Last week our blog post was about why you simply must have a Dream Client Profile for your business. This week we are getting into the ‘how’.

There are lots of business practices that we just ‘do’ as a matter of course without really understanding why we are doing them. This should not be one of them! You need to be clear on why this is so super important, so go swat up if you need to, and then come back. (Don’t forget to come back. Also super important.)

The Dream Client Profile is all about creating a mental image of your ideal customer. If you have lots of different types of customers for different types of products, you could need one for each product line. Don’t get overwhelmed though, just start with your bestselling product or service, and then move on to the others later.

So, open up a new document and start working on a personality profile of your ideal customer.

You should include information under the following headings:

• Demographics

Approximate age, location, male or female (or write ‘both’ if your audience is evenly mixed), family situation – does he or she have a spouse, children etc? Job type – if he or she is employed, a full-time mum, unemployed, student etc.

• Lifestyle

Ask yourself questions about the kind of house he (sidenote: I’m sticking with ‘he’ from here on, my fingers are already bored of the ‘or she’) lives in, where (and how) he buys food, his hobbies, the sort of holidays he prefers, and so on. Also in this category you should be considering whether he uses social media, and, if so, which one(s)? And, the types of magazines, newspapers and TV programmes he might watch, blogs and websites he reads, or the radio stations he is tuning in to. This section is particularly important if you are providing a B2C offering.

• Values

Put some thought into the kind of person he is. What does he feel strongly about? What values does he have? What values does he seek from his service providers? (Do they match yours?) Where does he go for advice? What most concerns him about the world, society or his own family?

• Problems

Finally, and most importantly, what problems does he have? And, most specifically, what problems does he have that you can solve for him? This section of the Dream Client Profile is designed to help you identify the transformation that you are going to help your clients to make. Whatever features you pile into your products or services, this transformation is the reason why your customer buys from you. It’s what he is looking for when he googles, asks friends for recommendations, or browses online and on supermarket shelves. You can only start to figure out the transformation he wants when you know what his problems are.

Finding The Information

“That’s all very well”, you might be thinking, “but I don’t KNOW this information about my customers, and they are all different.”

I can’t argue with this reasoning; you simply have to work around it. The tip we give our clients when we go through this process is to think of just one person that they’ve loved working with in the past. You know you’ve got the right person if you imagine working only with this one person for the rest of your career, and you are quite happy about that prospect.

Then answer all the questions from their perspective.

Over time, you can build up your Dream Client Profile by checking the details with your actual customers. You can either interview one or two of your best clients and ask them the questions directly, or use a networking group or customer survey to get the opinions of a group.

Get in touch now if you have questions about making marketing work for you. It shouldn’t be hard. Why not ask us to audit your marketing communications? We’ll give a free review and let you know what you could be doing better.