As the business landscape gets more competitive and challenging, understanding your ideal client is more crucial than ever. The success of any business hinges on its ability to connect with and cater to its target audience effectively.
In this episode of Influence by Design, Samantha and Tim explore one of the topics discussed in episode 503: 11 Mistakes Preventing Business Growth, and ask the question, who is your ideal client?
They dive deeper into the importance of understanding your ideal client, the possible consequences of not knowing who they are, what they need, and how you can help them solve their problems.
Being able to develop a deep understanding of your client’s needs, preferences, and pain points equip you with a business specifically tailored with products, services, and marketing strategies that resonate with the right audience.
As your business grows, your ideal customer avatar may also evolve. That’s why it’s important to refine and get really clear on who you want to serve so you can continuously improve your marketing and foster lasting relationships.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- Why it’s important to get clear on who your ideal client is (05:53)
- The demographics of your client avatar – is knowing this information still relevant? (08:50)
- How to manage the common thread among multiple avatars (15:50)
- The power of being able to help clients with their 2 AM problems (20:12)
- The significance of refining and revisiting your ideal customers’ list (21:02)
QUOTES
- “We want to make sure that the thing we do actually transforms people’s lives. And if you’re finding that you’re not transforming the before and after state, you’re probably not attracting the right person.” -Tim Hyde
- “We want to get clear on who it is that we work with so that we can speak to them in different ways.” -Samantha Riley
- “The kind of people that you worked with five years ago, may not be the kind of people that you work with now. There are going to be refinements that are made along the way.” -Samantha Riley
- “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” -John Wanamaker
RESOURCES:
- Influence by Design episode 503: 11 Mistakes Preventing Business Growth
- More Clients, Less Effort
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WHERE TO FIND TIM HYDE
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CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
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TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley Snippet (00:00):
Something that really has helped me is getting clear on what the 2am problem is, what is it that keeps them awake, staring at the ceiling at 2am? And once you get clear on that, and you can start to unravel, what are the characteristics?
What are some of the other emotional aspects? What are the demographics around that person around that 2am problem, you can start to paint a much clearer picture, but you need to get really, really clear on what that thing is,
Tim Hyde Snippet (00:27):
who it is that we want to work with, I think is a really important thing to understand, not just when we’re starting out, but also to consistently revisit as we build our business, to go with this still the person we want to help, and that we can help them most.
Samantha Riley Intro (00:38):
Welcome to the Influence By Design Podcast. I’m Samantha Riley, authority positioning strategist for coaches and experts. If you’re ready to build a business that gives you more than just a caffeine addiction, and you dream of making more money, having more time, and having the freedom to be living your best life, then you’re in the right place, it’s time to level up.
Welcome to today’s episode of influence by design. I’m your Thursday co host Samantha Riley
and joined as always by the lovely Tim Hyde, who is also a new podcast owner. I know and congratulations on your brand new podcast.
Tim Hyde (01:22):
Thank you, I appreciate all your assistance in helping me launch that has been fantastic. I think by the 12 events, when you’re listening to this one, we shall be up to two five episodes out of released more clients less effort on all good podcasting platforms and absolutely fantastic, really some really fantastic feedback from already, which is very, very exciting to hear.
So good. And oddly enough, I mean, you know, IBD influenced by design is, you know, willing to the 500 episodes, Mark now, you know, I’m down at the other end at five episodes, despite the fact that we’re actually podcasters since 2001. This is a real bizarre thing.
But what I’ve noticed already is the number of invitations, I’ve already had to be a guest on other people’s podcasts because that listen to mine is surprising, even for such a young for such a young show.
Samantha Riley (02:12):
Well, congratulations that you’ve grown up and gone out all on your own.
Tim Hyde (02:18):
I think it’s fantastic. My big boy pants on now. And away we go.
Samantha Riley (02:21):
Yeah, so don’t stop listening to influence by design. Of course, Tim will still be here every Thursday. But if you do want a nother podcast to listen to, then I highly recommend more clients less effort.
