Ideal Client – how to get the best customer!

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In business, having many ideal client is a privilege that only a few can enjoy. As the market becomes more saturated, the competition for an audience through goods and services becomes tougher and tougher.

However, the key to success does not always lie in immense, widespread popularity. For small businesses, the market provides opportunities to select a niche and use it as a foundation to market yourself as an enterprise.

In simpler terms, instead of trying to appeal to everyone, emerging players can split off and focus on a more restricted target audience. Here, limiting your audience is not meant to negatively affect your business prospects.

The idea is to design a business model that works just as well for a smaller but more carefully chosen customer base rather than try to serve them in multitudes. In fact, more and more up and coming businesses are branching out and aiming their services to their ideal client base.

What Makes an Ideal Customer?

There is a common notion among business owners that everyone makes a good customer if you know how to market to them. While there is some soundness to that idea, it is important to understand that some clients prove to be better than others, especially if they fit certain criteria relevant to your business.

For instance, a broad audience cover a large group of potential customers without much discrimination in terms of who it is. If your business focuses on a subset of that audience based on demographics or other factors, they would be your target audience.

But with hundreds of millions of people to choose from, targeted customers still encompass a large portion of the populace. These people might have certain traits in common like gender, age group, background etc.  But despite this, their needs might vary significantly.

A niche audience is where people within your target range have similar or related preferences. However, there is still the issue that you, the business owner, are catering to a group of people. Even with an overlap in commercial needs and inclinations, this still isn’t digging deep enough.

What differentiates an ideal client base from all of the above is that you aren’t looking at your audience as a random group with some surface-level cherry picking. What you are in fact looking for is a customer profile or “persona”.

Here, your entire range of consumers can be represented by one hypothetical individual: the perfect customer. What makes them perfect is a combination of personal and behavioral qualities, tastes, and inclinations.

By getting to know your ideal customer, you become familiar with them on a personal level. That way, if you can determine that they fit the customer profile that is compatible with your business profile, you have stumbled on the ideal client. If not, you keep looking until you do.

An ideal customer or persona digs a little bit deeper. It is the in-depth profile of one individual that sits within that target audience which describes them in detail, including their habits, personality traits, what they wear, how they spend their free time, who they follow on social media, and much more. It recognizes that each of your customers is a human being with real challenges, attributes and habits that affect their purchasing decisions.

A customer profile can include a number of things like someone’s personal traits, their occupation, hobbies, political or cultural ideals, tastes, and the people closest to them.

businessmen looking for ideal clients

What Makes This Approach Worth It

On paper, the concept of having an ideal client base seems straightforward enough. But for many businesses, this concept might come as slightly radical or a bit risky. If you are new to e-commerce, such concerns are valid. But in practice, narrowing down your audience has its rewards.

You Get Customers Who Understand You

For businesses that specialize in certain products or services over others, narrowing down clientele has one key aspect. Namely, they can focus their energy on customers that have a certain appreciation for your business.

Not only will these customers find value in what you are selling in a way that others don’t, but you too can earn more meaningful recognition by serving such patrons.

For instance, let’s say you manufacture high-quality speakers and audio hardware for home theaters and outdoor use. Generally speaking, pretty much everyone buys or uses speakers from time to time. But marketing to audiophiles or informed buyers who actually pay attention to specs might prove more valuable than selling to casual clients.

It Is Cost-Effective and Great Value for Money

As your audience increases, so do your marketing requirements. But such promotions are neither free nor cheap. In other words, you need to spend money to eventually make money.

Larger companies are known for their massive scale and influence, which fuels their profitability. The more influence you have, you need to dedicate large amounts of time and resources to fulfill mass marketing requirements.

By comparison, business owners that limit themselves to limited customers are at a significant monetary advantage. It’s not just that they must contend with less overall marketing expenses. Pleasing an ideal client base is far easier than appealing to the masses. This makes for a more successful marketing campaign per unit of money spent.

Less Burdensome Service Model

This is not dissimilar to the last point. Focused audiences are not just for companies that actually seek them out. Even for mega corporations, a large chunk of the revenue needed to keep the business afloat is just a fraction of those that they market to.

By and large, companies that pick and choose customers are therefore less encumbered by the need to impress everyone at once. This makes for a more manageable business model.

Running a Business Is Much Easier

By focusing your efforts on a limited audience, you can maintain the flow of traffic and run an impactful business, but on a scale that, to a significant extent, requires far less effort. You’re still striving to understand an individual, but that alone is much more efficient than trying to analyze multiple people at once.

