Is Your Ideal Client Part of Your Marketing Strategy?

YOUR LINKEDIN QUESTIONS ANSWERED! 

Do you have questions about your LinkedIn profile or how to use LinkedIn? Send your questions to our LinkedIn Expert Debbie McCormick and she’ll answer them in the magazine! Use info@LinkedInBossLady.com with subject Dear Debbie. 

Dear Reader: 

Last week I was answering Bruce’s question about LinkedIn being one of the foundations of your marketing  strategy, and we got into a little bit about communicating with your ideal client. 

I wanted to follow up on that this week because knowing your ideal clients is crucial to your marketing success. 

If you don’t know who your ideal client is, you don’t know who you’re talking to. And if you don’t know who you’re talking to, how do you know what to say? 

I always give the example of a 16-year-old girl and the 60-year-old man. 

If you were to have a conversation with each of them, would the conversations be identical? Would you use the same phrasing, the same words even? 

No, of course not. They’re two completely different audiences. Like talking to your mother and your teenager. 

Picking your ideal client is very easy, even if you don’t have any clients. You can make one up. It’s a two-step process and it goes like this: 

Step One: You take a piece of paper (or make a chart in Word) with two columns. 

Then pick your favorite client and describe her (or you can describe your fantasy client). 

In the left column of your paper you list her attributes — what you love about working with her. 

In the right column is why you love that particular attribute — why do you feel blessed when you work with a person with this attribute? 

 I did this with my client Lisa, and it went like this: 

Step Two: Now look at Lisa again, this time looking at all her characteristics. You can use another chart: 

So what we learn about my ideal client from studying Lisa is that what really matters to me is more psycho-graphical than demographical, meaning that I love working with women who inspire me by who they are and how they want to show up in the world. It doesn’t matter what they do as long as they want to help people and by doing that make the world a better place, even if it’s just their little corner of it. 

 Here’s the huge blessing that came out of doing these charts and identifying what I love about Lisa: my clientele is filled with “Lisas.” And the men I work with, one a U.S. Congressman and one who is developing and manufacturing an EPA-approved machine that wipes out germs and viruses, including Covid, are people with those attributes. 

 Because I know exactly who it is I want to attract, I know exactly what to say to them.  

And that makes your marketing EASY. 

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I’ll answer your LinkedIn questions every week in the YES I CAN Living Magazine. 

For further help or support from me, feel free to schedule an appointment with me at www.BookWithDebbie.com.