Growing Your Business: 5 Tips for Identifying Your Target Client

Stop wasting money marketing to the wrong people.

Would you ever consider posting an employment ad for a position without specifying what the requirements were for the job? Can you imagine trying to sort through all the candidates? How do would you ever find the right person for the job?

The same is true for marketing your business. Have you heard the phrase, when you market to everyone, you sell to no one? If your marketing is targeted to everyone, it is highly likely you are wasting both your time and money in marketing efforts that only produce minimal results.

Before you invest another penny in marketing, whether it be updating or building a website, placing an ad in your local trade paper or trade journal, or even posting on social media, you need to sit down and work out just exactly who your target client is.

5 Steps to Help Identify Your Target Client

List what your top 5 clients all have in common.

This should be everything you can think of from what type of business they are in, the size of the business, the organizations they belong to, where they hang out, what their interests are, etc…

What are their top 5 concerns about their business?

Think about what keeps them up at night, what are their pain points?

What do your clients really, really want?

What drives your client and what they would wish for to make their business better.

Identify the need behind the need.

Now that you’ve identified what your clients really want, WHY do they want it? How does fulfilling that need make your client’s life easier?

What are your clients’ personal and business goals, short term and long term?

Now, re-read your answers and add to them. Then do it again, and again. This exercise will work best if it’s done over a period of a few days. The more you come back to it, the better it gets.

Understanding your responses:

Once you feel you’ve given it a good go, try to identify any discrepancies between your existing client base and your ideal client. If there is a gap, try to understand what it is and re-work the questions focusing solely on your ideal client.

Compare your responses to what your business currently does now. Are you targeting the right people in the right places? Are you addressing your clients’ pain points? How can your products or services address their “need behind the need”?

For many, this is a tedious and difficult exercise, but if you want to save time, effort and money, it’s imperative that you have a clear idea of exactly who your target market is and their unique needs.

Your new marketing strategy is to be precise (targeting your message) and accurate (delivering it to the right people), and above all – stop wasting money.