Growing your business starts with having an offer you love. Seems straightforward, right? It follows then that selling your offer requires getting in front of the right audience with the right message. However, where things often get sticky is when it comes time to define your ideal client.
But it’s one of the most important parts of growing your business and it’s important to spend some time here.
Why?
Because, once you know who you’re working with, understand what motivates them, and know the problems they face, you can create an offer and tailor your messaging to speak directly to those needs.
There’s just one problem…
Most people struggle to figure out exactly who their ideal client is. So if that sounds familiar, you’re in extremely good company. Over the last decade-plus, most of the thousands of coaches and consultants I’ve helped share your challenge.
However, there’s a relatively simple approach you can take to find your ideal client that cuts through all the noise. And, I’m sharing it now as a follow-up to my series of previous articles about messaging.
What is an ideal client?
An ideal client is someone who is ready to pay you right now to solve their problem or meet their desire.
Sounds great, right? If you’re picturing a line of people waiting to work with you, that’s what I want to help you create.
Before we go any further, you need to know one thing—you’re more likely to hear me talking about “perfect-fit” clients than “ideal clients” because the word “ideal” doesn’t have the gravitas or immediacy.
Ideal is a dream—and perfect-fit is about reality.
It’s one thing to think about your dream world—and I highly encourage that because I want you to work towards the life you want. However, if you’re looking to grow your client list right now, you need to find people who are ready to work with you—you guessed it—right now.
For the purposes of this article, know that I’m going to use perfect-fit clients interchangeably with ideal clients.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about why all of this matters.
Why is it so Important to Define your Ideal Client?
When you know exactly who you’re targeting—their pain points, desires, and what they do—your entire marketing and sales strategy shifts. You deepen relationships with your audience, enjoy higher conversion rates, and can focus on reaching your goals, whatever they are.
And you do all that by making sure that your audience knows that you’re speaking directly to them with messaging that’s:
- Laser-focused on what your ideal customer wants
- Bite-sized, so you’re not overwhelming them
- Specific to your offer and the transformation it leads to
Sounds fantastic.
Let’s keep going to help you figure out how to find and talk to this audience:
You should have more than one perfect-fit client—you need one for every offer.
In fact, you should have two perfect-fit clients for every offer:
- Your ideal client’s current state—where they are now
- Your ideal client’s after-state—where they will be after the transformation
Because your audience isn’t buying your offer. They’re buying the transformation you’re promising them. That means your messaging should reflect both states, showing them you understand both their current reality and their future vision.
A lot of people I speak with say, “That sounds like mind reading.” And while I get why they say that—it’s more about understanding how to identify your ideal client, it’s both a science and an art.
The Best Method for Identifying Your Ideal Client
Now you know what an ideal client is and why defining who you want to work with is so important, let’s talk about the elephant in the room—how do you figure out who the heck they are?
Amy and I teach a method in the Content Personality® Club we call the three bold qualifiers.
It’s so simple that it blows people away, but it makes things so insanely clear. Your goal is to define three bare minimum requirements your client must have to be successful with your offer.
For example, our three bold qualifiers for the Club are:
- You have your email technology set up
- You have a developed offer you’re excited to sell more of
- You’re willing to lean into your Content Personality® and the power of email to sell more.
If you don’t meet any one of those three, you’re not ready for this program (yet).
Wondering about the Content Personality® Club? We created it to help business owners like you deepen relationships and double their revenue with email marketing. -(and provide the accountability to help you get it done). Get the details here.
Finding Your Three Bold Qualifiers for Ideal Clients
People get really nervous about making bold statements, worried that they’ll turn their ideal clients away.
However, the opposite is true.
Stating what it takes to be successful gives people confidence in your ability to solve their problems or meet their desires while simultaneously weeding out the folks who are a better fit for someone else.
If you’re saying, “Gosh, Shannon—it doesn’t sound like this method identifies my client profile at all.”
Bingo. You’re letting them self-identify with extremely clear language. Because the last thing you want is for people to say yes and then not have success—that doesn’t serve anyone.
Neither do vague, fluffy language or hard-to-believe promises, so we focus on qualifiers.
So, what is a qualifier for your ideal clients?
Let’s start with what’s not a qualifier. Lots of people mistake the ability to pay as a qualifier, but the truth is it’s an enabler.
The best way to start is by considering these questions:
- What did your best clients have in place before they got to you?
- What are the things your best-fit clients have in common?
- Are there any limiting factors that have affected people’s success?
- What beliefs do you need to have?
In addition to helping you get clear on your ideal clients, this exercise is also the foundation of some of your copy, specifically sections that talk about who the program is and isn’t a good fit for.
For the Content Personality® Club, we work to dispel beliefs that will hinder your success. For example, The Club isn’t for you if:
-
- You despise email—we help people increase their sales and profits through email marketing, so not liking email will hinder your success.
