How Well Do You Know Your Ideal Client?

From my experience mentoring entrepreneurs and small businesses of all shapes and sizes, I’m willing to guess it’s not nearly as intimate and internalized a relationship as it should be.

It’s crucial that every business whole-heartedly understands their target audience—their customer’s deepest desires, wants, fears and needs.

Understanding your customer not only saves you time from marketing to the wrong people, it also allows you to create more IMPACT in the lives of those you work with. And that means your most successful, fulfilling and profitable business yet.

Ready to get to know your ideal client? Here’s everything you need to get started:

Step Into Your Ideal Client’s Shoes

Start to understand your target audience by painting a picture of what your ideal client does on a daily basis. Pretend you are an author writing a new novel or a screenwriter drafting a film to create the detailed life story of your client. Peek inside their day-to-day existence.

A few overarching questions to consider include:

What problems or obstacles does your target client face? What are they seeking solutions to? What brings your customer joy and happiness? What do they value above all else?

To help you answer those questions, I suggest outlining what your target customer does on a routine basis. Think about:

• What time does this person wake up in the morning?
• What do they think while they are getting ready for the day?
• What do they look like?
• What do they eat?
• Who do they hang out with?
• What are their hobbies?
• Where do they hang out online? (For example, young moms and soon-to-be-brides are all on Pinterest.)
• Where do they live?
• What is their income level?
• Do they have a family?
• What brands are they already loyal to and purchasing from?

As you can see, you can get super detailed here. Don’t stop with the questions above—keep diving into the head of your customer until you feel as close to them as your best friend or family member.

I always suggest taking the time to RESEARCH the answers to these questions, rather than simply guessing what you think they might be.

Conduct interviews. Send a survey to your e-mail list. Ask the right questions to the right people—and keep it super niche. The more information you gather here, the easier the next step will be.

How To Create A Buyer Persona

Now that you have heaps of information about your target audience, it’s time to create a Buyer Persona (sometimes also referred to as a client avatar).

A Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data.

Since you already gathered all of the data you need in Step One, now all you have to do is organize and assemble it.

Think about writing a biography or a dating profile to summarize who they are, what matters to them, what they are looking for, what they do for fun…all of the deepest wants and desires you identified in Step One. You’ll also want to include a stock photo and basic information such as height, weight and eye color—details to make them seem like a real, breathing person.

If you really want to take it to the next level, you can even create a Pinterest Mood Board specifically for your target customer. I am obsessed with Pinterest for client branding. It allows me to fully understand the essence of my client and their product, and then to incorporate this into their comprehensive branding strategy. The same technique can be used for getting into the head of your ideal client and internalizing who they are and what they love.

HubSpot has an excellent free template you can use to create your Buyer Persona. I recommend downloading it and using it as a guide to help you in this process.

Finally, don’t hesitate to create more than one Buyer Persona if you feel it allows you to more closely relate to and understand your target audience.

Meet Your Client On Their Journey

Once you have your Buyer Persona, you’ll find it is much easier to market to the right people who already WANT and NEED what you have to offer.

Now that you are talking to your target audience, there is one more detail to consider…

About the author: Lynan Saperstein

My Big Factor is Seeing Your Unique Gift- Greatness and Illuminating It, so you serve and share with the world in the biggest way possible. Mindset transformation and business strategy action planning is the way we make it happen together. I was put on this planet to support entrepreneurs, to help to them step fully into their service ideas and talents to make a profitable living with their business. I believe entrepreneurs will change the world we live in, I am here to show everyone that the entrepreneurial spirit lives inside of each one of us. As a Business Expansion Mentor, I will help you break free of your personal roadblocks, help you to completely avoid the ‘normal’ pitfalls of growing a business and support you in scaling up your vision to serve more people and reach around the globe with your brand. With the Big Factor Team and Implementation Support, nothing is impossible. If you can dream it, we’ll test it first then we’ll build it.

This article was first published by Lynan Saperstein