend more money, buy repeatedly, often upgrade to the next level, and generate more profit for you while also giving you awesome feedback, promoting you to others and singing your praises, stop right now and create your customer avatar before you write one more word of copy or create one more product or service.
With this information you’ll be able to look right at your avatar while you write blog posts, develop guest posts, create your sales pages, and develop new products and services. Your business life will change and grow beyond anything you thought previously possible. With the information you’ve collected you can better attract your ideal client.
How to Attract your Ideal Client
Now that you have a client avatar, you can use it to understand more about how to market to your ideal audience. Let’s go over steps to attract your ideal client that work. You can start
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where you are, even if that’s at zero. These steps will be successful. Finding out exactly who your ideal client is and then attracting them will improve your bottom line like almost nothing else. Follow these steps using your client avatar to know what words to use.
• Create an Amazing Lead Magnet –– A lead magnet is a free offer that you provide to your audience, something they really want and that will really help them in some small way solve at least one problem immediately. This free offer can be an information product, a book, a worksheet, a webinar or anything in between that will get the attention from your audience that you need, putting you on their radar.
• Build Your Brand –– Using social media, blogging, guest posting, interviews and more you can build your brand into the “go to” brand for your niche. Build profiles that make your values and expertise apparent. Use your logo, tag line, images, colors and words as a way to appeal to your audience. Knowing who they are will help tremendously.
• Market to Your Client Avatar — You’ve created the avatar, now it’s important that you use it. Look at it, and really get to know it as you create the copy for your ads, words for blog posts, and information you include in your products. Everything you do should be for your ideal client who is represented by the avatar you’ve created.
• Be Where Your Audience Is — A useful part about creating the avatar is that you will have learned about where your audience hangs out. You’ll know where to go to find them. You can go where they are and make a presence by speaking to people, sharing what you know, and letting your light shine on the audience.
• Create Clear CTAs — You can put a call to action in many places from your social media profiles, to each blog post you create and inside your information products not just on sales pages, and “buy boxes”. Calls to action need to use the words that speak to your audience best. The way you determine that is by knowing exactly who your audience is and what they want most.
• Follow Up — When you have any dealing with anyone in your audience it’s important that you always follow up. If someone downloads a freebie, it’s important to give them time to absorb the information, and then take the time to get in touch with them to find out what they thought about it. Ask for a testimonial, ask for feedback, and use that to make your offerings better and to stay in contact with them.
• Provide Amazing Value — The best thing you have going for you is providing the most amazing value that you can in all your products and services, always under promise and over deliver. When you do that, you’ll win new clients for life. You’ll blow them away with the value you provide and they’ll become repeat customers.
• Ask for Testimonials / Referrals –– Whenever you work with a new client, whether it’s a freebie offer, a lead magnet or a paid product it’s important to give them time to use it, and then ask for a testimonial or referral. You can incentivize referrals by offering a percentage of sales when someone refers you to a new paying client.
When you work on attracting your ideal client over trying to appeal to everyone you’ll find that you actually earn more money. You will be able to create better products and services for that
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particular audience which will help you become even more important to your ideal audience. Soon, you’ll become the go to person and company for what your ideal client needs.
Why Attracting and Marketing to Your Ideal Client It Matters So Much
When you think about it, attracting your ideal client is really the whole point of your business. You want to create products and / or services for a particular audience because that fits in with your expertise. You’ll be able to do a great job when you’re focused. Spreading yourself too thin and trying to please everyone will only dilute your value. When you focus, you will increase your value exponentially.
Where Are You Right Now? — To get started, it’s important to assess where you are today. Then determine if where you are is working for you. Knowing things that seem generic like gender, age, education and so forth will really help you develop your marketing as well as your product funnel. Starting with where you are, will help you determine where you need to go.
Create an Avatar — Understanding your audience enough to create an avatar, and then marketing to them in such a way as to narrow it down to just the main audience you want to attract will make you exponentially better. The more you know your audience the more you can write copy, and speak directly to them.
Use Your Client Avatar — Once you’ve created your ideal client avatar it’s important to post it someplace. Be sure to always look at it for any type of marketing or product creation. It will help keep you centered and focused on your mission and goals.
When you do this, you’ll find that you:
• Better Understand Your Customer – The information you gather while researching your target audience will help you understand your customers so much better. You’ll be able to know what they want, how they want it, and when they want it.
• Learn Where Customers Spend Time – Knowing where your customers are will help you be where they are. You can leverage their location to your advantage by being a driving force in their communities demonstrating your skills and knowledge as an expert.
• Gather Better Quality Leads – As you build your knowledge about your audience you will be able to get leads that are more likely to become customers. The reason is that your marketing material will be more in line with what they desire.
• Create Consistency in Your Business – It can be hard on your business to have the wrong people buying your offerings. Why? Because, they’re not going to be as satisfied with the product if it’s not really meant for them, by attracting the right audience you eliminate these problem customers.
• Create Better Products – The best thing of all is that you’ll be able to create even better products and services when you know more about your ideal audience. You’ll know their pain points, and how to solve them, and be able to express it to them as well.
With all this information you can leverage it to be what your customers want and need while also being where they need you to be. Whenever you want to introduce a new product or service it’s
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imperative to look to your target audience for clues as to the best way to market the product. Because once you know who you’re working with (your audience) you can start to design a plan of action that gets results. Because, if you try to send out a generic, blanket message to the world to get customers it just won’t work as good as focusing on your target audience.
Get Started Today
Get started by setting in motion a plan of action that works. Take these steps to begin.
1. Study Your Current Audience – Use your current audience, or your direct competitors market to start. 2. Know Their Demographics – Age, sex, income, education, location, and values – all matter. 3. Find Out Their Pain Points – What are their main problems, try to list at least three. 4. Know Where They Go – What do they read, where to they hang out, who are their friends and advisors? 5. Develop Your Client Avatar – Draw an avatar, which is a sketch that depicts your ideal client narrowing them down to just one person. 6. Create Products or Services – Using the information gathered, create a product or service. 7. Get the Word Out – Use social media, websites, blogs, and more to get the word out about your products, services and brand.
Going through each of these plans of action will make a big difference in all your marketing efforts. You’ll have less stress, enjoy your business more, and make more money. What could be better than that?