How To Find Your Ideal Client Online
Knowing how to find your ideal client online is absolutely crucial to building your online business. If you are working only with people who energise and inspire you, this will motivate you to do work that you are passionate about and enjoy. This will ultimately grow your business and you’ll also have fun while you’re doing it!
Firstly you need to define the characteristics of your ideal client. You can do this by thinking about the people or business that you’d most like to work with. These are the clients that you are most passionate about serving. Who are a joy to work with. Who make your day a breeze.
What makes them specific and unique? There are many checklists and tools available to help you find out, and I’ll cover three of these tools in this blog.
Three tools to help you find your ideal client online
1 – YouGov Profiles
YouGov Profiles is a great tool for breaking down your ideal client online profile. The lite version is free and it enables you to search for a brand, celebrity or profession and returns the fan base or customers of it. It contains self reported data from UK, US and German markets.
For example, If your ideal client is someone interested in consumer finance, you could search for Money Saving Expert on the front screen of the site. This returns the combined profile data for 4863 people that are customers of Money Saving Expert. Now isn’t this a great way to get an insight into the interests of people interested in consumer finance?
Ideal Client YouGov Profile
The tool returns details on Demographics, Lifestyle, Personality, Brands, Entertainment, Online and Media that a group may be interested in.
Media Category
In the Media category – you can see that this group of people is online for 21-15 hours per week. This means that online forums, Facebook and news sites are probably a good place to find them, if they are your ideal client. Looking at the Newspapers section, 15.8% read the Daily Mail, so potentially, getting an article submitted to the Daily Mail online would increase your chances of reaching this group.
Ideal Client Media Profile
Online Category
Under the Online category, you can see the top websites, Facebook pages and Twitter follows. Continuing with the example of Customers of Money Savings Expert, one of their top Facebook Pages is Quidco.
Ideal Client Online Profile
Now, you may think that knowing this is of absolutely no use to you, BUT, in Facebook you can search for Groups joined by people who like Quidco. And taadah! You now have a list of Facebook Groups that you can join where your ideal client hangs out!
Join these groups, and watch what your ideal clients are posting about, see what questions they are asking, and then start to contribute and be helpful, which will ultimately get you noticed as being as good source of information.
If your ideal client is on LinkedIn, then you should post articles and join and contribute to relevant LinkedIn groups that your ideal clients may also be part of.
The Lifestyle section of the YouGov Profile data gives a breakdown of their interests, which can then be used to find more groups online that they may be part of.
Although I used customers of Money Savings Expert for this example, you can do this for any brand, person or thing. Test searches for Consultants, Psychologies magazine, cats, horses and members of the National Union of Teachers had lots of interesting results.
Going one step further, YouGov can also can take your customer profile data and turn it into a poster for you. Imagine how amazing that would look on your office wall!
2 – Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook Audience Insights is a powerful tool that you can use to get even more data about your ideal client. You can find out about their relationship status, education level and job title. As well as the Facebook Pages they like, their locations, activity and even the devices they use.
This is self-reported data from their own Facebook profiles. So it is very useful data that you can use to initially research your ideal client, but also to target them through Facebook Ads.
In the screenshot below, I took the demographic data returned by the YouGov Profiles tool and entered it into the Facebook Audience Insights tool to get even more information about the customers of Money Savings Expert.
Facebook Audience Insights
3 – Amazon
You can use Amazon to find out who your customers are reading and other authors, books and audios they may be interested in.
Using the Facebook search facility and our Money Saving Expert customer, you can type in Books liked by people who like MoneySavingExpert.com which will return a list of books that this group have expressed an interest in.
This returns a whole list of books, one of which is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
If you go onto Amazon.co.uk, and search for Think and Grow Rich, it will return a number of editions. Pick the most popular – the September 2007 edition – and have a look at what they also bought.
Amazon
Napoleon Hill Search
They also bought The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T Kiyosaki.
Even the customer reviews can be a useful tool to get an insight on their views, thoughts and opinions on the topic.
This gives you a great insight into their other interests and authors they follow. Which means you will then have a great source of information that you can use for writing posts, e-books, newsletters, blogs, creating videos and generally getting closer to your ideal customer.
Survey Monkey
Once you have clearly identified your ideal client’s demographics, lifestyle, interests, opinions, and begun to build up rapport with them in LinkedIn and Facebook Groups, you can compile a survey using SurveyMonkey. This will help to further refine your data and create the products and services your ideal customers want to buy.
Create your survey and send it out to people you know, or ask your Facebook page, Twitter and LinkedIn connections to complete and forward to their connections.
If you have built up sufficient rapport in the Facebook and LinkedIn groups that your ideal clients hang out in, and dependent on the group rules, you can also ask them to complete your survey.
Ask all respondents in your survey if they would like to be added to your mailing list. Keep the survey as a pinned post on your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles and a link in your email signature.
Over time, you will have an excellent source of information about your ideal client’s needs and wants, and will be able to build a more successful product for them.
Summary
I hope this gives you a good overview of how to find your ideal client online. There are many tools and systems out there to help you identify your ideal client and where they hang out. I have just briefly covered three here, but I will go into them in more depth in future posts.
Michael Port’s book – Book Yourself Solid – has more detail on identifying your target market and niche. He talks about The Red Velvet Rope Policy – a way to filter out the clients you don’t want.
