Okay, so put your hands up if you don’t know who your ideal client is? Come on, be honest, and yes that includes you if you are thinking your ideal client is anyone of any age, male or female, young or old!
I’ll reveal something a little embarrassing to you, for my first few years in private practice; I didn’t really know who my ideal client was either. When I eventually took the time to discover who my ideal client is, it helped me to attract more of those clients who I do my best work with.
So for those of you who don’t know who your ideal client is – let’s figure out who they are..
The easiest way to identify your ideal client is to think about those clients who you have really enjoyed working with in the past, and those people who you feel you did great work with.
You can do this by visualising a client you loved working with and then writing down everything you can think of about this person. If you are new in business and have not had any clients yet, imagine who you would love to work with.
Once you have visualised who your ideal client is you then need to create a profile for them by identifying the following:
What age are they?
What gender are they?
Where do they live?
What is their Income?
What is their profession?
What do they read or watch?
What interests and attitudes do they have?
What are their needs in relation to your services?
What problems/ challenges/ issues are they coming to you for your help with solving?
The next step you’ll want to take to discover more about your ideal client is to create a brief survey. This is a great way to find out more about what your ideal clients’ problems are that they really need your help to solve.
It’s best to create a survey using a free survey builder like Survey Monkey or Wufoo. Your survey only needs to be brief (about five questions long) and ideally needs to be a mixture of open ended and closed ended questions.
Some of the questions you might want to ask in your survey are:
Are you interested in a service which helps you with ……………?
What is your biggest frustration/challenge with ………….?
What would a good outcome to your problem look like?
How would overcoming this problem impact your life?
What would it mean to you if you could overcome this issue?
When you have created your survey you’ll want to post your survey in places where your ideal clients can see it and complete it. Here are just a few suggestions you of places to post your survey…
- Email your survey to your email list of existing & past clients and colleagues.
- Post your survey on your Facebook Page and LinkedIn Profile
- Post your survey in Facebook Groups and other online groups where your ideal clients hang out.
- Send your survey to charities, organizations, businesses who have service users/ employees who match your ideal clients
You want to get as many survey responses as possible. If you receive 30 or more completed surveys that will be a good start and give you informative results that will add to your knowledge of your ideal clients.
Once you have received a good number of responses to your survey, you need to analyse them to discover answers to the following questions:
- What is your ideal client’s biggest pain points and frustrations?
- What words do they use to describe the problems that they need your help solving?
- What would it mean to your ideal client if they could overcome their problem?
Having completed these steps you’ll should now know exactly who your ideal client is, and what is even better, is you are now In a far better position to market your services to them and convert them into paying customers!
