Your Perfect Client - why and how

“But I don’t want to exclude anyone” they insist. “I want to appeal to EVERYONE” they cry, when I ask my clients who their perfect client is.

The trouble is that you try to appeal to everyone and you end up appealing to noone. Why? Well read on and I’ll tell you.

This could be best done by giving you two recent examples from my own business. One was a personal portrait session with a woman whose partner had recently died. The other was with a woman for a personal branding session who was feeling good, inspired by work but just a little nervous about being in front of the camera.

With the first woman, I empathised with her, I listened and I reassured her. With the second woman I was able to carry on a conversation about work, relationships, joke around, help her relax and smile, again reassure her, but it was much more of a two way conversation.

I had to tailor my approach and my behaviour to each of these women or we just would not have built a rapport that would enable fantastic photographs.

Perfect client

And thats what you need to do when you are marketing - TALK to your clients in a way that they can identify with. Work out what problem you can resolve for them and then talk about how you can do that. If you don’t understand your perfect client, how can you do that. And if you don’t talk to your client in the language that they need to hear how can you attract them?

And it’s not just how you talk to them, but everything about the way you communicate with them - the style and colours of your website and other branding materials, the design of your products because whilst your products might drive who your perfect client is, it may work the other way too - bearing in mind who your perfect client is, you may well design a product just for them.

Success in branding is ALL about how you make people FEEL.

Ideally you want to make people think: I HAVE to contact this person - it doesn’t matter where they are in the country or how much they charge. I have to work with them.

You don’t have to have just one ideal client. You can have one for each of the products you sell, for example. But neither do you want too many products. Specialising and nicheing will make the biggest impact. Trust me - you don’t want to be a Jill Of All Trades or you go back to trying to please everyone and pleasing noone.

So grab a piece of paper and start defining your ideal client. Criteria you could use are:

Gender

Age

Education

Marital status/family

Interests/hobbies

Location

Job description/employment status

Business - size, number of employees

Earnings

Financial situation

Health

Beliefs

How they FEEL - stressed, nervous, overwhelmed, confident, insecure, proud, budget conscious, etc etc

As you write all this done, you will start to form an idea of who your perfect client is and how you need to communicate with them - the words that are going to resonate and compell them to contact you. And over time your perfect client will become like a character in a book - they will evolve, you will get to know them even better and communicate even more effectively.

Defining a perfect client can transform your business. Give it a go and see if there is a shift in who you are working with.

Want to know more? Send me an email: janette@beautifully-you.photography or call for a no-obligation chat on on 07947 608800

janette edmonds