But today, we’re on influenced by design, and we’re continuing the conversation that we had a few episodes ago around the 11 Mistakes Business Owners Make. And today we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into understanding your customer or the opposite. We know what happens if you don’t understand your customer.
And this is something that I see a lot of people making. And gosh, I’m even going to put up my hand and say sometimes even it’s gonna say sometimes even affects me a lot. It affects me even you and I’ve even had a lot of conversations around this together.
Tim Hyde (03:11):
Oh, absolutely. I think we constantly need to revisit this. And a lot of our audience will know I do a lot of networking. And every time I hear someone get up and spend like an hour articulating who their ideal customer is by going into what they do for them. I go, Okay, you need some help, you’ve got some fundamental missing steps, right? Rather than Foundation’s ROI out of the very basics, forget your Facebook, forget what content you’re gonna put out, but get your tick tock in your Instagram.
This always comes first and foremost about everything that you need to be thinking about who your customer is, and what is the what is it that we want to sell them, but particularly, who cares about the thing you can sell them? If you don’t know who that person is? Yeah,
Samantha Riley (03:53):
no, I just wanted to clarify what you said just a little bit ago, around you said that people at your networking event can stand up for an hour and talk about what they do. What you were meaning was when you say to someone, you know, what is it that you do?
They say things like, Well, I have a course or I run retreats, or I sell this thing. And that is not where we want to go at all we want to really get clear on who it is that we work with, so that we can speak to them in different ways. That is what you are referring to right?
Tim Hyde (04:27):
Yeah, absolutely. These are these fundamentals is who we help, not where they are. And then we’ll get into that in a second where the hours is as important, but not what we do. But that in another episode as well. We’ve got that in the agenda to come in coming weeks. But who it is that we want to work with, I think is a really important thing to understand.
Not just when we’re starting out, but also to, you know, consistently revisit as we build our business to go is this still the person we want to help and that we can help the most. And I say, and you and I’ve had that conversation, we had that conversation when we, you know, rebranded, influenced by design, thought leaders business that those who have been with us a long time remember that thought leaders business lead, but even as as your business and my business has evolved, we’ve changed who it is that we serve?
Samantha Riley (05:19):
Absolutely, I can you and I have a document that we share every year, and we redo our documents, and we give them to each other. You know, this is who we work with.
And I think that if we had a look at each other’s documents from, oh, my goodness, I don’t know how long we’ve been sharing documents, I’m going to guess probably around seven or eight years, there’s seven or eight years ago, they looked very, very different to what they look like today.
Tim Hyde (05:42):
It’s not that long, because I’m not counting COVID In the middle of it.
Samantha Riley (05:46):
Well, maybe, maybe not. It’s probably it’s actually 2016. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So. And the reason that we want to get really clear on who our ideal client is, or who it is that we want to work with is, so that we can find these people.
So you know, we’re doing marketing in our business so that we can create new clients or sign new clients, if our marketing doesn’t hit the right place, or the people that are seeing our marketing, don’t put up their hand and say, Oh, this is for me, is really, really difficult to find these people.
And a friend of mine said to me, once it’s kind of like trying to sell a Ferrari in a schoolyard. There is a huge, they’re not huge, I guess there’s always a group of customers or clients are people that are happy to buy Ferraris, and want to buy Ferraris. But they’re not often hanging out in a school yard.
Tim Hyde (06:38):
I like that. And I’m going to use that instead. Now I used to, I used to say it was like pitching to kindergarten kids, right? Now there might be someone in that room who’s going to buy your service eventually. But not many people have 20 to 30 year pipelines.
Samantha Riley (06:52):
For them to finish school also creates a problem around creating content. You were talking about this before we hit record that when you don’t really know who that ideal client is that you’re creating content for the sake of creating content? No, I don’t know about you.
But I sure know, for me, I’m busy enough without creating content for no reason. Like my days are busy, I need to know exactly what it is that I’m doing. And I want to create content that’s going right to the person that needs to see it.
Tim Hyde (07:22):
Yeah, absolutely. We find, I think not understanding, you know who that person is we want to do and so content, obviously, content marketing is a very important part of our marketing matrix that we’ve got right now.
