The key to a solid client base, thriving future sales, and clear company culture? A full understanding of your ideal client. 

The way you structure your sales process, which products and services you develop, marketing methods, and the individuals you hire all hinge on your end user. Without a clear understanding of your client base, your current and future success will be like hitting a target in the dark. 

Instead, there are many simple but highly effective ways to identify and communicate with your target demographic. And one of the best ones to start with is creating an ideal client persona. 

We’ll teach you why this practice is so effective and then show you how to create a profile to champion your target market.

Why Does Every Business Need an Ideal Client Persona?

Your company’s grasp of and commitment to your ideal client persona will determine the success at which they interact with your target market over the life of your company.

1. Informs Marketing Methods

Marketing efforts are often one of the highest costs for businesses because it takes a lot of work to analyze a demographic, create content, and deliver messages across multiple platforms. Your business can increase the ROI and protect your marketing investment through your ideal client persona. 

You’ll streamline decisions like:

• Where does our target market find most of their information? Tiktok, radio, social media, TV commercials?
• What kind of information does our target market respond to? For example, do they like product information, pop culture references, or a specific spokesperson?
• What colors, music, and imagery is most likely to capture their attention?

2. Determines Sales Price

Every industry has the opportunity to provide value, mid-range, and luxury solutions. Your ideal client will help you find the price point that your clients will value, allowing you to position yourself correctly and land with the intended demographic. 

Whether you have a discount service or a high-end exclusive brand, without a clear view of what your client intends to spend on a solution, you’ll also find what features sell your product as worth the price, helping you to create marketing efforts with high conversions.

3. Helps to Maintain Brand Integrity

Company longevity often correlates with a business’s success in creating a loyal consumer base, whether you have a product that consumers regularly purchase or more limited sales opportunities like real estate. Repeat purchases and brand ambassadorship matter. 

But without a clear anchor to guide company decisions, expansion efforts, and even who to hire, companies often drift away from their initial client base and become disconnected from their target market. A clear target demographic is why companies like Walmart, Netflix, and Johnson & Johnson have remained while other competitors have faded away.

Steps to Creating Your Ideal Client

With this clear understanding of why your ideal client persona holds the power to make or break your business, let’s get into how to create your ideal client profile.

We’ll walk you through several questions and help you create a wide range of information. But in the end, you’ll distill all your answers into a simple statement to summarize your ideal client for clear, pervasive communication. Then your entire company can make decisions in new situations accurately.

1. What Do They Want to Have?

At first glance, this question is a relatively simple answer related to your product or service. For example, your ideal client wants a new business park built, their finances easily managed, or affordable healthy food options.

And while you’ll undoubtedly need to closely examine what product or service your client wants, you’ll need to cover several other wants, like:

• Where do they want to find solutions?
• How do they want the sales process to go?
• What features do they want the most?

It can help to break down your ideal client’s wants by department within your company. You’ll inform their marketing needs, sales preferences, and more this way.

2. What Do They Want to Avoid?

Customers want solutions but also want to avoid additional pain while shopping. For example, they don’t want unavailable customer service, broken products, or to feel exploited. And each industry will have specific pain points that customers try to avoid while searching. 

Your ideal client persona will help you to identify what your clients are trying to avoid. This will inform product and service development, the features you highlight in marketing efforts, and much more.

3. What Have They Tried Already?

Understanding your target market includes how long their problem has been unsolved and why past and current solutions aren’t enough for them. You’ll appreciate their frustration, what they continue to miss from available options, and how high the stakes are for a better solution.

You’ll create empathy, meaningful conversations, and brand loyalty when you demonstrate you understand the journey your client went through to get to you.

4. What Do They Expect to Spend on a Solution?

Failing to meet a market need is a top reason for business failure, including providing a solution the target market considers overpriced. Successful sales always seem to hang around the question, “what is it worth to my client to solve the problem?”. Balanced against the cost of providing the solution, you create your profit margins.

So we revisit your target market niche– do you serve the bargain, median, or luxury demographics? 

You may find that your cost of service or production rules out specific groups or allows for higher profit margins when positioned to another group. Work with the reality of your financial constraints to inform your demographic, then build your ideal client persona around that information.

5. What Basic Demographics Unite the Group?

Some brands serve niches based on demographics where gender, age, race, or region significantly impact their sales. Beauty brands market very differently to women, men, or families. 

For example, Johnson & Johnson may provide general, value-priced lotions for the entire family. But their marketing, packaging, and product development focus on women in their 20s-40s. Because moms of kids living at home are the main demographic making the purchase, rather than the majority end user. 

Other brands may not depend on gender markers but on lifestyle choices like preferring tech integrations, healthy lifestyles, or animal lovers.

By identifying the final pieces that identify the commonalities between the users and the decision-makers, you’ll increase the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts.

6. Synthesize Into a Simple Statement

The previous steps will give you a long list of information– but an overly-detailed review isn’t particularly effective for company-wide communication or even vision longevity. So keep the answers, but work from them to create a simple statement that will create a clear picture of your ideal client.

For example, Apple’s ideal client appeals to “Think different.” Apple’s target market is people who will pay more for something they perceive as unique because they want to be different and create change themselves.

Because of a clear, simple statement like “Think different,” Steve Jobs didn’t have to create iTunes, the iPod, or the iPhone himself. His employees took the company’s ideal and expanded into new revenue routes.

Then your employees can make decisions on their own from the simple summary of the ideal client. You’ll empower employee buy-in, brand loyalty, and consistent service by staying true to your simple statement. 

Ready to Expand Your Market Reach?

New businesses have a high mortality rate, in part because they are working to earn a market share from existing businesses. And with fewer resources and time to nail marketing efforts, it’s truly a David and Goliath scenario.

But what if you had an inside track on what matters most and what systems will produce the highest ROI and greatest market share?

Think of us as a third-party partner committed to supporting you from start to finish. That includes discovery, implementing changes, and sticking around to see your business recover. And we’ll still be there in a year or two to help you adapt to new needs and growth!

Contact us today for a consultation!