We love working with female entrepreneurs because they do business differently. This is especially true of those of us over 40. When we’re developing our ideal client profile, we care about different things, and when we lean into what matters most to us, it’s much easier to attract the right people.

Who is your ideal client?

Before you can develop a clear ideal client profile, you need to know, without a doubt, who your ideal client is. We dive deep into how to do this in the podcast episode Get Clients to Come to You. To sum it up, among other things, you need to understand whose challenges you solve and who you can get the best results for.

How Female Entrepreneurs Do Things Differently

Above, we mentioned that as mature women, we care about different things than our younger counterparts or men do. Relationships are more important at this stage of life than they’ve ever been. Gone are the days of backstabbing cliques and frenemies. We now lean into building true relationships with other like-minded women, and this is our superpower.

When you’re able to build real relationships, you’re also able to get to know people better, and that helps you develop a thorough ideal client avatar (ICA) profile. 

Elements of an Ideal Client Avatar Profile

We’ve all filled out at least one ideal client profile sheet. If you’re anything like us, you wondered why some of the questions are being asked. Questions like “What’s their favorite magazine,” are outdated at best and irrelevant at worst.

So, what do you need to know about someone to be able to classify them as an ideal client? It helps to have experience working with clients because that’s where you gain the best data. This is a catch-22 for new business owners, though, so we’ll proceed as if this is a new exercise.

Demographics

Depending on your business model, demographics may or may not carry much weight, but they are a good starting point. If you sell internet services, your demographics can look something like this: Men or women 18 + who have a computer. To niche down, you might focus on businesses that require fast internet speeds. By narrowing your focus, you’ll be better able to speak to your ideal client avatar.

If you are someone who helps women in menopause, your demographics can look something like this: Women 48 + whose last menstrual cycle was twelve or more months ago. If you help women entering peri-menopause, your demographics cal look something like this: Women 35 - 48 who are experiencing symptoms of peri-menopause.

Demographics allow us to create the broad category that our ICA falls into.

Psychographics

Psychographics speak to what’s important to the person. When building your ideal client profile you want to ask yourself the following questions:

• What beliefs do they have? What are their interests? 
• What is their socioeconomic status?
• What is their lifestyle? 

The answers to these questions provide a deeper understanding of who your ICA is as an individual. This takes our categorization to the next level. 

In the example of the professional helping women in menopause, if you’re an Ayurveda practitioner, your approach is going to be vastly different than someone who practices Western medicine. You can speak to the beliefs of your ICA in a holistic approach to symptom relief in your messaging to attract the right women to you.

Hubspot has an in-depth article about marketing with psychographics.

Pain Points

What are the pain points of your ideal clients? Are there one or two, or ten or more? In order to connect with your audience on an emotional level, which we teach our clients how to do, you’ll need to know exactly what they believe their pain points are. You need to speak to those exact challenges and frustrations so they know that you understand them.

Aspirations

There’s a lot of advice out there that we should exacerbate the pain points to urge our ICA to purchase. This is overdone, in our opinion. Aside from knowing what the pain points are and speaking to those, you need to know what your ICA’s goals are and give them hope that they can achieve the desired results. With all of the negativity in the world, in mainstream media, and online, providing a ray of hope can be more impactful than focusing on the pain someone is in.

Finding Your Ideal Client

Market Research

Use the power of market research to fully understand who your ideal client is. This is the most important step when building your ideal client profile. We provide detailed information about how to use low-touch and high-touch market research strategies in our Get Clients to Come to You podcast episode. 

Competitor Research

Part of the process of performing thorough research is to perform competitor research. While we believe in collaboration over competition, there are other people out there doing similar work. Broadly speaking, they make up your competition. 

Through competitor research, you can learn:

• How is your competition addressing the concerns of the target market?

• Can you identify something that’s being missed by the competition? Identifying gaps in the market is a great way to set yourself apart from the crowd.

• How does your competition nurture the market? We suggest opting into their freebie or signing up to receive their emails so you can get a front-row seat and experience what their list experiences.

Warning! Competitor research is to be done to identify where and how you can differentiate yourself from the competition. It’s not meant to send you into a shame spiral because you believe that everyone is doing everything better than you are! 

We each have an ideal client avatar, and those people will prefer you over anyone else - that’s what makes them ideal. Make sure you don’t try to replicate what others are doing because that’s a surefire way to blend in not stand out. When you blend in, you don’t attract the right people. They don’t know why they should come to you because what you’re doing looks exactly the same as what everyone else is doing. 

Create Your Ideal Client Profile

By doing what comes naturally and building relationships, you’ll be able to build your ideal client profile with ease. Compile all of the data that you collect into one spot that you can refer to often. ICA research is not a one and one activity! The way your ICA views the world changes as things in their lives and in the world change. We recommend performing client research annually at a minimum. The more often you’re in contact with your ideal client avatar, the better, as that will allow you to see how their focus changes over time.

When building your ideal client profile, you can include anything that helps you to tap into feeling like you know this person. You can give her a name, or she can be a real person that you do know that you base your profile on. You don’t want to stop at one person, however. Once you’ve collected the demographic and psychographic information from at least ten prospects or clients, you’ll begin to see patterns that you cannot see when viewing one person’s data set. The intersections and similarities are what you’ll pull into your ideal client profile. 

If seven out of the ten people you collected information about all believe the same thing, that’s part of your psychographic profile. If they’re all the same age, that adds another layer, and if they all describe their challenges in a similar manner, you’ve got a great place to start with your marketing message. Learn more about why you need a marketing messaging strategy.

Your ideal client profile represents the cross-section of people who you most want to serve and who you can get the best results for.

When you have a thorough ideal client profile, your marketing activities are so much easier and more fun. You truly know who you’re speaking to, and you’re attracting more of that type of person. If you’d like guidance on how to connect with your audience on an emotional level, we invite you to join us at our next Marketing Methodology Workshop.