And we’ve got, we’ve got ads, we’ve got content, real websites, for our socials, you know, we’ve got things that we need to speak to people in different ways, even, you know, creating content for referral partners, customers and channel partners to the sheer quality content is a very important part of the marketing mix.
But if we’re releasing content that doesn’t resonate with our, the person we’re trying to attract, and it doesn’t keep the mark and I, we’ve spoken to it about it briefly in their episodes.
But I think there’s a kind of thing that not only do we want to create content, that our ideal avatar, and customer avatar we’re talking about here, the person who wants to buy we want serve resonates with them, we’ve got to kind of like be the attractive avatar for them as well. So it works both ways.
There’s not just saying I want to work with $100 million companies, but I’ve got to work with someone like me. And if I don’t create content that appeals to that 100 million dollar company, as an example, it’s just not gonna it’s gonna fall on deaf ears.
They’re gonna look at it in a way that resonates with them and sort of hits those on have triggers that they want to get out. That’s interesting. Any more about that?
Samantha Riley (08:43):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. So let’s talk about the way Ashley, I want to talk about the way that I learned about avatars when I first started doing online marketing, and that was some sort of Avatar worksheet that said, is your ideal client and male or female? And how old are they? How many children do they have? What car do they drive? Where do they live? And we’re talking here about the demographics.
And these are the characteristics of your avatar, your ideal client avatar, however you say it. This, I personally feel and I’d be really interested to hear your take on this Tim being a marketer. I really feel like I learned that this was the most important thing.
And over the years, I don’t even pay much attention to this anymore. I tend to go into the psychographics much more like the the emotional aspects of the ideal client, but I’d love to know from you, how much weight do you put on the demographics these days compared to like back in the, you know, in the late 90s.
Tim Hyde (09:51):
I think both are important. I think the you know, with the emergence of social media in the early noughties, you know, we didn’t have infinite I should note on how people bought and what they thought, and what they interacted with, in the same way that say, you know, last century, you had to pick, you know, you drive a Ford and you are 35 years old, right?
Because that was the information that we could collect about people that kind of informed that marketing decision about what to say, and in what channels to set, right. So if you know that your customer drove forwards, you would put your advertising afford magazine.
And if you knew that your customer, you know, we’re wore fancy hats to the races, you might put something at the races to get in front of them. psychographics I think there’s more of that, in that space about what people do, right, what they follow what they’re interested in, and social media in many ways, and let’s put the big baddie in the room, Facebook ahead. Do that.
And if you pause on anything, and watch it for a few seconds, Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok are tracking your engagement with that content and creating a psychographic profile of your interest. Gate different from yours, demographics, visits, the physical characteristics. And both is incredibly important in creating a profile of the person who engages with your content.
Now, I want to put a caveat on this terms, it’s not necessarily the person you want to engage with us. Or, and it’s just the person who is right. And the more we understand who engages with it, it allows us almost like a tracer bullets, I guess, you know, the ones that sort of flare up in the middle of night disable you’re on target or off target.
We’ve got to constantly adjust our what we’re doing, to try and get on target with the person that we can serve the most. Right? And represents, I guess the other part of an avatar that we haven’t even talked about yet at all. Right? Is some of the other things that we want, right? Can I do, actually,
Samantha Riley (12:05):
I just want to share a story that really hones in to what you were just talking about. Then I was chatting to someone just last week, who boosted some posts on Instagram, she noticed that there was two particular posts that got huge views, a lot of interaction.
However, the videos that didn’t get as much interaction was specifically being engaged with by the people that she wanted to work with. And the two boosted posts that she was running that had massive engagement. It wasn’t her ideal avatar, they were people that were never going to spend money on her program.
So we really need to understand the data. And it’s not just about engagement, we have to really know who it is that is this ideal client, like what are the things that are? What are the characteristics? Or the the aspects of this ideal client?
And really understand what it is that’s going to make them that ideal client things like, you know, are they likely to buy our product or our service? Are they likely to refer? Are they likely to be, you know, have the right sort of mindset to be able to do the work these kinds of things?
