How to Define Your Ideal Client

business Sep 17, 2015
Defining your ideal client is one of the first and most important steps in your business. Being clear about who your ideal client is has many benefits:
  • It simplifies content creation – writing articles, building your website and developing workshop content becomes much easier because you have a specific person to talk to.
  • It makes it easier for people to refer you because they know the kind of person you can help.
  • It helps you be perceived as more credible because you specialize in helping a specific kind of person.
  • It makes your job more fun, because you only work with the kinds of people who you enjoy working with.
You get it. You’ve probably heard over and over and over again that it’s important to define your ideal client. But how do you do it?
 
 

HOW TO DEFINE YOUR IDEAL CLIENT:

There are 2 things to determine when defining your ideal client:

  1. What TRIBE they belong to, and
  2. What CHARACTERISTICS they have
The “Tribe” refers to the group of people your ideal client associates or identifies with. Not everyone in that tribe, however, will be your ideal client, so you need to take it a step further and define the characteristics of the tribe members who are your ideal clients.

 

 
Tribe
A tribe can be general to extremely specific. Typically, the more specific your tribe, the easier it will be to attract your ideal clients because it will be clearer to people who you help and what you help them with.

 

Here’s an example of a tribe from general to specific:

Single adults
⬇︎
Single men
⬇︎
Single men over 50

Here’s another example of a different tribe from general to specific:

Business owners
⬇︎
Women business owners
⬇︎
Women, product-based business owners

If you are just starting your business, I recommend choosing a very specific tribe, getting your footing with that tribe, and once you have, consider broadening your tribe based on the needs you are finding that people have.

 
Characteristics
Once you’ve determined your tribe, you will want to determine the characteristics of those tribe members that make an ideal client.

 

Characteristics are things like:

  • personality
  • values
  • goals
  • interests
  • challenges
It’s also important to know what characteristics you will not tolerate in your ideal clients. For example, some characteristics that I will not tolerate in my ideal clients are: having a victim mentality, being untrusting, being a know-it-all and being a chronic skeptic.

 

Knowing your ideal clients’ tribe and characteristics is an important first step, but before you make your ideal client official, ask yourself the following questions to determine if this is the best ideal client for you

  1. If you had to spend everyday with this ideal client, would you be happy?
  2. Are there enough ideal clients out there for you to help? There should be at least 10,000.
  3. Does this ideal client have an urgent problem that they want solved? Urgent enough that they will be motivated to invest time and money into working with you?
  4. Does this ideal client have enough money to afford to pay you?
If you answered yes to the questions above, congratulations! You have your ideal client! Now that you know your ideal client you will be able to move forward in your business with so much more ease.

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