- You believe paid ads or social media is the only way to make sales—we’ve grown a multi-million dollar brand without ever paying for advertising.
- You do not love the offer you’re selling—but, we can help you develop an offer you love and then invite you into The Club to help you sell it.
Wondering how we can help you create an offer you love? Set up a call with Amy, and she can help you identify next steps.
The Role of Market Research and Competitive Analysis
You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about market research like social listening or surveys or performing a competitive analysis. There’s a reason for it. Of course you can get valuable information from these strategies, and there’s absolutely a place for them in your business.
So what’s the problem? They can become a BD—a big distraction. It’s really easy to get caught up in all the details and data instead of taking action that grows your business.
Sure, social listening, or paying attention to how people talk about the problems you solve, is really helpful for understanding their current state and their ideal future state. However, I want to remind you that you have an even better resource for this—your existing clients.
And when you’re looking at other people’s companies, you’re forgetting one thing—you’re not worried about their ideal clients. When it comes to finding your perfect client, you should be focused on your business, your offers, and who can be successful with them.
Remember what I said above about needing ideal clients for every offer? That’s exactly why too much data becomes noise. Focus on what makes your offer important. You can always fine-tune the messaging later.
The Benefits of Identifying Your Target Clients with this Method
When you focus on the three bold qualifiers as a method of identifying your perfect-fit clients, you’re better able to tune out the noise and make better decisions about how to reach these folks.
You don’t have to worry about going too niche or broad or focusing too narrowly on the wrong data. And instead of niching on the problem, you can niche on the person.
Most importantly of all, by using your clients’ success as an indicator, you can much more easily market your offers.
Why You Shouldn’t Fill Out Your Ideal Client Avatar (and what to do instead)
I have a real problem with the words “client avatar.” We’re all humans. We’re not robots, and we’re not avatars. And, as real, breathing, living people, our marketing needs to have heart and soul.
I created the Real Client Connection framework to show you how to ditch ideal client avatars and attract real human clients. Here’s a sneak peek (you can grab the full illustration below).
I’m not saying that you should ignore demographic data or hobbies and interests, however, I can tell you this—never in a million years have any of my clients asked me if I read Oprah magazine. All that to say, mapping out your ideal client characteristics or buying triggers is not the best use of your time.
As for finding out where people spend time online, the social media platforms they use, and who their sources of influence are using tools like Sparktoro, that information can help you figure out where to spend social media energy to drive people to your email list. However, again, this can turn into noise at the “figuring out your ideal client” stage.
So what should you focus on instead?
Absolutely, spend some time thinking about your ideal client’s pain points, but tie them into specific offers. Instead of going general, here’s what I recommend:
- Identify your favorite offer
- Make a list of what pain points it solves to identify your ideal client’s current state
- Think about the transformation and what they can do instead
- Identify what they’ll need to be successful
Then test out your messaging, and rinse and repeat with each of your offers.
Connecting with Your Ideal Client
Everything I do is about nurturing connections and helping my clients grow relationships with their audiences, specifically using email marketing. Since, at its core, marketing—and, truthfully, sales—is just a conversation with your audience about how you can meet their needs, it’s helpful to know who you’re talking to and what they want in the first place.
Understanding your ideal client in the context of your offer(s) makes all of it easier—
- getting clear on your brand messaging
- creating content and writing copy
- building out your inbound marketing strategy
- getting new clients in your target market
- growing your email list
- finding prospective clients and fine-tuning your sales process
The bottom line is that instead of throwing word salad out into the world and hoping something sticks, you can be deliberate in what you say and how and confidently help your ideal clients find you.
That’s the magic of connecting your brand storytelling with perfect-fit clients. You can be confident you’re marketing the right offer to the perfect audience—and reap the benefits of a business that supports you in living the life you desire.
FAQs
Q. Is it OK to have more than one ideal client profile?
A. Heck yeah. You need an ideal client profile for every single offer. And, really, you should have two!
Q. What’s the difference between ideal client profiles in a B2B vs. B2C setting?
A. Great question—however, while there are some differences, I want you to consider what I said about all of us being humans. Your goal should be what I call human-to-human or H2H marketing. So the same rules apply whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers—
- What are the three bold qualifiers for your audience?
- What do they care about now?
- What do they want to experience after your offer?
Q. When (or how often) should you review and update your ideal client profile?
A. It should be a continuous process that you refine every time you revisit your marketing for your offer or every time you create and launch a new offer. Who will be successful, and what do they need to succeed?
Q. Is there a difference between ideal clients and buyer personas, ideal customer avatars, ideal customer profiles (ICPs), or client archetypes?
A. Functionally, there’s not a huge difference. All of these things are very close to one another. The key difference is how you go about defining and refining them and how you minimize the noise so you can take action that grows your sales.
