How to Sell More by Profiling Your Ideal Customer Like an FBI Agent

But what if doing the same kind of process for your customers could lead to stronger and more targeted marketing messages and then…lead to more sales!

Don’t be a jack of all trades, be a knowledgeable expert

In order to make your marketing work, you need to identify who’s your ideal customer. Too many solopreneurs and small business owners  want to please everybody. I you do that, you’ll be seen as a generalist. You want to be seen as a specialist, as the best at one thing. In this  lesson, you’ll learn how to identify your ideal customer and how to construct a client avatar in order to deliver focused marketing messages.

My massage therapist…

My massage therapist is very good at what she does. She’s by far the best I’ve seen in my life and that’s why I only go see her. Even if she’s very good at what she does, she was telling me that she needed more clients in order fill up her schedule and really be profitable.

So I asked her a simple question: “What’s your specialty? Who’s your target customer?” “What do you mean?”, she replied, “I’m a massage therapist, I can work with pretty much anybody; women, men, any age and almost any pain or condition they might have”.

That was exactly the problem! I explained her that if she wanted to take her practice to the next level, she needed to focus on a smaller section of her potential clientele and be perceived as an expert. It turned out that what she had the most experience and the most fun doing was working with athletes who have muscle and joint pains due to their extensive training. I showed her how to form an ideal customer avatar and we started working together on a marketing strategy geared towards this target market.

As a result, she gained quite a few new customers who were athletes in pain and she’s getting great referrals from them. People will be willing to drive longer to go see a specialist. The funny thing is that the fact of being seen as a specialist did not only result in attracting clients from that targeted group, it also resulted in new clients coming in which were not exactly athletes.

People who are active but are not athletes (people like me I’d say) think to themselves “if that therapist can help athletes feel better, imagine what she can do for me!”. There’s a certain pride in doing business with a specialist.

Building your ideal customer avatar

The goal here is to identify precisely who’s your target customer. Identifying this ideal customer profile helps creating our unique marketing message and helps you speak to one person and sound more personal in your marketing copy.

It’s okay and even preferable to not target everybody with your services. You want to be perceived as an expert, the best at a certain thing or with a certain clientele. Generalist usually don’t do very well.

I have a client who’s a hypnotherapist and one of the services she offers is a special program for weight loss. Her marketing for that service is geared towards her ideal customer; mid-aged women. Here’s what her ideal customer profile (or avatar) looks like:

A woman who’s between 35 and 55 years old. She tried diets and exercise routines, lost some weights but gained it back quickly. She doesn’t particularly enjoy exercise. She tries to eat more healthy but that’s not always easy. She really wants to lose weight but she’s a bit suspicious of any method that sounds too good to be true. She wants to have better habits but lacks motivation and perseverance. She has some money, doesn’t want to throw it away but she can afford to pay if results are there. She would like fast results but she can also understand that looking better and feeling better will take some time and effort. Seeing the first results without feeling that she’s depriving herself or involved in something she can’t keep up is what will get her and keep her motivated. She probably has a husband she’s been with for 15 + years and kids that are now teenagers.

We even gave her a name; Laura.

Does that mean that every client has to fit this description 100%? Does that mean that she will refuse to help a 25 years old man lose weight? Obviously not. But that means we’re going to have Laura in mind when we create marketing material and website content.

You could have only one ideal customer avatar for your whole business. Sometimes, you’ll need to have more than one because they will differ from service to service. For example, this same client also offers hypnosis to clients who want to quit smoking. The ideal customer profile is slightly different for that service.