Tim Hyde (13:30):
Yeah, like, Absolutely, Sam. And there’s a combination of things. And it’s a very, I think it’s a very different conversation you have when you’re just starting out, too, you’ve got runs on the board, and you’ve you’ve served 50 100 200 500,000 clients, right?
It’s a very different conversation, you know, when you’re just starting out, you’re probably doing a little bit of navel gazing and going, I think this is the person I can probably serve really well they’re gonna get value from what it is that I can do, it will be transformative for them, they can probably pay what I want to get paid, right, and all those kinds of things.
When you’ve got, you know, a bunch of clients under your belt, you can start to come back and look at those with a little bit more, I guess, maturity, and go through all of the clients I’ve worked with over the last 12 months, who represented the people we actually got lots of value for.
And I think there’s a key question, right? We actually want to make sure that the thing we do actually transforms people’s lives. Right? And if you’re finding that you’re not transforming the, you know, before site to after state, you’re probably not necessarily attracting the right person to business, even if you want them, okay, you’re probably not necessarily attracting the right person.
But I think I’ve got other ones like, you know, are they easy to work with? They have a sense of humor, what else would I write down on mine? You know, do they have a growth mindset? You know, are they vulnerable enough to accept help? Yes, that’s a huge rallying enough to, but willing enough to take action?
Yeah. And there’s other characteristics I think that are different from, you know, male 45 lives in California. drives a Prius, kind of, to, you know, some of things that one of the ones I love. The Judas said was, you know, will they refer me? Okay, I can have all the clients in the world.
But if the ones I’m working with don’t refer me why they’re not talking about me Hi, that I’m missing in my delivery of service that they don’t feel like they can talk about me to other people.
Yeah. And so that’s an important characteristic I think we want to look at when we pick who is this client that I want to attract more of, and then look at what you’ve done to attract those people to your world. Tidally.
Samantha Riley (15:32):
The other thing we need to talk about is the fact that many of us have multiple avatars. Now, you explained this really well, in that generally, we’ve got a vertical where the kinds of clients that we work with are at different stages.
Can you just share what you were talking about? In regards to, I guess, being able to find the common thread, so that people don’t completely misunderstand what you do?
Tim Hyde (16:02):
Yeah, well, this is the thing, right? I think when, if we’ve got different avatars, you know, for some of us, you might have some government clients and some corporate clients and some private clients, it might be on a on a different demographic that you might work with men and women.
And you might want to put sort of different messages out there into the market on things. But fine once you sort of start to kind of write down all those commonalities of your different types of clients that you love working with.
So maybe there’s a four foot 11 business coach who lives in Queensland might be generous they might be for for teaming,
Samantha Riley (16:36):
oh, come on, it’s four foot 11. Just don’t take away. Don’t steal exactly, I need that inch
Tim Hyde (16:43):
veins of twins, where it sounds wearing heels or not. I got it. So you might be working with a four foot 11 business coach in Queensland, and a, you know, six foot 11 sort of basketball player in the NBA as your two avatars, but what is the commonality between those two people? What is the thing that kind of binds them together?
So that you can go well, I can, if I find this common thread, I can create my content and my marketing that speaks to both of them on this linear journey. Okay, so let’s pick something Sam completely at random here not to sort of speak to you, but let’s go liver disease, right?
And if you’re if you solve people with liver disease or weight loss or something, you know, where are those people? Now that I’ve got these two avatars? Where do those people see us? And where do they go to find information out about the thing that they’re concerned about? And how do I put myself into that particular channel?
And if we get that, right, and then we can start to look at what are the tactical things we do? That allows me to then reach those people, because ultimately, they come back to the same thing.
They’re coming back to your profile, your thread, the words you use, in that common space, the website, you don’t have 15 different websites, you’ve got one website with a landing page, that’s got to speak to both of these different demographics, and even psychographics. Yeah,
Samantha Riley (18:03):
yeah. So it was that golden thread that there is through all of those different avatars, we doesn’t mean that all of your marketing needs to fall under that I still think that with your social posts, you still should have different social posts that speak to each of those avatars.
But yeah, there are times where we need to speak to that to all of those people all at once. So really finding that golden thread is absolutely critical.
