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reach youir ideal clients

How to Reach Your Ideal Clients

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ideal client

 

Do you ever feel like your marketing message is getting completely lost, as if you are shouting into the void? Are you wondering how to reach your ideal clients?

The key to reaching and attracting your ideal clients is threefold:
  1. Identify who you want to reach in a very specific way
  2. Get very clear on what is most important to them
  3. Determine exactly where to find them
Step One: Identify and Define Your Top Client Niche

I’m sure you have heard this before. Create your “Ideal Client Avatar.” Describe your ideal client in detail. Give them a name, a persona. This step is really important. The problem is, most business owners are too mired in the nitty gritty of their business to get clear on who their best clients are.

Here’s a technique that will help you figure out who they are and how to reach your ideal clients.

  1. Open up a spreadsheet.
  2. List all of your clients or customers in order of how much money the spend with you.
  3. Rank them on how easy they are to work with, how good they are for your business, how aligned they are with your core values.

Using the data in your list, determine who your best clients really are (sometimes what you see when you put it in writing may surprise you). Once you determine who your very best client is, the one(s) you would like to clone over and over again in your business, describe them in as much detail as possible. Combine the attributes of several clients if applicable. What do they have in common?

Steps 2 and 3: Interview Your Best Clients

The best way to determine what matters most to the clients you want to attract is to talk to them. This is also the best way to figure out where to find more clients just like them!

Start by asking the following questions:

  1. What do they like about your business? What are you doing right?
  2. What don’t they like about your industry in general? What do they wish was different?
  3. If they were looking for a business like yours (to hire or purchase from), where would they go to find it?
  4. Where do they spend their time? Do they hang out on social media (which ones)? Do they go to industry conferences? What do they read and listen to?

You might be wondering why we suggest you ask what your clients don’t like about your industry, vs what they don’t like or aren’t happy with in your business. The reason is that this is less awkward than asking them to confront you with things they don’t like about you. You are more likely to get an honest answer when asking about the industry. This also shows you potential gaps in your industry that you can fill.

Once you have this information from your best clients, you can craft a message that will distinctly appeal to them. Look for the answers to your questions that will help you distinguish yourself from the competition. Most businesses think that they need to convince their clients or customers that they have the “best” product or service. Or they think they need to incentivize their prospects with discounts and low prices.

More often than not, if you can identify a specific attribute that your clients appreciate about you, you can use this as a point of differentiation. For example, let’s say when you ask what you are doing right, they say they appreciate that you are always on time, or that you communicate clearly, or that you are flexible, etc. If you hear the same answer from multiple clients, then you know that this is something that will attract other clients who care about this too. Use it in your sales and marketing!

Once you have a message that stands out, you want to get in front of your ideal prospects with your message. The key to reaching your ideal clients is to show up frequently in the places where they “hang out.” Where are they most likely to see you? Most small businesses don’t have the marketing budget to be everywhere, so make sure you concentrate your efforts in the places where your clients are most likely to see you. If you can find some places where your competitors are NOT showing up, even better! You will know something that they don’t know. While they are busy competing in the red ocean, you will have the blue ocean all to yourself!

These are some of the strategies that we have in our toolbox at Pumpkin Plan Your Biz. If you would like help determining who your ideal clients are, what your most effective messaging is and where to find them, Hire a Certified Pumpkin Plan Strategist today!

Are you passionate about helping small businesses to grow and thrive? Join our Community and Get Certified as a Pumpkin Plan Strategist!

 

Elise Campbell Photography Brand

Create a Brand Your Ideal Clients Love with The Pumpkin Plan

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When you know something has to change

It was the middle of the night and photographer Elise Campbell of Elise Campbell Photography was pouring her heart and soul into editing her client’s family photos. This particular client had begged Elise to lower her prices because she really wanted to hire her but couldn’t afford her rates. Elise had agreed.

Feeling like she needed a break from editing, Elise jumped on Facebook for a few minutes. She was shocked to see posts of her client, who claimed she couldn’t afford Elise’s photography rates, on a clearly expensive family vacation. In that moment, everything changed.

When Elise first started out as a photographer, she saw herself as a mom with a camera who could maybe turn her photography into a business. She would take photos and sell a bunch of digitals on a disc for a very low price to anyone who acted like they liked her. This unintentionally became her brand. Over time, she started to feel like she was over-giving, over-serving, and being taken advantage of.

Elise knew that something had to change. She started googling for help and she found The Pumpkin Plan book. As she read through the Pumpkin Plan, she had an “aha” moment. The clients who were hiring her, were hiring her for the wrong reasons. They were all looking for family photos as cheap as possible. They saw her as a commodity. The deciding factor had nothing to do with her skills and talents, her ability to beautifully capture the essence of her subjects, her ability to turn a photograph into a work of fine art. For those clients, it was all about her pricing. It was time to re-create her brand.

The Pumpkin Plan to the rescue

Elise decided in that moment that she would no longer compete on price. She knew how much of her love and attention she devoted to her clients’ photographs and producing art quality prints. She would only work with clients who valued her work enough to pay for it.

The first step in making this change to her brand was to find her special seed, her business Sweet Spot. Once Elise identified her Top Clients, those clients who truly appreciated her artistry, she was able to charge what she knew her services were worth. She could continue to devote her time, energy and love into creating truly special portraits for her clients without feeling resentful or having to reduce the quality of her work and the level of service to match their budgets. Elise wanted clients who wanted to work with HER, not clients who wanted cheap snapshots.

As she drilled down on who her Top Clients really were, she was able to determine what was truly important to them. Not surprisingly, they were not people who were looking for a bunch of digital photos that they could reproduce somewhere for a low price.

Create a brand that is aligned with your Top Clients

Elise’s Top Clients are busy women who want to be served well. They want a final piece hanging above the fireplace that features all the people they love, that is as beautiful as a painting. They don’t want to have to make decisions about what size the final piece should be or what kind of frame. They want Elise, the artist, to make those decisions for them.

Based on what she now knew about her very best clients, Elise developed a Unique Offering and put systems in place to deliver on that offering. She knew that her best clients didn’t want to have to make a million decisions or worry about how their children or grandchildren would behave during the photoshoot.

Elise’s solution: when she’s doing a shoot with toddlers, she brings in “child wranglers,” extra hands to help deal with the little ones. She takes care of all of the details, so the parents don’t have to stress.

Since Elise implemented The Pumpkin Plan into her business, her revenues have quadrupled. And even more importantly to her, she is known for what she does, for her artistry, for her level of service.

The impact on Elise personally has been huge. She has three children, and she is proud that they get to see their mom owning her worth. She now feels a strong sense of empowerment and freedom.

Through her own sense of empowerment, she has also started a project called “She is Love(d)™,” which is a combination of a photo shoot and words that help girls rely on their own inner knowing of themselves, as opposed to getting their self-worth from social media. According to Elise, “it’s like turning selfies into a soulful kind of thing.”

Today, after Pumpkin Planning her business, Elise Campbell has a business that she loves, that both rewards her financially and fulfills her artistic passion.

Would you like support and guidance using The Pumpkin Plan method to create YOUR client attracting brand? Go here to Hire a Certified Pumpkin Plan Strategist

Are you passionate about supporting small businesses to experience extraordinary success? Get certified as a Pumpkin Plan Strategist.

Download our FREE Pumpkin Plan Booster Pack for more business building resources!