How to identify your ideal customer or client
This blog is part of the Brand Foundation Series. Where the first 4 posts talked about your vision and mission, how you can define your why, your values & beliefs and how you can make your business stand out. Now we are going to talk about determining your ideal client or customer.
You’ll learn:
What an ideal customer is
Why it is important to know who you want to work with
That there are 3 steps to the process - Identify who, market research and connect
To me, there are 3 different stages when it comes to determining your ideal customer. Firstly you have to decide who you want to work with and who you don’t want to work with. And only once you know this, you perform market research to get to know this ideal customer you want to work with. And then, you need to come up with a strategy on how you can connect with this ideal customer.
When you look for blog posts about ideal customer for the most part you will directly get a list of all the things you need to know about your ideal customer.
But to me, this is the second step. How would you otherwise know who you need to focus your market research on? You need to know who you are going to ask to fill in your survey or have a call with you. If you ask every business owner you will get so many different answers you are not getting any closer to getting to know your ideal customer.
First things first; what is an ideal customer?
An ideal customer is the type of customer that fits perfectly with the type of services you offer, the price point you have for your services and your way of working.
So, let me get into that a bit more:
Your services should be aimed at solving a problem for your customer. So let's say you are helping your customers connect with their ideal customer through brand design or copywriting. To do this the right way, you have elaborate packages that look at the whole business to create a visual identity or copy that really can help your customers business attract those customers they want to work with. You could say that every business needs a visual identity or great copy, which they absolutely do, but your package is much more than a simple logo or superficial copy, which is also reflected in the price.
So aiming your efforts at attracting business owners that are just starting, that don’t understand the value of visual identity beside the need to have a pretty logo or that understand how much impact the correct messaging can have to attract those customers they want to work with is not going to work. As they will not be willing to pay your prices.
That does not mean, your services are not worth what you are asking for this, it just means this would not be the right audience for your services and all your efforts to market to this audience would be wasted.
So to be able to spend your time and efforts well, you need to decide who would fit well with your services and price points. But also with your process or way of working.
You can look at this in several ways. When you are a designer or copywriter you have formed your own style over time. So you could say that you only want to work with customers that fit with your specific style. Or you can say you only want to work with customers that value your experience and are open to your input instead of that you are only translating your customers drawing or editing their copy. And If you are very structured, organised and have lots of projects running past each other and need to keep to deadlines, you need to work with customers that also value this and are fully prepared before the work begins.
Why is it so important to know who you want to work with?
There are so many benefits to knowing who you want to work with. You will not only be able to adjust your messaging to connect with these ideal customers, once you work with these customers (and you have a good customer process) their testimonials will also be so much better and in turn, help you attract your ideal customers. Just to name a few.
But on the other hand, when you don’t know who you are targeting with your marketing or if you are trying to attract everyone that could possibly need a visual identity or copy you will find yourself frustrated and stressed. Because it might feel like your efforts are not getting you any customers. Or you might get some customers but the projects take much longer than planned because your customer was not prepared or it takes days to get feedback, they were not willing to pay the price you wanted for the project but because you don’t have many customers you gave them a discount. And I could name a couple of other frustrations from working with the ‘wrong’ customers.
I hope this makes sense and you get a better understanding of why it is so important to identify who you want to work with. Or maybe these examples are exactly what you are running into at this moment.
So, what can you do to turn this around?
Firstly, go back to the example above and decide the following;
What problems are your services are solving?
Where should your ideal customer be in their business journey to value the services you have to offer and have the money to pay for it.
Define your processes and decide which type of personality fits best with how you like to work.
What can also help is think about previous customers and projects and which project your favourite was.
What was the customer like?
What was the project?
Why is this your favourite?
What was the problem this customer had?
What I also like to do with my customers is to ask them who they don’t want to work with as sometimes it’s easier to define what you do not want. You can think about the worst project (that caused the most stress, frustrations, rang long) you had. If you look at this closely why do you think this project did not go smoothly. Did the customer not value your expertise and did you feel like an order-taker? Was the customer not prepared? Was the customer hard to reach? Was the customer not at the right stage in business to fit well with your services?
It can be so many things that you did not like about a project but knowing what you don’t want will help you narrow down who you do want to work with. Don’t forget to go back to your mission, vision and values and check if the answers on above questions are still in line with this. If not, you need to go back to the drawing board and adjust where needed to make sure there is alignment.
Up next
Next up in this Brand Foundation series is getting to know everything you can about your ideal customer. Now you know what your mission and purpose are, how you want to show up to your audience, how you can stand out and you know what kind of customers fit well with this. So the next step is to really get to know these customers through market research.
How do you feel about your customers? Are your current projects the ones you like to work on?
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