An ideal client is a person or a company whose needs and wants are met by the products and services your company is offering.
If you can define your ideal client, you will have a more focused or targeted approach to building the target audience for your business.
Your products, services, operational framework, customer support, and marketing strategies will be aligned toward servicing a specifically targeted group of potential clients.
Why is this important in business? Because the needs, wants, concerns, tastes, and preferences of clients are different. Potential clients should be treated as individuals with different specific goals and objectives within the sales process.
Why Is An Ideal Client Profile Important?
In any business working out the ideal client profile is vital in the sales process. You don’t want to waste time, effort, and money on targeting the wrong customers.
Take time to look at your existing clients to help you establish ideas that will help drive your sales and marketing efforts forward.
Using internal marketing data from your current clients will help you but always remember to create marketing campaigns that will target ideal clients for your company.
Your target audience mustn’t be too narrow. The customers you are trying to attract should come from all walks of life.
When you are trying to attract future clients to your business, you must remember that you must treat them as individuals to get the ideal client profile.
Not everyone has the same interests in life. It is the same when people are parting with their hard-earned cash. Your sales team must take a deep instead of a narrow approach when trying to sell your product or service.
The bottom line is that if you apply a “one size fits all” strategy to build your business, you will get overwhelmed by your competition.
You will end up wasting time and energy as well wasting money on out-of-control marketing costs promoting your business to everyone and yet be seen by no one.
As a business, you should focus on defining your ideal client profile without being too narrow. Knowing who your ideal client is will help your business achieve long-term success by establishing strong, sustainable relationships that are built on trust, mutually-beneficial goals, and objectives.
Here Are 5 Easy Steps To Define Your Ideal Client
1. Define Your Purpose
“Ben and Jerry’s” started out as selling organic, homemade ice cream from a newly-renovated gas station in Vermont. Within a few years, “Ben and Jerry’s” became big enough to challenge more established brands such as “Haagen Dazs.”
Even though they couldn’t afford medical school, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield didn’t set up an ice cream business to make money. “Ben and Jerry’s” was their way of highlighting the quality of dairy products coming from Vermont.
The first step in defining your ideal client starts with you, and that means identifying your purpose. Why did you start this type of business?
Businesses that state their purpose is “to make money” will not find their ideal client. Unless you are a non-profit organisation, then it goes without saying that you are in business for the sales team to make them money.
Determining your purpose will help you differentiate your product. It will guide you in identifying the market segment you wish to target for your products and services. As a result, this will attract your ideal client, and a sales cycle will begin.
In the case of “Ben and Jerry’s,” their purpose resonated with customers who appreciated ice cream that was made without processed ingredients and a company that promoted sustainability.
Cohen and Greenfield remained persistent with their green advocacy even during difficult times and after being bought out by Unilever.
A study by Nobel Prize-winning Psychiatrist Daniel Kahneman showed that consumers tend to patronise businesses and brands whose values are aligned with theirs. So if the ideal client’s background story is relatable, then it is mutually beneficial.
Once you find your purpose, you have to stay true to it throughout. This will help you find the ideal client demographics needed to create an ideal client.
The purpose is a function of your set of non-negotiable core values. That means you will never compromise your business purpose in any situation.
A business is defined as a “living, breathing entity.” You are the business. You should have a deep understanding of your values, and they should be reflected by their purpose. Consumers will define you by what they believe your values are. You have to stay true to “Who” you are, and it starts with the “Why” or the purpose of your business.
2. Get To Know Your Client
There could be several reasons why a client would choose your business over a competitor before the buying process. Maybe your pricing was more attractive, perhaps it was word-of-mouth, or they liked your marketing message due to the types of content you publish on social media.
Regardless of the reason or reasons, whenever a prospect becomes a paying client, it represents the start of a relationship. You should now focus on building a key quality of every strong relationship: Loyalty. This also helps you gain a new free client profile template which can help you attract another potential client or clients. Remember, you can never have too many clients.
A client who is loyal to your business will remain with you for the long term, which is extremely valuable to your business. Imagine if you had more loyal clients? How far will they take your business? The right marketing team that uses the right marketing materials to put their marketing messages across will always help you gain the best clients.
This is why it is very important to develop an understanding of who your ideal clients are, which with help you create an ideal client profile template:
Identify the Key Demographics
- Where do they come from?
- How did they come across or learn of your business?
- What are the age, gender, educational and occupational categories that comprise the majority of my clients?
- Conduct client interviews?
