‘Customer profile’, ‘avatar’, ‘dream client profile’. They are all more or less the same thing: a clear, concise and detailed overview of exactly who your *IDEAL* customer is.

Putting this in place is one of the first things I do with a new client. It’s such an important part of the marketing planning process. Without it you can go SO badly wrong, and way off track in the wrong direction.

If you are running a business without this vital document, I want you to go to your diary right now and schedule a coffee meeting with yourself (ideally in a lovely café, with sumptuous cakes) and get it SORTED!

I’m sure you’ve heard all the theory behind doing this before. It’s certainly not a new idea.

And, there’s a good chance that when I first mentioned creating a dream client profile you were already rolling your eyes and thinking thoughts, like: ‘EVERYONE is my potential customer.’ And: ‘I don’t want to limit myself to a specific group or type of person.’ Or: ‘What’s the point of all the silly details? Frankly, I don’t care if my potential customers ‘shop in Waitrose rather than Sainsburys’.

Well, I have a newsflash. Creating a dream client profile, is all about working out who is your ‘IDEAL’ customer. Not your ‘ONLY’ customer. And there are loads of excellent business reasons for why you’d want to do this.

Here are 5 of them (insider scoop, this is so important, that when I started writing this post, there were actually 10 reasons, but it was going to be far too long, so I prioritised down to 5!):

1. You will save money

Once you know who your customers are, what they enjoy doing, what they read and who they listen to for advice, you can start to market yourself in those places too. For example, if you know for a fact that your customers commute to London every day, you might consider advertising in your local station, rather than in the advert breaks on regional daytime radio station. Having these types of insights is going to save you a whole heap of cash that you could have invested into the wrong marketing activities.

2. You will enjoy working with your customers.

When you know who your dream clients are, you can create a set of sales messages that talk to them specifically. This doesn’t mean it will repel all other clients. Likely, they’ll get sucked in too. But what it does mean is that, in the main part, you’ll be attracting the kind of people that you will enjoy working with.

3. You will save time.

There’s no point thrashing out a complex marketing campaign to go out on your Twitter channels if, in reality, your ideal client rarely visits Twitter because they are more of an Instagram person. Sure, you might pick up a few outliers, but if the bulk of your customer is somewhere else, and you know this because you’ve researched your dream client profile, you are investing your time effectively. Read this if you want to find out more about choosing social media platforms.

4. You will convince your audience faster.

When you know exactly WHO your audience is, you will also know precisely WHICH problem you are solving for them. Matching up the problem you are solving with the right audience and proving your abilities to do just that is exactly HOW a business stays in business – so it’s pretty important.

When you start to base your marketing campaigns on communicating the problems that you can solve for your audience, your ideal prospects will start to feel that you are talking directly to them. They will quickly start to build the ‘know, like and trust’ relationship with you that is crucial for effective selling.

Suddenly your marketing campaigns start to work and you are investing your money into an effective strategy, rather than just throwing it away.

5. You can position yourself away from your competitors.

By knowing exactly who you are targeting as a prospect you can identify under-served segments of your market place.

You might have lots of competitors but if they are all focused on one specific corner of your market, there is room for you to snap up the customers in a different demographic. For example, as a local photographer you may know that various local competitors are successfully targeting the ‘business’ market, the ‘families’ market and the ‘wedding’ market. If you’ve also observed that none of these competitors are focused on pet photography (for example), you could start to advertise this as your key service (to the owners, not the pets themselves – they don’t carry any cash) as your own special market segment. Then you know that you should be advertising at the local cattery and not inside school magazines.

Hopefully this is enough to convince you of how key your dream client profile is. And, to be honest, these reasons are the tip of the iceberg.

Look out for next week’s post, where I’ll be giving you the full works on how to create a dream client profile for your own business.

Until then, get in touch, if you need help to create a dynamite dream client profile for your business.