“The only place that success comes before work, is in the dictionary” - unknown

Identifying your perfect client can seem daunting, and it can be challenging. It takes work, research, and patience. In fact, I prefer to focus on defining a best-fit customer or client.

You might think that targeting everyone is the best approach, but that's not the case unless you have a huge budget.

In reality, if you try to reach everybody, you won't attract anyone. Your message won't connect with people or stand out amidst the noise, making it difficult to reach your potential buyers.

For small businesses, it's important to narrow your focus and target the right people with the right offer. This is where establishing a best-fit client persona (BCP) comes in. By creating a BCP, you can concentrate your efforts and achieve better results.

With a good BCP, your message will reach the people who need to hear it.

Creating a working profile is easier than you might think. In just a few simple steps, you can develop a profile and then make adjustments as you gain more knowledge. It involves some planning and a little trial and error, but once you have a profile in place, you'll start to see your efforts pay off.🧑‍🤝‍🧑🧑‍🤝‍🧑

What Is Best-Fit Client Persona?

A best-fit client persona describes your target audience as an individual. It defines, in specific terms, their demographics and the psychological factors that influence them. Businesses use a BCP to figure out where and how to reach their potential buyers.

Demographic information includes:

-      Age

-      Location

-      Income Level

-      Language

-      Profession

-      Marital status

- Hobbies

- Interests

 Psychological data includes values, attitudes, behaviours (especially those related to the products they buy or the services they engage), personality type, and pain points. Understanding your target’s pain points is critical because it identifies the problems they face.

Your job is to make sure they know that you provide the solution.

The Benefits of Identifying Your Best-fit Client

It takes some work to research and identify your target market, but the benefits are well worth it. Businesses identify their best-fit client to:

Maximize Their Efforts. No business has the resources to market to everyone. You need to identify the best lead for your business so you can maximize your time and budget.  

Nurture Leads Effectively. The key to successful marketing is identifying and nurturing leads. The research generated by creating your BCP will lay the foundation for all of your future marketing efforts.

Craft a Message that Resonates. Marketing relies on effective communication. If you don’t speak the language of your audience, they won’t buy from you. Your best-fit client persona will help you craft a message that resonates with your audience and motivates them to act.

Create an Army of Loyal Brand Advocates. By identifying your customers’ attitudes and beliefs, you can align these with your business’s vision and mission. This will increase brand loyalty among your clients and customers.

Better Personalize Your Client Journey. Knowing your clients allows you to foster a personal connection with them. Create content that matches where they are on their journey to work with you.

It’s Easy. Finally, the internet and online resources make it easier than ever to research your audience and pinpoint exactly who they are.

 Without a best-fit client persona, you’re shooting in the dark.

Here are the steps to creating your best-fit client persona.

Step 1 - Know Your Service and/or Products

Start by getting to know all the details of your service. Understand the features and what your clients achieve by the end of their time with you. How will their life change? What personal transformation can you help them to make?

For physical products: Know every aspect of your product: what it does, how it works, and most importantly, why someone should buy your product over a competitor brand.

If you haven’t already done so, create a unique value proposition (UVP) for your offering. Your UVP is a statement that explains how your service or product uniquely solves the client's problem.

Focus not only on the features of your service/product and how it’s used but the benefits it brings to users. In other words, how does it improve someone’s life? This is important because this is the real reason someone uses your product.

For example, if you offer a cloud-based project management tool, it’s not the tool you’re selling but the time you’ve freed up for your users.

If your service helps clients cope with anxiety, it's not the coping strategies you're selling but the relief and confidence your clients gain from being free from worry.

Take a look at your service/products and see if you can reframe their benefits in this way. 

Step 2 - Create a Broad Description

You know your service and you probably have a pretty good idea of who would buy it from you. Consider who your service helps. If you already have customers, think about the type of people who buy from you. Take down some notes but be ready to scrap everything if this preliminary research is proven wrong. 

Later, you’ll gather objective data to create a solid best-fit client persona, but for now, this broad description is a good place to start.

Step 3 - Research Online

Search online for your target market so you can learn more about them. If you already have clients, start there. If not, here are some places you can look for potential audience members:

Social Media. Look at your current followers on social media, especially the ones that interact with you the most. Go through their profiles to find basic demographic information, but also check out their content to get a deeper understanding of who they are and what makes them tick.

