Rocking Your Ideal Client’s World—A Quick and Dirty Audience Persona Template

If you want to take your business to the next level, you’ve got to stop marketing to everyone—you need to market to your ideal client.

Time to put your thinking caps on, y’all.

Why an Audience Persona Template Is so Crucial to Marketing Success

Targeted marketing is effective marketing. To be effective, you need a marketing message that’s as specific to your ideal client as possible. Think of it like this: marketing to everyone is like shooting a shotgun at zombies from a hundred yards away—sure you might hit one or two, but it’s not going to be effective.

Now a sniper rifle on one zombie? Y’all, that’s how you stop the apocalypse.

If you want to create a targeted message, you need to think about who that message is for. Who is your ideal client?

Here’s how you figure that out.

Identifying Your Ideal Client

First, I want you to think hard about actual clients you’ve had who were friggin’ awesome to work with. Think about your absolute favs.

What set them apart from other clients? What was it you loved about them so much? It could be any of these things:

Easy to work with
Detail-oriented
Smart
Flexible
Understanding

Or maybe it’s more like this:

Wealthy
High standards
Highly intelligent
Extremely successful
Low on time
High expectations

Or maybe it’s even like this:

Hard-working
Economical and frugal
Uninterested in details
More interested in fast and cheap than slow and quality

Remember, this is going to differ from industry to industry and from business to business. Your ideal customer isn’t necessarily going to be the same as your competitors’ or your peers’ in the industry.

For example, my ideal client is laid back but successful—the kind of person who understands the value of marketing, who wants to invest in the long game, and who isn’t picky. I like to work with someone who leaves the details to me and understands that I’m the expert and that they need my help.

We can go deeper though. We can think about demographics and psychographics:

What is their salary range?
What is their position in their business?
What is their title?
Where do they live?
Are they married?
Do they have children? How many?
What activities do they participate in regularly?
What are their interests?
What are their opinions that are related to your business and what you sell?
How do they like to do business?
What makes them awesome to work with or terrible to work with?
Are they cheap or ready to spend?
Do they want fast solutions or do they have time to wait?
Are they interested in quality or do they want something that’s low cost?

Y’all, you can go super deep on demographics and psychographics, but for most people, getting a rough outline is more than sufficient to get your head wrapped around this marketing tactic so that you can start putting together a strategy to reach this person.

Now that you’ve identified your ideal client, there’s an equally important task you need to complete—you need to identify who isn’t your ideal client.

Who Do You Want to Turn Away

Y’all, I get it—sometimes it’s super hard to turn business away, especially during these crazy times, but if you want to have a happy business life, it’s critical that you whittle down your list of potential customers. You start by identifying who you do want to work with, and then you identify who you absolutely hate working with.

Think about the worst client you’ve ever had. What sets them apart from your best clients? We need this info to figure out how to tailor marketing messages that won’t target these folks.

Here are some examples of people you might not want to work with:

Picky about details
Doesn’t understand the value of what you do
Wants results in an unreasonable timeframe
Doesn’t trust you to do the job right
Complains

Or maybe it looks something like this:

Doesn’t have time to go over the details with you
Slow to respond
Late to meetings
Reschedules constantly

Or maybe it looks like this:

Only buys when there’s a sale
Argues about little things
Takes up the attention you need to pay to other customers

I’m sure we can all think of the clients that we absolutely hate to work with. You know, the ones who make you want to tear your hair out and who make you wonder why you got into this business in the first place.

That’s who we want to avoid! When you make your audience persona, use some of those same questions above (the demographics and psychographics ones) to create a persona for the clients you don’t want.

And after that? It’s time to start marketing, y’all.