In the marketing world there is tons of talk about knowing your ideal client and using that to your advantage. What if you don’t know who your ideal client is or how to build a profile of one?
Not to worry, DMTG has you covered! Read on and learn.
First and foremost, what is an ideal client and why should you know yours? An ideal client profile is nothing more than a list of criteria that allows you to look at a sea of potential clients and know who would be a good fit for your business and who wouldn’t.
There are tons of benefits to building out your ideal client profile, namely allowing you to target a specific type of client and will save you time, money and energy. Once you know who you want to target, you can begin to build out content that will engage those prospects, as well as personalize it.
You can build out segmented lists and use them for email marketing, social media marketing and more. You can also use the profiles to help you gauge where the particular prospect is in the sales process and how they will make their next move.
Now that you know what an ideal client profile is and how it can help you, let’s talk how you build out yours. It’s pretty simple once you understand what you are looking for and you’ll be able to build out profiles moving forward for each step of the sales cycle.
- First, you’ll need to look at your current clients and do some research. Look at your existing best clients and see what they have in common. Do they all purchase the same services? Do they have the same monthly spend? Are they located in a certain area or a specific industry? How many employees does the company have? Do they have a person in house for marketing? It helps to list out these qualities.
- The Individual:
- Ask them if they are the decision maker and what their title is. What their skills are, and how long they have been with their company. What is their role, what do they do, what tools do they use and who reports to them/do they report to?
- What are their goals and challenges in the role? What publications do they look to keep up to date?
- How is their job measured and what do they feel their priorities are?
- The Company:
- Who makes decisions regarding marketing? What industry is the company in, and what is their marketing budget? Do they have in house marketing or do they typically use vendors (like you)?
- Do they belong to any industry groups? I.E local chambers, trade organizations. Do they attend any industry conferences?
- You:
- What do they like about working with your company? What pain points does it resolve?
- How did they find you? What does the decision process look like on their end?
- What do you think the 3 most important qualities in a digital marketing agency are?Now that you have your list, it’s recommended that you build out of a list of questions to ask your customers. This is by no means a comprehensive list, feel free to add your own qualifiers.
- Compile all the information you’ve just gathered! With the research you did, the information you’ve compiled from your interviews, you should be able to build out a solid profile of your ideal client. Your profile will want to cover:
- Background
- Demographics
- Communication/Personality Style (of the decision maker)
- Goals
- Challenges and how your agency will address them and showcase how they can correct them.
- Objections you may during the sales process and how to acknowledge them.
- The clients purchasing journey
- Your sales pitch to the profile
You can repeat these steps to build out profiles for each potential client you may come across in your target market. This will help you to not only make decisions regarding who to target, but also how to target them moving forward. Have you build out your ideal client profile? Tell us how it went in the comments!
