How to Find Your Business’s Ideal Client

Hello friends! This is my first blog to share with you, and I’m so excited to get to know you and share some things that I find really important to you and your small business! I don’t think small businesses consider who their ideal clients are often enough because it’s so easy for them to just want to get any business they possibly can, no matter who the client is. I totally get that. We’ve been there before, and are still there some days. But there’s hope! I’m going to walk you through some easy steps to provide you with some concrete, real-world take-aways so you can start working on attracting your ideal client now! 

What is an ideal client?

First, let’s discuss what an ideal client even is. Your ideal client is the person or multiple people that you want using your business services or product. It’s the person you created your business for, the people who want to spend money with you, who will refer business to you in the future, who will rave about you every chance they get, and who will continue spending money with you as long as they can. 

Why do I need to identify my ideal client?

There are many reasons why this is a useful tool as a business owner: 

• Do you find that you’re stuck attracting the wrong clients? The ones who don’t spend enough money with you? The ones who just aren’t the right fit for your business?  
• Do you long to find the perfect clientele to work with? The ones you dreamed about when you were dreaming about starting your business? 
• If the answer is yes to any of these, you need to identify exactly who you want using or buying your product! 
• As soon as you identify who that ideal client is, you can put yourself in that person’s shoes and then speak directly to them. 
• Once you think about all the characteristics of your ideal client, and you put yourself in their shoes, you start marketing to them directly. Your marketing becomes dialed in to speaking TO them, and then your ideal clients will start finding you. You’ll answer the questions, the struggles they deal with on a daily basis, and you’ll provide them with a solution. They’ll come running to you begging for what your business has to offer because it’s everything they need. 

Let’s get to the nitty-gritty!

Now, how do we make this happen? Let’s start by doing some solid brainstorming:

1. If we lived in your perfect world where you already had a thriving business, what type of person or people would you most like to have as your customer?  
2. Do you have only one type of ideal client, or are there multiple ideal clients you’d like to work with? 
3. Now, sit down and describe everything about this person or these people. Nail down as many details about them as you can. 
   • Where do they live? 
   • What do they do for fun? 
   • What social media channels do they use? 
   • Do they have a family?
   •  Are they single, married, widowed, divorced? Does that even matter?
   • Mostly women? Mostly men? 
   • Is your ideal client in their 30s? 40s? 50s? Younger, or older? 
   • What problems do they face? 
4. Once you have them dialed in, what solution does your small business offer them? 

Now what? What do I do with this information?

All you need to do now is figure out how to TALK to your ideal client(s) across all of your various forms of marketing! Write content for your ideal client(s), find content to share on social media that’s relevant to your ideal client(s), build your website so that it’s speaking to your ideal client(s), etc. 

Are the clients you want to attract on LinkedIn? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? Do they read blogs, want daily tips from you or love to read newsletters? Do they love seeing pictures of you or you and your family? Figure out what they want to see from you and where, and then reach them there! 

How to translate this to your website

Social media is a powerful tool in order to reach your ideal client. Your website is the landing page that you should always be sending them to once they’ve found you. Your website needs to be the extension of who you are as a business owner, and your website should showcase how much you love your ideal client, and how much you want to help them. When you’re writing the content for your website, when you’re deciding on any logo, color, font, etc. changes, when you’re trying to figure out what voice you think is best to use on your website, having your ideal client figured out is absolutely essential. It’s also just really helpful, as it provides you guidelines on which to make your decisions. Any SEO campaigns you run should focused be around your ideal client.  You want to make sure the keywords you are using are ones that would have you seen by your ideal client rather than someone who is not.

Here’s an example

Let me show you an example of one we did for our business just a few months ago. We decided we had two types of ideal clients; one type is brand-new business owner, and the other is an already-established business owner. Below is the one for the brand-new business owner:

• Female-we named her Lisa
• Roughly 45 years old or so
• She’s married, and has 3 children-ages 15,17 & 19
• Started a brand-new business 6 months ago. She has had a lot of interest in her business and is hoping it will soon take off. 
• Lives in rural Flagstaff, AZ
• Made $15,000 her first 6 months, and was very successful working for another local veterinarian clinic before starting this business.
• Owns an in-home vet clinic that she wants to start taking mobilly
• Wants to mostly serve rural homes (we decided to make this rural to Flagstaff because many of our ideal clients live and run their businesses in Flagstaff, AZ)
• Works mostly with large animals like horses, sheep, swine, etc. 
• Grew up in Flagstaff, and loves to support local businesses as much as possible 
• Knows a bit about websites, but prefers to be pretty hands-off
• Knows what she needs to get her website going,but doesn’t want to maintain it herself-would prefer to just have someone do it for her so she can focus on growing her clientele base. 

As you can see, we really thought a lot of details out about Lisa. We thought about her family, her home life, what’s important to her as a business owner, what her hopes and dreams are, what her goals are, what her ideal clients are, and we also thought about what her needs were for her website creation journey. For our business, knowing our clients this well is really important to us. We feel the better we know our clients on a professional and personal level, the better we can make the best website we possibly can for that client. That’s why we felt it was important to go into as much detail as we did-because that’s important to us. 

Final thoughts

This is one of the most important decisions you can make as a small business owner! Once you sit down to really figure out who your ideal client is, you put yourself in their shoes, think like them, then you figure out how to talk to them, how to market to them, and ultimately how to get them to your business! 

There are quite a few articles out there about finding your ideal client, and I like to think that I’ve offered a more hands-on and useful approach for you. For some other thoughts on this topic, I did find this article useful, as she explains more about market research and some other basics of your business. Hope you will too!

Thanks for being here!

If you liked this post, leave me a comment below with your thoughts, and share it on your favorite social media platform! I appreciate the love, and I would love to know how this helped you! Also, let me know if you were able to nail down your ideal client after reading this. I really hope you found this useful! 🙂 Thank you so much!