Profiling Your Ideal Clients – Is It Your First Step toward Growth?

Absolutely! I’m guessing you either own a home or have experience in buying or attempting to buy one. What did you do to search for your dream home? Did you profile it? You likely created a list of ideal criteria including location, size, budget, school district, community, etc. This is called profiling. Would creating a profile help you locate your dream home? Yes, it likely would.

If creating and using an ideal list of criteria makes finding your dream home easier, then should you not profile and create model criteria for your ideal clients? After all, it’s the business from these clients that will pay for your dream home. Therefore, the more you know about them, the better you can reach them and gain their business.

Ideal Client Profiling

“If you have a target, you will walk more lively even in the middle of the desert!” –Mehmet Murat Ildan

In my opinion, profiling is the first step in any good marketing plan. I gained many of my clients by saying, “I can sell to almost anyone,” but I also realized this is like shooting blindly without a target. You must profile your ideal clients. They may fall into different categories or different product or services, but each needs to be profiled with detail.

I have always told my team and clients, “Success is in the details.” In order to properly profile your ideal clients, you need to identify:

  1. Where they hang out
  2. Their weaknesses
  3. Their age
  4. Their gender
  5. What influences their decision making process
  6. How they make decisions and the time they take to make them
  7. Their earning range
  8. The kind of car they drive
  9. Whether or not they own a house
  10. Their educational background
  11. Their reading habits
  12. Their socializing habits
  13. How they respond to peer pressure
  14. Their location
  15. Their buying habits
  16. How they learned about you
  17. What convinced them to purchase your product or service
  18. Whether or not they’ll be interested in giving you a reference
  19. Their hobbies
  20. Their eating and sleeping habits
  21. Their interests and passions
  22. Which devices they use often (smartphones, tablets, etc.)
  23. Which television shows they watch
  24. Where they vacation
  25. What search terms they use in search engines

I suggest that you group the above list into Personal Attributes, Business Attributes, Personal Activity Attributes, Shopping Attributes, Learning Attributes, Transportation Attributes, Communication Attributes, Decision Making Attributes, Income and Spending Attributes and Entertainment Attributes; this list can seem like an overwhelming amount of detail to unearth. You might wonder if you can identify half of this information. The good news is that thanks to technology, it’s surprisingly easy to discover and track these details. All you need to do is be observant of your clients and take advantage of their want to provide feedback. Use brief surveys and ask for feedback. Your clients will jump at the opportunity to become unique in your eyes.

As you identify your ideal clients, this list will grow. I strongly recommend that you keep this list dynamic and up to date. You will continually come across new attributes to add to it; don’t forget to update them!

If you would like to get a Profiling Template, let me know. I will be happy to share what I use for my business and for my clients.

It’s all in the Details

“It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” –John Wooden

Marketing starts with profiling. It’s the attention you put into the details, both big and small, that will affect your overall business success. Ideal client profiling is vital because it allows you to plan:

  1. How to reach them
  2. How to attract them
  3. How to engage them
  4. To lean ideal information to share
  5. How to constantly stay connected with them
  6. How to relay your product benefits through their interest area

Without a plan of action, you’ll be shooting your sales pitch at unmarked targets. While you can still produce results, you’ll likely produce much stronger results by refining your marketing strategies and plans. Marketing is an ongoing process that will continually evolve as your business grows. You can be sure we’ll talk more about marketing and ideal client profiles in future blogs.

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