7 key Steps to an Ideal Client

In this post, I set out the questions you need to ask yourself about the best market for your products or services. By being very clear on your ideal client you can more specifically and economically target your marketing efforts.

With a well-defined ideal client, you can have a point of reference to answer the following questions:

• Where should you advertise to maximize exposure to your ideal customer?
• What types of advertisements typically affect your ideal customer?
• What vocabulary and tone should you use in your marketing efforts?
• What story should your marketing content be telling?

Having a clear ideal client makes it so much easier for your marketing consultants, SEO experts and general social media support to set clear target audiences and optimise how you spend your valuable marketing budget for the best impact. Otherwise, you will waste many $000’s on messaging to areas that won’t have potential clients listening to your message.

The 7 Key Steps to follow to help define your ideal client are:

Step 1: Identify the known problem or challenge of your ideal client

Step 2: Identify the known but unspoken problem or challenge of your ideal client

Step 3: Identify the secret unknown and unspoken problem or challenge of your ideal client

Step 4: Identify what your client wants

Step 5: Identify what your client needs

Step 6: Identify the fears and frustrations of your client

Step 7: Describe your ideal client

Then ask yourself the following key questions to drive your marketing strategies:

1. If you could wave a magic wand, what would your ideal client want to have happen, have change, or get?
2. What are the wants, desires, and insecurities that your future client has?
3. What do you have to help them overcome these obstacles?
4. Does the potential client desperately want this solution?
5. Is your target market willing and able to spend money on this?
6. Does your target market congregate so you can reach them online and offline?

Niche

Once we have the above information we can now define a specific niche, or targeted focus area.

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers.

You can think of a niche market as a narrowly defined group of potential customers. For instance, instead of offering cleaning services, a business might establish a niche market by specialising in window cleaning services.

Generalists will always supply the background noise in the market. They will always clamour for work, wonder how to get it happening, and feel over-worked.

More competitors mean more challenges in differentiating yourself from the rest. You’re left to compete on price. As the market segment gets smaller, the marketplace narrows, and fewer providers devote energy and time to it – and that means less competition.

Once you become a specialist your expertise in that area begins to improve, because all you need to research, study and deliver is information and solutions in this area only. Every time you work with a client you deliver only this one message.

If you don’t already have a niche, or you have a niche and your concern is that it’s too broad, not distinctive enough, or just not making the money you want it to, then here is the list of attributes a great niche should have.

The more attributes your niche has, the better it will do.

Niche attributes:

1. The market is growing
2. They have to have a problem
3. Will spend money to solve it
4. You can reach them – they congregate
5. Make sure they’re hungry
6. There’s already success there by others
7. You can stand out
8. The group is large enough
9.  The client makes the decision themselves

Now make sure your niche is valid by undertaking keyword searches, social media campaigns etc to see if your niche strikes the right chord with your market. Otherwise, start again.

In the next post, we’ll look at how to develop business and marketing strategies based on all the work done so far to understand your product or service, the market and competitors, and your specific niche and target audience.