You may have heard the words ‘not everyone is your customer’ before. These are the wise words of Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur and marketer.
Anyone with a business will need to identify the ideal customer for their business, as you simply can’t be everything to everyone.
Why not you ask?
Because if you’re trying to be everything to everyone you’re either going to end up overworked and underpaid or you won’t attract anyone at all.
Identifying who your ideal client is, is the most important step of any business and sadly it’s often ignored or quickly worked through.
By identifying your ideal client, you become more focused on what you are here to do and who you are here to help. This will help you in your business direction, your social media, your website, your copy and all other content.
After all, if you know who you are talking to, it becomes a lot easier to put words to paper.
The more you know about your ideal client, the more you can tailor content, products and services to serve your ideal clients. When you have the right products, use the right words and attract your ideal client you’re in business.
You’ll find that knowing your ideal client and using this knowledge in your marketing will make it easier to attract your ideal client and you’ll have more fun working with exactly the kind of people you want to be working with.
So how do you identify your ideal client?
There are a number of strategic ways to identify your ideal client. These are the ways us marketers use, but I like to be slightly unconventional and throw in some more organic ways to identify your ideal client.
Let’s look at the strategic way first.
First of all, there are ways to ‘label’ groups of people and segment them into behavioural, demographic, geographic and psychographic. In marketing we call this market segmentation.
So for your ideal client you want to write down their age, gender, family structure, income, interests, where they spend their time, etc.
In terms of providing a business solution to them, you also want to focus on the problem they might have. By this we don’t literally mean ‘problem’ but what is the challenge they are facing that your product or service can help with?
Using market segmentation is what a marketer would use to get a clearer idea on an ideal client.
The other method I would like you to use, and this is not something most marketers recommend, is to start working with a few different clients before you have identified whether they are your ideal client.
I know, controversial right?!
The reason I recommend this is that sometimes it’s simply too hard to categorize your ideal client and you don’t know who you’ll most enjoy working with and get results for. The best way to find out is to try it.
If you’re unsure of who your ideal client is and you struggle to use market segmentation to identify your ideal client, just start saying yes to people who want to work with you. After a while you’ll start to see a trend in the type of people you attract, you’ll learn who you get the best results for, who you like working with the most and they might even share some commonalities such as location, age, gender etc.
It is extremely important to identify your ideal customer, but there are different ways in which you can find who you’re most suited to work with. After all, you don’t want to work with just anyone.