Tim Hyde (18:29):
Yeah, absolutely. It’s just kind of bringing that together, right. But we’re talking about their core avatar here. And their core person we want to attract, the more you can speak to them, the more likely you are to get that person and a little halo effect with people around that are close to
Samantha Riley (18:45):
that is the important thing. We need to go right to the center, right to the bullseye. Get that one person that we really want to speak to and we will attract the people around the I like that the halo effect. I like that. I’ve not heard that before.
Tim Hyde (18:59):
I haven’t used it before. That’s my
Samantha Riley (19:02):
halo effect TM.
Tim Hyde (19:06):
Not trademarked yet. But yeah, there is that halo effect I’ve kind of described as a head and shoulders effect as well. And you know, if you if you picture the silhouette on somebody, right? It’s a bit like a bell curve.
And you’ve got, you know, one shoulder the slow the kind of, you know, the head of the middle of the other shoulder, that’s the other side. And if you said like, I want to work with companies that are making, or coaches that are making $200,000 a year, what you’ll attract is you’ll attract coaches that are making 50k a year, and you’ll attract coaches, they’re making 350,000 as an example.
Okay, and if you can make your transformation for that group of people, fantastic. But if you suddenly find no that that $200,000 is the minimum a person I want to attract, well, maybe you need to actually move your language and your avatar up a little bit.
Ryan to say hi We work with people who make 400k, which means you attract for 200k people steal, and so on. But they’ve got different problems, and they will they’ll be able for different things as well.
Samantha Riley (20:10):
Yeah, he is really a something that really has helped me is getting clear on what the 2am problem is. And what I mean by that is what is it that keeps them awake, staring at the ceiling at 2am?
And once you get clear on that, and you can start to unravel, what are the characteristics? What are some of the other emotional aspects? What are the demographics around that person around that 2am problem, you can start to paint a much clearer picture, but you need to get really, really clear on what that thing is. I love it.
Tim Hyde (20:42):
You know what wakes them up at night? Or keeps weight or wakes them up? Or keeps them up at night? And if you can answer that problem, Jean Jean. nine tenths of the battle? Whoa, a lot of it. Yeah, it’s a really good place to start.
Samantha Riley (20:57):
Absolutely. Yeah. And as you mentioned, I do want to wrap this up saying you do need to check in and revisit that regularly. Because the kind of people that you work with five years ago, are not as often the kind of people that you work with.
Now, there are going to be refinements that are made along the way. So it’s always worth checking in revisiting and refining who this person is because the clearer you can get with articulating who this problem is so that the other person can understand or your audience can understand, the easier it’s going to be for your marketing efforts to work.
Any final thoughts, Tim?
Tim Hyde (21:40):
I did it market is expensive. And if you don’t convert, right, right. I love this quote. This is, you know, I like my quotes there say, I believe this is attributed to us, Senator and businessman in the 1800s by the name of John Wanamaker. Okay. And John reportedly said, I don’t know accuracies says, half my marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which half
Samantha Riley (22:06):
out felt that straightaway.
Tim Hyde (22:10):
Okay, and this is the thing, right? We do this stuff. And we don’t really know what’s actually driving the needle for us. And, you know, we’re going to be so much ahead so far ahead of our competitors.
If we can move that needle just a little bit into, I want, some of my marketing is wasted on but I’m pretty sure I know, most of it.
Samantha Riley (22:31):
I love that I think I really want to you, or the thing that I really want to leave you with today is to take some time out take out some CEO time, some time to really reflect on who your ideal customer is, get clear on who they are, how they make you feel. Because this will make a really big difference to how you show up in your business.
So get really clear on on this when you can attract more of the right people, you’ll feel more confident you’ll enjoy working with them and it will grow your business. So definitely take some time out to get clear on this.
And if you have other business people in your network that you know, would also get some value on getting clear around their ideal customer. Please share this episode of influence by design with them.
We would love to and we’re very passionate about helping people to build their businesses so that they can live their life by design.
Thanks so much for listening, and we will catch you next Tuesday for another episode of Influence By Design.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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