A Beginner’s Guide to Finding Your Ideal Customer

As a marketing and lead gen agency, we understand the desire to help multiple types of clients and the feeling that you need to be helping everyone. But along the way, we’ve learned the importance of finding a niche where you can truly make an impact and shifting your focus there. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how we find our ideal clients and what you can do to find yours.

When we first started Boundless Media, we were all over the place with who we were trying to target. We were trying to help people in all different types of industries, different sized businesses, and businesses in various stages of growth. And we’ll be honest; it didn’t go super well. We didn’t have a clear or concise message, making it hard to nail down the perfect step-by-step process for helping our clients. We quickly learned that niching down would help us and our clients be more successful.

How did we decide what our niche would be? It all started with looking at our data to see which clients we were the most successful with, which clients stayed with us the longest, which clients were the happiest with us at the end of the day, client LTV, and which clients our team worked the best with. We asked many questions and had to say no to a lot of opportunities (which was difficult, of course), but ultimately we can now operate at a much higher level for our clients.

One significant aspect we looked at when finding our niche was client Lifetime Value (LTV). Some questions we asked were:

• What clients are we doing the best work for?
• Which clients’ campaigns were the most successful?
• How long did the client stay with us?
• What was the projected monetary value of this partnership for both our client and us?

This narrowed it down to a select group of clients. From there, we figured out who out of this group were the most responsive, who our strategy is more geared towards, and who fits better with our business style best (proactive vs. reactive, moving quickly vs. moving slowly). This process doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes months of looking at the data and asking questions.

Another important aspect we looked at was figuring out who we were the best at selling to and who we connected the most with. We looked back at our conversations with our clients when they were still prospects to look at who engaged the most and seemed the most excited and interested in our solutions. These were the types of people we knew we wanted to continue going after.

We also considered demographic and psychographic factors. These things are harder to quantify but are still important when determining a niche to focus on. On paper, someone might seem like they should be a perfect fit for your company. But it might completely change when you have a conversation with them, and you begin discussing goals and outcomes when you realize what they’re asking for is unrealistic or not something your team can easily provide. Don’t waste your time and money (or your client’s) on something that’s doomed to fail from the beginning — learning to turn people away when you can’t help them can be a great way for your business to truly be successful.

It’s really easy to say yes to anyone who’s trying to pay you. But accepting anyone and everyone as a client isn’t beneficial to your business long-term. We recommend using your data to find your ideal clients and make a list of clients who aren’t a good fit for you. Your client should be a perfect fit for you, just like you should be an ideal fit for them. Niching down helps you get much more focused in your messaging, and outbound marketing enables you to find more ideal clients and helps boost your overall success. Using your data to find your niche can help you make more informed decisions on who might be a better target for you. Finding your ideal clients will help your lead generation campaigns be more successful and save you a lot of time and money down the road.

If you need help finding your niche or want to know how to reach out to more of your ideal client, contact us at nico@getboundlessmedia.com!