One of the most common mistakes businesses make when creating a marketing strategy is skipping past the step of really getting to know their ideal client. It’s a natural inclination in marketing to focus on your offer and getting it out to as many people as possible.
However, jumping straight to traffic can create a massive disconnect between businesses and potential clients.
Without a clear view of your ideal client a lot of problems creep in:
- Your message doesn’t resonate
- You attract the wrong clients
- You can’t create repeatable systems
- You can’t offer the same repeatable service
The good news is, on the flip side, when you create an ideal client persona — you can create a powerful marketing strategy to work with the right people. And this has an incredible impact.
A study by NetProspex showed that by targeting their ideal client persona, they were able to double their page views, increase website visit duration by 900%, and noticed a 171% jump in marketing ROI.
Moral of the story: To create successful marketing (and avoid the struggle), your business needs to create and utilize an ideal client persona.
What is an ideal client persona?
An ideal client persona is an abstract depiction of the ideal customer. It is created by using qualitative and quantitative data from market/competitor research and existing client profiles. When done correctly, an ideal client persona will give you everything you need to know about the client who is most likely to use your business. Creating this persona will provide information that adds value to your services, teams, and most importantly, your marketing approach.
How creating an ideal client persona will boost your marketing game
As simple as it sounds, it’s all about reaching the right potential clients. You should view your newly created ideal client persona as a real-life, ideal client. From there, you can tailor your marketing strategy to effectively reach, correspond, and sell to potential clients who most closely resemble the ideal client persona you’ve created.
Click here to watch “Why you NEED to Identify Your Ideal Client” on our YouTube channel!
Marketing benefits
Remember, your value comes from providing a specific result to a specific audience. Your value will go unnoticed if you aren’t sharing it with the right audience.
Determining who that audience is will allow you to narrow your search and reach potential clients more efficiently and effectively.
Operational benefits
In addition to simplifying marketing, defining your ideal client also helps with your operations. The reason being, you start to attract a specific type of client. Those clients are going to be dealing with the same problems again and again.
Now you can tailor your services and staff to being really good at solving those specific problems. Rather than taking each client and building services to meet their needs, you can bring them into a process you know works for that ideal client.
How to create an ideal client persona
The process of creating an ideal client persona can be broken down into two sections:
- Research the market
- Understand your best clients
Research the market
This is as straightforward as it sounds. This will require you to dig deep into your market, extract data from your competitors, and use the data to compare it to your own business. Search for what is working for other businesses and incorporate your findings into the make-up of your ideal client persona.
Study your best clients
This is the most important step when creating an ideal client persona. If you already have great clients, the question you should be asking is, “How do I get more clients like this?”
Think about what makes these clients great. How did they find you? Why are they great to work with? What unique problems are you solving for them?
Then, engage those clients with the same questions. You can even be honest with them, and let them know you love working with them.
By speaking with your clients, you’ll want to learn what problems you solve for them (in their own words) so you can clearly communicate with others who are probably needing the same solutions.
Ask your clients
Here are a few examples of questions to ask your client about your relationship:
- What are the qualities of the services we provide that you enjoy? What are the qualities you don’t enjoy?
- What more could we be doing to better meet your needs?
- Are we providing enough information about our services?
- Would you consider us a valuable asset to your business? Why or why not?
Now shift your focus entirely towards your client.
Here are a few more points to consider to better understand your best clients:
- What are the client’s goals and values?
- What are their demographics?
- What are their challenges and pain points?
Additionally, you need to ask yourself why you enjoy working with this particular client.
Ask yourself
Here are a few examples of questions to ask yourself:
- What qualities do they embody that would be ideal for a future client?
- What tools did you use to secure them as a client?
- Do you believe this process was successful? Where does it need work?
- How do you think you could better serve them?
Build your ideal client persona with our template
Creating an ideal client persona is an important step to properly market your business. It allows you to share your value with the audiences who will appreciate it most. You can create an ideal client persona by researching the market and understanding your best clients. Once you’ve done this, having successful marketing will be a breeze.
Don’t forget! To make things easier for you, we’ve put together a template to help you create your personalized ideal client persona.
Fill it out here: https://www.fullstadium.co/ideal-client-persona/
