How to Identify Your Ideal Client

The digital age has made many business practices easier and more efficient. Businesses are increasingly using digital resources to collaborate read into advanced analytics. The digital revolution doesn’t just stop with documentation and collaboration, however.

Your company can use a mix of online resources and current knowledge to brainstorm the perfect, most ideal client for your products or services. The process is deceptively complex, but the results are well worth the effort. Here’s a step-by-step guide to identifying your ideal client.

Understand Your Business

The first step to identifying your perfect client is direct and blunt. Before you can decide anything, you need to step into your client’s shoes and observe your company from their perspective. Once inside their shoes, you should be asking yourself a number of questions, starting with “why would I choose this company instead of one of its competitors?” and “what are the benefits of choosing this company and what solutions can they offer?”

Spend ample time inside your customers’ minds, evaluating what kind of products and services you’d enjoy if you were them. Once you’ve thoroughly observed your industry and business from inside their head, it’s time to move into the next step.

Know Your Own Goals

What does your brand want from its customers? Are you happy with the customers you have now or do you want a new type of customer, one with a different set of values, demographics, and income? You probably already have a list and set of customers you can trust and depend on, but is this the list you truly want to depend on?

You must assess your company’s goals from a variety of vantage points and answer for yourself what sort of business you want to do with the customers you’re currently seeking to acquire. Answering these questions will give you a great idea of where you should be looking when attracting new clientele.

Build a Customer Profile

This is one of the most important steps. If your company hasn’t already built an ideal customer persona, you should do so ASAP, building upon questions you’ve already answered and knowledge you already have of your own products, services, and existing customer base.

You can take the time to build two different customer profiles if you want; one for the customers you already have and one for the customers you want. If you are targeting a few, very different clients, you may want to consider building personas for each type. Ask a myriad of questions, such as how much your customers should make yearly, where they live, who they live with, what they want out of their own lives and what problems they are facing that your product or service can solve.

Send Out Surveys

In the process of building your customer profiles, you may want to send out a few surveys to existing clients. These surveys can ask a variety of questions that you feel you need the answers to and or don’t already have the answers to.

This data can then be parsed through to build a specific and robust database of answers and customer traits, which will help you build your ideal customer, not from the ground up, but from your existing base. You can skip this step if you want a totally new and untapped base of customers, but it’s always an option. It’s also a good idea to ask your customers how and where they heard of your company.

Utilize Google Analytics

Google can provide you with an embarrassment of riches as far as analytics and customer data is concerned. Analytics will help you pinpoint exactly who you serve and where they’re located, along with some specific insights you wouldn’t be able to dig up anywhere else.

There are a few tabs in Google Analytics you’ll be most concerned with at this stage, including Behavior, Events, Conversions, Site Content, and Page Views. Using this information will help you make more accurate and streamlined estimations of who your customers are and who they could be in the future.

Here's how to set up your Google Analytics.

Try Social Listening

Social media has come a long way in the past few years. Today, you can actually eavesdrop on people talking about your industry and looking for answers. This is a powerful form of customer acquisition that was never a possibility in the past.

A variety of tools, such as Mention, AgoraPulse, and Google Alerts, help you identify and find customers who are currently asking questions and trying to solve problems in a way that associates with your brand or industry. Using these tools is a great way to determine just where your new and potential clients are hanging out online and who they’re interacting with.

Ask for Help

Now that you’ve had a minute to review the steps to finding your ideal client, you may be asking yourself, “do I feel comfortable working through these steps on my own?” If so, great! If not, we are here to help during any step in the process. As part of our Certified Digital Marketing System Program, we have a section dedicated to finding your ideal client. Our customer persona worksheet will lead you through the process with ease. Reach out to our team to get started!