NOT-Ideal Clients….
Have you ever felt DRAINED after dealing with a client who is…..less than ideal? Someone who doesn’t respect you, or treats you badly? A customer who is so negative you just can’t wait to get away from them? Or even worse someone who complains about your prices or other things? You’re not alone, we’ve all dealt with clients and customers we’d rather not spend time with. There are a lot of things we can do as leaders with processes, training our staff and intention (just to name a few tools we could use) to make these interactions more positive, BUT the best thing to do is to only work with ideal clients. Here’s how to connect with your ideal clients:
Ideal Clients!
Ideal clients make us feel good, proud, happy, positive, appreciated and respected. They love our products and services, and they even brag about us to their friends and families resulting in referral business. They also are a JOY to be around! You feel GOOD and ENERGIZED after dealing with an ideal customer!
I bet you’re thinking, “Sounds great but how do I find more customers like that?” Well, my friend, I’m glad you’re here, because I’m about to break it all down for you. You got this! You CAN deal with IDEAL CLIENTS who MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD! In my businesses my teams and I enjoy working with ideal clients allllll the time.
Marketing: Identifying & Reaching Ideal Clients
The first step is to acknowledge that any old client is NOT who we are looking for. Agree with the team involved in this project that you want BETTER CLIENTS and HAPPIER TRANSACTIONS. Next we can get to work on defining ideal clients for your business specifically.
In your marketing plan make sure you need to clearly identify and target your ideal clients. We need to do this before we can connect with them. You’re going to do this by choosing your top ten percent of clients, and finding their common characteristics. You can either do it by memory (if you know these clients VERY WELL) or by surveying them.
Who are your ideal clients?
You want to know everything about them: demographics, geographics, psychographics and where they consume media. How old are they? Are they married? Where do they live? Do they have kids? What are their hobbies? What words do they use to describe you (positive words?) What would make them choose a competitor over you? Find out all of the things we need to know in order to:
Use their words to attract them and more people like them.
Put these words on the right platforms (where they consume media).
Know the characteristics, demographics, and interests we can use in targeted ads.
You can start by exporting a report of customers and their spend in the last two years (or whatever time period you think is appropriate.) Then, sort the list by spend. This is a good place to start, with people who spend the most at the top. Then STRIKE people from the list if they’ve ever mistreated you or your staff, if they’re super negative or horrible to deal with, complain about your prices, etc. You’ll end up with a great list of people. These are the people you need to interview, or simply get out of your head and onto paper, their characteristics, demographics & psychographics!
Ideal Client Persona/Avatar
Once you have this – their commonalities will define your avatar/persona/target client profile! Sometimes you will have more than one segment. Sometimes you’ll have several. I like to recommend three or fewer to start with. You know you need to split them off into more than one segment if the age range (for example) varies by more than 10 years. We can’t communicate and connect with a 25 year old AND a 65 year old with the same message. These segments should include all of the common characteristics you found above. These are the people, with the hobbies and characteristics that you are going to find and make your ideal clients! Having all of the information we need makes it very easy to say what they will love about us, in the places we need to say it (where they hang out.)
Marketing Tips to find even more Ideal Clients
Remember that you are ALWAYS AIMING at ideal clients. Picture a laser pointer or nerf gun. You can’t hit EVERYONE! Which is fine because we only want the ideal clients! And we will still have other customers coming in, which is fine, but MOST of them should start to become like the ideal customers you identified through this process!
Be very clear and confident in your mission, vision and culture statements, because your ideal clients will be attracted to these, and you can’t properly define ANY marketing strategy without those!
Speak to your clients fears, long-term vision, what they need to believe to purchase from you, and THEN what they need to know about your products or services. DO NOT SKIP THE FIRST three! Most of us speak only about the fourth thing; what we think our customers or prospective customers need to know about us. This is a mistake, if you haven’t already been talking about fears, vision, and what they need to believe.
Offering a gift card for filling out your survey can work WONDERS. I once had a client get 90% of their surveys back because of this! *Remember only survey IDEAL CLIENTS! We don’t care what the non-ideal clients have to say!
Execution: the mother of all success tools.
Go put these tasks into your calendar, or the calendar of the person you delegate this to! You can learn and learn all day long but if you don’t execute you’re never going to succeed. Follow up to make sure they implement a marketing plan around these things. Redo this annually or when major shifts occur in consumer behaviour ie a pandemic.
