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Sonia Simone’s Remarkable Marketing Blueprint has taught me a lot about marketing. One of the first lessons is about creating your perfect customer. I brushed over it when I first joined, but recently went back and really listened to it.
Sonia says “Who you serve is more important than what you do.”
Your Perfect Customer
The concept is that you should create one person to be your perfect customer, then write all of your marketing materials to that person, and no one else.
It makes your marketing more personal and intimate, which makes it more effective. The farther you get from writing for one person, the more “corporate speak” you get, so people care less about what you say.
The fear is that you’re leaving money on the table by excluding people. The truth is that by focusing your efforts, you become more appealing to the people you’re trying to reach. Other people get swept in as part of that. Focusing doesn’t mean you’re rejecting anyone. You’re just focusing.
By trying to reach everyone, you don’t reach anyone very well. You make more money from the people in your niche than you will by trying to reach a broader audience. (My perfect customer is not General Motors or Apple.)
My Struggle
I’ve been struggling with knowing who I should be addressing on this site and in my business. I’ve been torn between you and that guy over there, so I’ve been trying to make everyone happy.
I’ve been frustrated and unsuccessful as a result.
Sonia asked a bunch of questions about your perfect customer in her course. Not just the normal demographics, but personal facts too. How many children do they have? What kind of a car do they drive? What do they care about? What are they afraid of? The exercise is to write it all out, so I did.
My Perfect Customer
I was shocked at how easy it came, once I thought about who my best clients are.
Beyond just the questions in the exercise, I started to write out a whole back story for this imaginary person. It was an amalgam of a few of my current and recent clients. I was surprised when I realized that they had values and fears in common with each other that were unrelated to their web sites or SEO.
As all of this information came pouring out of me, I got to know my perfect customer really well. Their kids, their values, what they did on the weekends. (You’d be surprised by what they drive. I was.) I gave them a name.
What This Means To You
From now on, all of my writing, will be to this one person, to you. See if you can tell if there’s a difference in my writing style or in my marketing materials.
The advice to take away from this (the advice that I would give to my perfect customer) is to figure out who you serve and let everyone else go. They’ll find their way. Don’t worry about them. Create your perfect customer and focus all of your energy on that one person. Imagine how that one person will react to everything you do. Tell stories that one person will respond to.
Please Unsubscribe
If this article makes sense to you, great. If it doesn’t mean anything to you, if it doesn’t strike a chord, then please unsubscribe. Don’t come back. You’re not like my perfect customer and I need to spend my time taking care of the people who are.
If you ARE like my perfect customer, then remember what Sonia says:
“Who you serve is more important than what you do.”
Thanks, Sonia.
I’m sticking around Conrad! ^_^ But now you’ve got me really curious – what characteristics did you come up with for your clientele?
Ha! You’ll have to stick around and see what kind of articles I write.
What’s more important is what kind of characteristics did YOU come up with for YOUR customers?
It’s hard to get out of that mindset of quantity of followers, especially starting out when you’re (I’m) struggling to get traction in the online world. But I totally get the concept and am ready to embrace my ideal customer.
Does YOUR ideal follower drive a Subaru, Conrad?
Tess, I’ll never tell!
I don’t want to offend all the Toyota owners.
I really got to thinkin’ that I was being told I wasn’t the right kind of person.
You will ALWAYS be the right kind of person, Linda!
I like the sound of this. Curious: did you do a survey, or just dream up the answers to questions like “what kind of car do you drive?” I have been writing a blog long enough to establish a circle of commenters who have come to feel like friends. It is garden-centric, and my product is banners and flags as garden art, but I hesitate to try to SELL to these people.
I thought about real people, real customers, but the answers were all thought up inside my head, completely created out of the air. I had an idea of THE perfect customer and just started to tell a story about them. It sort of fit into a few people. I thought also of the people I didn’t like to work with.
Now, whenever I write anything, I imagine that I’m writing only to that one imaginary person.
Don’t think of it as “selling”. Think of it as “sharing”. If your personal friend had a cool product that you would like, wouldn’t you want them to share that with you?
“Selling” is manipulating someone to do something that they normally wouldn’t do.
“Sharing” is giving someone the opportunity to do something they always wanted to do.
I think the hard part for you in this is the same one that’s difficult for me — we want to help everybody. We want to fix every problem that’s thrown at us, and spend hours with every fascinating new client who comes our way.
And when you’re starting out, you do. But as your business grows, you’ve gotta set some boundaries so you can focus on your *best* work.
I think it’s awesome that my stuff sparked this, thanks for sharing it Conrad.
Sonia -
Thanks for sparking it!
I love this, needed this and will use this….but I am still at loss for who my real clients are…am trying though.
Laura
Conrad,
I feel like you’re talking to me, so I want to stick around! Really enjoy your site and your Simple Guide to SEO. Great stuff, thanks!