Summary: If you loved this podcast and post check out our <a href="https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/marketing-strategy-plan/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ultimate Guide to Small Business Marketing Strategy</a><br> <a href="http://traffic.libsyn.com/ducttape/John_Talks_Ideal_Clients.mp3">Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch About Defining Your Ideal Client</a><br> Let me ask you this, if you have clients, and had the chance, right now, to chuck them all, and be able to go out there and say, “I can work with anyone I want to work with,” would you still be working with who you’re working with today?<br> Experience tells me that you would say, maybe some, but probably not all. That comes from the feeling that anybody who buys what you do, or anybody who needs the products that you make or sell is an ideal client.<br> What you have to do in order to get your marketing strategy started, is you have to think about how you can narrowly define your ideal client.<br> <br> * What do they look like?<br> * What are their problems?<br> * How do they want to be served?<br> * What do they think value is?<br> <br> I’m going to talk a little more about each of those, but you have to get to the point where you are so sure about how to describe that ideal client, that you are also defining who your ideal client is not.<br> Let’s say I wanted to refer business to you, whatever your business is. I’ve got friends, neighbors, and colleagues that need what you do, and so I came to you and said, “Hey, I want to send some folks your way, I really love what you’re doing.”<br> How would I spot your ideal client? Think about that. That is one of the greatest places to start when you’re thinking about how to narrowly define your ideal client is if somebody came to you and said, “Okay, how would I spot that person?”<br> Could you define and describe all the characteristics of your ideal client in a way that I’m going to say, “Oh, okay, yeah, I know a couple people like that.”<br> That’s what you’re really after.<br> Finding your ideal client<br> It’s really important that you develop the habit of understanding who it is that you’re going after, identifying them, and building your entire business around attracting them.<br> You may get lucky and be able to define them quickly, but what I’ve experienced is that you start with a hypothesis, and over time, if you pay attention, you’ll learn who you like working with.<br> Your ideal client will find you, partly because of how your business evolves, because of how your messaging gets tighter, and because of the results you’re getting for people like them.<br> If you’re just starting you don’t have to have the answer to who your ideal client is.<br> You have to have an idea, and you have to try to prove that hypothesis, but mainly you have to pay attention, because I know a lot of people that have decided that they love working in certain industries, or in a certain niche, and they had no idea they would, it just found them.<br> They started working with a couple clients like that, and they discovered what they really enjoyed doing.<br> So what if you do have clients and still haven’t defined this idea of an ideal client? Take a look at the stratifying of your current client base.<br> What I mean by that, is rank each client by profitability.<br> When I do this with people, I often help them discover that there is work that they’re doing, or segment that they’re serving or a product or service that they are still engaged in that maybe they did when they started, but it’s not something they focus on anymore because it’s not really profitable.<br> What I find happens, is that a lot of businesses don’t realize that there are certain segments of their market or their community or certain demogr...