Plus, you’re not excluding people by devoting yourself to an ideal client base. Rather, you’re taking meaningful steps to understand your smaller audience, which offers better results than a flimsy assessment of a bigger audience.

How to Identify Your Ideal Client Base?

Once you appreciate the importance of laser-focused marketing, you need to actively seek out the perfect customers for your business. To do that, you must realize that rather than exploiting them, your objective is to serve and benefit your ideal customer base.

With that in mind, here’s how you can go about defining your clients.

Make A List of Traits

Since a consumer persona is a carefully calibrated mixture of individual characteristics, you need to list each of them based on what matters to you. This is important if you intend to put their needs first and use that to refine your campaigns.

Firstly, you need to determine traits based on demographics, such as age, sex, background, job and salary, and family. This step is to get an idea about molding your campaign. Once that is done, however, you need to know more about the actual “ideal” customer.

These details will include everything from their nature, temperament, and way of life, all the way to their tastes, pet peeves, quirks, and habits. Of course, you’ll need to work hard to acquire such information, and you must do so without infringing their privacy. But though this can be difficult, the results will be worth it.

In any case, once you’ve gotten some idea about how to judge the suitability of a particular client profile, the next step is to actually reach out to them.

Connecting to Clients

To gather insights and details about your ideal client base, you need to find a way to reach them without resorting to illicit tactics. The best way to do that would be to let them know about you. Basically, now that you have decided how to judge your most suitable audience, you must now allow them to do the same to you.

If you know how to craft marketing campaigns based on customer responses, you must then choose platforms to mobilize your content or advertisements. For online businesses, social media sites offer a free platform with a wide range of possibilities. But if you’re marketing to a specific type of people, you’ll likely have to choose your platform accordingly.

For instance, if your demographic includes younger audiences around or below the age of 25, sites like TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram are fair game. For older audiences, Facebook posts or e-mail marketing are a viable path to reaching suited clients.

Once you’ve reached these customers, you have the chance to know them better and determine which of them qualify as the perfect patrons. You might even stumble across entire groups or communities of people that tick every box in your ideal customer profile. From there, the marketing can begin.

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Attracting Your Ideal Audiences

With your clientele pinpointed, the next step will be to convince them to do business with you. Again, it’s not as straightforward as with targeting larger swathes of consumers. Here, your approach needs to be more tactical and present a personal touch.

Rather than just offer an appealing product, you must empathize with people so that they deem you worth seeking out.

Direct Outreach

This is a simple technique to attract the right audiences. Obviously connecting to customers on a case-by-case basis will take time, but if you’re starting from scratch, patience will pay dividends.

The aim here is to identify problems, show that you understand their struggles, and offer your insight or services in the form of a solution. There are several ways to do this depending on your approach, platform, or the number of people you intend to connect with at once. Still, the results can be swift and substantial.

Relevant Promotional Content

If you’re reaching out to a distinguished ideal client base, it makes sense that your content is tailored to fit their needs. By comparing your products or services to the list you have made of your client’s traits, you can decide how to frame your content. The end goal, again, is to know the struggles of your patrons and draw their attention with answers to their most burning questions.

So far, the theme of empathizing is consistent throughout the process of growing a restricted, carefully picked set of customers. But to really stick the landing, potent advertising works best when available in a digestible medium. Speaking of which…

Diversify Your Media

Human beings are complex, to the point where even those with similar interests might have nuanced ways to get to them. Some like to read while others stick to other types of audiovisual media. Therefore, you’ll need to cover your bases.

For making the most of your carefully curated and cost-effective advertising, you need to divest your campaign through all available forms of media. Videos, blog posts, image galleries, pdf files, and podcasts are just some of the avenues you can exploit while attempting to reach your ideal customer base.

Visibility Matters, Especially with Limited Audiences

Through efficient connectivity, the internet has made it easier not just for services to reach customers, but vice versa. In terms of making themselves more accessible, business owners can use SEO optimization to offer their online enterprise better exposure to the right audiences.

In the case of small businesses, the lack of time, resources, or skills needed for such digital marketing can be more than made up for by outsourcing your needs. WeLoveWeb and other e-commerce services have the solutions for enterprises of all sizes to overcome obstacles faced in the streamlined pursuit of consumers.

In Closing

Treating customers as a group with vague needs and money to spend works for large businesses with immense capital. But while smaller enterprises don’t have that luxury, they can still make the most of their smaller pool of customers.

Identifying and drawing in an ideal customer base won’t happen overnight. But it’s clear that catering to smaller, more informed and compatible groups of works for business that know how to do it. So given the rewards, you should absolutely give this a go if you’re confident in your products but worried about competition.

Carmen Marín
Editor

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