Where to find your ideal client

Humans are social creatures. For thousands of years we’ve formed groups.

Sometimes to survive.

Sometimes to work better together.

Sometimes to have more fun.

Your marketing should take that into account. That’s why we spent so long describing your ideal client. With a crystal-clear picture of who they are, what they do, and what they need, you can now go out and look for them.

Finding out where they meet and socialize is the next step in your marketing plan.

There are a few steps to this so we’ll start slow.

Online

First we’ll start by looking for them online.

Looking for clients online is easiest because you can be efficient. If you’re not finding them in one place, you can quickly move on and look elsewhere.

But this ease also means that it’s easy for competitors to find them too.

You’ll have to put in some extra effort and thinking to find them, and find them before the competition does.

So how do you look for them?

Use the description of your ideal client that you created earlier.

  • Who are they?
  • What do they do for a living?
  • Where would they meet their peers?

A fitness industry example

Let’s say you’re a mobile software developer, iOS specifically. Your ideal client is in the fitness industry and already has an established brand. Perhaps they have a presence online, but it’s just an informational website.

In this case, what they do for a living is to help people improve their fitness. Maybe they manufacture apparel like running shirts. Or maybe they cook food specifically for athletes. Perhaps they run a gym.

You can see right away that this ideal client is still very broad. In three examples we’ve described three completely separate businesses that are only similar to each other in that they provide goods and services for the same customer.

When this happens, and it probably will, you’ll need to segment your ideal customer. Create multiple ideal customers and get more focused on each one.

(Eventually you might find that one or two segments are a better fit for you. This is where you’d remove the others so your ideal customer becomes laser focused.)

Let’s take one segment to start with, a gym owner.

  • Who are they? A business owner who owns a gym.
  • What do they do for a living? They run the facility to help people become healthier through exercise.
  • Where would they meet their peers?

Finding their peers is important because if you know where they meet their peers, you’ll be able to find groups of potential customers.

Thinking online for now (we’ll get into offline later), these might be some places where you can find them:

  • Forums
  • LinkedIn groups
  • Google groups
  • Email mailing lists
  • Websites catering to gym owners
  • Online magazines or even a printed magazine’s website

Take each of these and turn them into Google searches.

What you are looking for is actual people who could be your clients. In this case, gym owners.

Take note of any promising places you find them, especially if the place is active and you get a feel like there is a community there. You’ll be coming back to these places soon.

Offline

Searching online is the easiest way to get started, but some clients don’t form communities online. That’s why you need to combine online with offline tactics. But you’ll have to be careful with offline tactics for them to work.

The most important thing I’ve discovered with offline searches is:

make sure the time you spend is actively looking for ideal clients

I’ve gone to conferences with the intention of learning about my ideal clients, discovered they weren’t there, and then spent the rest of the conference without learning anything about them.

The best way to counter this is to prioritize. Just like with the online methods, make a list of where you might find ideal clients. Here’s few to get started based on the gym owner example:

  • local gyms
  • exercise stores, especially ones that cater to wholesale customers
  • bodybuilding magazines
  • general fitness magazines
  • bookstores with exercise books
  • local colleges and schools
  • exercise and fitness conferences

You might notice that books and magazines are included on this list.

While they aren’t places where your ideal clients gather, they can serve as great maps to where they might be. Many books provide appendixes, indexes, or lists of resources in the back. I’ve found many communities through skimming these lists.

(You might consider buying a few magazines while you’re at it too. Magazines are great resources for copywriting.)

Now, why look at books and magazines in person instead of through Amazon or online?

If you only have one hour to research, you can get much further by looking at a physical shelf of books than searching on Amazon.

  • You can see how many books on this topic there are
  • You can see how thick the books are
  • You can see how many of the books are all-words vs. ones full of pictures and diagrams
  • You can see which ones are popular in your local market by the number of copies in stock

If you want to go back online after looking in a bookstore, that’s a great way to find related books that might not have been in stock.

Make sure you spend some time looking offline for where your ideal client hangs out. If you’re successful, you might be able to learn things about them that you wouldn’t be able to learn online.

Eric Davis

P.S. This might seem like a lot of work and thinking upfront, but it will pay off. Right now you’re trying to learn about your clients so you can reach them using the least time and energy.

And the benefits from this work will stay with you. Every minute you spend researching your ideal clients, the better you get at understanding them. With better understanding, you can provide better solutions to their problems.