How to Target your Ideal Client

In this blog, I cover how you can move from defining your ideal clients to targeting them for conversion and turning them into paying customers.

The Dream 100 Strategy

The first thing we need to do is to figure out the top hang-out spots of our ideal client. At The Business Catalyst, when we talk to our clients about the best way to do this, we always like to use the Dream 100 Strategy created by Chet Holmes.

Back in the ‘90s, Chet was working for American billionaire Charlie Munger, when he realised something.

Chet discovered that his top salesperson spent all his time speaking to only 20% of their client base. However, those 20% were their ideal clients, and this salesperson spent 80% of his time finding out where those people hung out. 

This led Chet to develop the Dream 100 Strategy and publish the hugely successful book The Ultimate Sales Machine, celebrated by great marketing minds like Russell Brunson.

Essentially, Dream 100 is a simple and effective method of identifying your top 100 targets. 

You need to figure out exactly where they hang out, what they read, what they watch, how they think, etc. By narrowing this focus, salespeople like Chet nailed down who their ideal client was, and spent their efforts on ensuring they knew where to target them, saving a whole lot of time and resources.

With this in mind, here are some questions to get you thinking about your Dream 100 clients:

• What podcasts are they listening to? 

• What influencers are they following? 

• What magazines do they read? 

• Which email newsletters do they subscribe to? 

• What YouTube videos are they watching?

• Does a potential JV (Joint Venture) have access to them?

How to gather this information

I’m not going to lie to you, this bit is going to take some real research on your part, but trust me it’s well worth it. 

The first thing we at The Business Catalyst recommend doing is getting a list together of your top ten clients and setting up interviews with them. You need to get as much information out of them as possible so you can go and find more people like these top ten. Some good starting questions are:

• How did you find out about us? Was it through social media? If so, which channel?

• What magazines are you reading?

• Which YouTube channels are you subscribed to?

• Which newsletters or podcasts are you currently really into?

• Which books or online authors are you reading at the moment? 

• What are your hobbies or interests?

• What do you do in your spare time?

• Where do you like to go on holiday?

• What stores do you shop at?

• Where do you work?

By asking your existing ideal clients these questions, you will obtain tons of useful information that you can then use in order to find more of those dreamy clients you like so much!

You can start engaging with things they are interested in, and contributing to the communities they hang out in, which will give you a much better shot at bringing them into your business. 

From here, you can start building strategies around the information. Your marketing plan can be specifically tailored around those people: for instance, you can “like” and comment in their feed circles, get involved or publish content in the communities that they are already a part of online, and find the digital spaces where they are generating thought leadership in their particular area. 

Then you’re hanging out together!

No cheat codes here

Being the automation queen, I wish there was a way to automate this process, but there just isn’t. There aren’t any cheat codes to this I’m afraid! Doing the audience research – finding out what keywords they’re searching for, where they’re hanging out online, where they’re hanging out offline, what kind of media they respond to – isn’t something you can (or should) easily automate.

However, once you have this information what you can do is use certain automated processes to help you find your people. For example, you could create Lookalike Audiences on Facebook, track people via pixels or cookies, and create tailor-made ads to draw them in.

Additionally, imagine you could find five Facebook groups that have your ideal clients in them. If those five Facebook groups have got 5,000 people each, all of a sudden you have 25,000 potential ideal clients to whom you can target and deliver the right messages at some point. If you know where you need to look, you can cover a lot of ground quickly this way.

It's all about being as efficient as possible, so even though you cant automate your research, you can be super-efficient when it comes to finding the right people.

Pro tip: To help you keep track of your research, try to maintain a spreadsheet whenever you’re working on your ideal client and create new tabs for each social media channel they use. That way, you can record which messages are going out on which platform, and how regularly they are sent out. 

Choose and implement a strategy for targeting your ideal client

Your targeting strategy will really depend on how your ideal client consumes information, so understanding that is a very important part of your strategy. For example:

• Are you going to start creating audiences on Facebook and putting information in front of your ideal clients so they are able to opt in? 

• Are you going to be meeting them in person, e.g. at a social/sports club?

• Are you going to be at a trade show, which is where they’re all gathering, and are they going to come past your stand? 

The main thing to consider is that, for most businesses, you will probably want to have a few different ways to target your clients. Having all your eggs in one basket, and focusing all your time on one strategy, is risky.

For example, Google love changing up its algorithms, most recently the IOS update in 2021 which massively impacted Facebook Ads and email marketing. If those were your only two ways of targeting clients back then, you would have been in a rough situation; so the more you can spread out and find new ways to engage with your prospects, the better.

Doing the groundwork to target your Dream 100 clients can take some time, but I always like to think about the long game. The more work you do here the less time and money you will spend targeting the wrong crowds. Instead, you can spend your time, and marketing budget serving the people who will add real value to you and your business. 

Happy hunting!

Still need help finding your ideal clients?

Get in touch with The Business Catalyst here.