Determine Their Purchasing Behaviour
- How often does my ideal client purchase my products and services?
- How much does he/she spend per purchase?
- What is my ideal client’s preferred mode of payment?
Define the Specific Benefits They Are Seeking
- Of all the features of my products and services, which one(s) benefits my ideal client the most?
- How do my products and services address the needs of my clients?
- Which product or service feature is responsible for lead generation, which brought in the highest number of clients?
3. Create Your Buyer’s or Client’s Profile
According to the 2018 Marketing Agency Growth Report, 60% of companies have a hard time finding new clients through poor marketing campaigns, while 16% have problems retaining their clients.
A key factor to these problems lies in another telling statistic: 23% of businesses fail to meet clients’ goals and objectives.
In our previous two steps, we discussed the importance of understanding your business (purpose) and your clients (needs). Having a firm grasp of who your business and clients are will help establish effective strategies for your company.
This brings us to a very important component of targeted marketing strategy: The Client’s Profile. So much money is wasted on poor marketing stories.
The information you’ve gained from the first two steps will help you create an accurate profile of your client. The profile will become the basis of your business development framework.
It will be used as the main reference point for determining your operational processes, pricing points, marketing strategies, and customer support channels, among others.
Three Steps To Making A Client Profile:
Step 1: Start Out With a Small Group
- Identify a group of clients that have accounted for the largest percentage of your profits.
- Scale the group down further by identifying the clients that have been with you the longest. These are the best clients.
- Make sure the clients in the group pay you on time and have no delinquent accounts.
Step 2: Engage Your Clients
- Invite them for a meeting.
- Email client surveys.
- Set up an outbound group to conduct a phone survey with your clients.
Step 3: Create the Client Profile
The standard format for a Client Profile should include the following details:
- Personal Information.
- Key Demographics.
- Identifiable Personality Traits.
- Goals/ Objectives.
- Issues/ Concerns.
- Criticisms of Products and Services.
- Preferred Mode of Payment.
4. Study Your Competitors
It’s good to have another perspective from which to evaluate your business plans which will help you target your ideal client. Your competitors can become valuable resources because you can find out the reasons why their clients chose their business over yours:
- What products and services do they offer?
- Who buys or patronises their products and services?
- How different are their products and services from mine?
- How are they performing in the industry?
- What are their strategies for attracting clients?
Competitor analysis is an effective way of gaining an advantage. Before the age of the Internet, companies sent spies to work for the competitor so they could get their trade secrets. This helped them build client profiles on the ideal client for their business.
Thanks to the Internet, you can simply check their social media posts and study a blog post to see the content they publish. You can also visit their websites or engage their customers on why they like the products and services.
5. Define Your Products And Services Based On Client’s Needs
Have you identified your Branded Value Proposition (BVP)? This is the statement that summarises the overall value of your product or service to your client.
The BVP will not just be represented in all types of marketing copy. It will be used as your statistical data guide when improving existing products and services as well as developing new ones:
- What makes your product or service better than the competition?
- Why should a prospect choose your business over a competitor?
- How does my business address the wishes, interests, wants, and concerns of my target market?
Keep in mind that you are in the business of addressing the needs and concerns of your ideal client. Your business offers solutions to pressing issues and concerns from the constructive feedback provided.
There will always be competitors in the same market segment. Your goal is to consistently provide the best option in the industry. Do not give your clients a reason to choose a competitor over you. Also, make sure you have the right person looking at your customer data, be it CRM data, demographic data, analytics data, or behavioural data.
Putting It All Together
To succeed, your business must always be in a state of constant evolution so that your company’s future story is a good one. Stay updated on developments in your industry; client demand, tastes, and preferences are influenced by industry trends.
These conditions can affect the information you’ve gathered on your ideal clients, influence the direction of your company goals, and require a change in your mix of products and services.
Therefore, your business model should never remain passive. It must be revised to reflect changes in your ideal clients to keep ideal client profiles current and in line with ideal client psychographics.
To help you get the ideal client profile, the demographics that make up your ideal client today may be different within a few months or a year.
Contact Us Today
All businesses need to get their ideal client profile and ideal client persona right to make sure the company succeeds. Put in the right marketing and investment strategy to help you in your goal of creating an ideal client.
If you think your business would benefit from working with an agency partner, then please get in touch with us today for a free consultation.
We can provide you with access to virtual assistants that can make you business and customer facing processes a lot more efficient and effective. And you gain that benefit at a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house employees.