Other ways to use social media include:

• Searching for hashtags related to your product, your niche, or the broad profile you created.

• Joining groups related to your niche and seeing who is most active there. Listen to conversations (this is called “social listening”).

Your Competitors. Check out your competitors. They’ve already done their marketing research so see what you can learn from them. Look at not only their followers and customers but also get a feel for who they’re targeting with their marketing. If they’re more experienced or successful than you, you can learn from them.

Analytics. Look at your website analytics to see who’s visiting your site. You can get demographic information this way, but also see how much time they spend on which pages. This will give you some insights into their interests. For example, you might find that they engage more with video content than text.

You can also simply Google search with keywords to find out where your audience hangs out online so you can learn more about them.

A great tool to use that shows you in real-time what people are searching for is Ask The Public. Enter your keyword and find out what search queries are currently being used for that term. This gives you a head start on defining your client's current pain.

Step 4 - Gather Data

Now you’re ready to start gathering data. There are two ways to gather data – directly and indirectly.

Direct data comes from personal interactions with your target audience. This includes things like surveys, interviews, and focus groups. You have to reach out to people and connect with them, which can take a great deal of time. But the data you receive will be well worth it. Through direct data gathering, you can find out how they feel, what issues they face, what problems they have, and how they buy the products they need.

Indirect data is much easier to gather but usually, the insights aren’t as deep. This is the data you get from following people on social media, checking out blog comments, or seeing user-created content. Through indirect means, you can get demographic information and also extract valuable psychographic information.

A great place to start gathering data is with current customers and followers. Reach out to them and create an opportunity to receive direct feedback.

Seek demographic and psychographic data, but look especially for pain points, challenges, issues, and questions. Your audience members are motivated to resolve these and if you can offer some form of relief, it will be easy to engage with them.

Step 5 – Create Your Customer Profile

Create a client persona that treats your audience as one single individual. Give them a name and make it personal.

Naming your best-fit client profile makes it easier to create content. you can visualise your client persona when writing emails or creating ads. This will make the reader feel you are talking directly to them.

You can’t put all the information you found into the profile. Some of this data might contradict each other. Look for patterns. When you see the same thing over and over again with members of your target audience, these are the things you should include.

What if you have two sets of unmistakable patterns? For example, you might find that your customers are evenly split between Europe and North America.

If you observe something like this, you might want to segment your target market, creating two different profiles for each. But keep in mind that this will involve a lot of extra work, so only segment if it’s totally necessary.

You might instead choose to dig deeper – find something these two distinct markets have in common that overrides the demographic information you’ve uncovered (e.g. they live on two different continents, but 80% of both groups come from rural areas).

Step 6 - Use Your Customer Profile

Now, it’s time to put your best-fit client persona to use and see the difference.

Here are some of the things you’ll do with your BCP:

Create a Marketing Message and UVP. Now that you know your audience, you can create marketing materials that speak directly to them. Craft a message that communicates the unique value your product offers in a way that resonates by addressing your audience’s pain points.

Choose Marketing Channels. Your BCP tells you exactly where to go to connect with your audience. The key to successful marketing is to find your audience and put your offer in front of them. You’ll also know the best times to engage them.

Create High-Quality Content That Will Convert. With a keen understanding of your target market, you can create and share content that appeals to them.

Target Your Advertising to the Right People. You can use demographic information to target the right people with your ad campaigns. Social media ad networks allow you to choose profile features to target.

Service Development. Use your understanding of your best-fit client to develop new services or product lines. You know what problems they face, so create services that offer solutions to meet their specific needs.

By using your best-fit customer profile, you’ll be able to market more efficiently. Even with limited resources, you’ll know exactly who to target and how to reach them, putting you on an equal footing with more established companies with larger marketing budgets.

Step 7 – Revise and Refine

But wait! You’re not done yet.

Maintaining an accurate and effective best-fit client persona is an ongoing process. Once you’ve created and implemented, keep gathering feedback and refining. The market and your industry are always evolving. It is crucial that you keep up with these changes. Revise your BCP to reflect these changes and it will provide a powerful boost to your marketing.

Ready to Fast -Track Your Best Fit Client Profile?

Get started by downloading this FREE worksheet to help you refine your target audience:

Click here to download your client worksheet

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