How to define your ideal client, and then speak (directly) to them
The secret holy grail of having a successful business is understanding your ideal client and being able to speak exactly to them.
And this is somewhere where most business owners fall flat because they try to speak to everyone which means that they speak to no one and yes I know that that’s a massive but whatever it’s true.
Being super clear on your ideal client means understanding everything about who this person is so that you are talking to the right person and all of your marketing speaks to them.
However, putting together this ideal client and the avatar demographics is a lot more complicated and strategic than people usually understand.
Luckily, as a brand messaging expert, I am going to walk you through everything that you need to know about putting together an in-depth strategic ideal client avatar and understanding it so that you can make more sales and market more successfully.
In this guide, I’ll breakdown what an ideal client is, how to find yours and how you can use that in your content or copywriting.
Hi, I’m Elle…
Website Copywriter, Unapologetic Girls’ Girl, And (According To Clients) An “Absolute Dream.”
What An “Ideal Client” Actually Is
So…what even is an actual ideal client?
It’s not anyone who might buy, it isn’t anyone who’s already bought? It is the exact person that you are hoping will buy from you, hire you or work with you.
Everyone, it’s the person who has a problem that you solve, is ready to act, gets the most value from your offer and that you work with.
This should be super specific because your offer shouldn’t be for everyone and if it is then you need to refine your brand messaging fast before you move forward.
The thing I want to stress is that your ideal client is also going to depend on what industry you’re working in. If you work in SaaS or e-commerce then your ideal client is the person that you have created the solution for and who is most likely to buy it and who is ready to buy it already and take action.
If you’re a service provider, a solopreneur or a coach, anyone who’s working one on one with clients then your ideal client is a combination of the person that you solve problems for and that you can help but also people that you actually like and want to work with.
Something that a lot of service providers forget is that you do not have to work with people that you don’t like and it’s really important to try and focus your messaging and build an ideal client around someone that you actually would want to work with to save yourself from burnout or stress in your job.
So in summary your ideal client is a combination of the person that you built your solution for, the person who is going to buy and is ready to buy your solution, and the person that you would like to buy your solution.
So let’s talk about how you can actually define that and figure out who that is in detail.
I’m also an ambassador for romanticizing business and making it fun, an expert in non-toxic conversion copy, a Miranda Priestley apologist, and my actual job description should really be ‘matchmaker for you and your dream clients“
If you liked reading this blog post – I would love to hang out more with you 🙂
And these, IMO, are the best ways for us to that:
Step 1: Start With the Problem, Not the Person
The first thing that you’re gonna do is define the problem that you solve and why somebody should care about that.
And to define the problem that you solve, you want to get really deep into the motivation or the problem and the outcome that somebody would want from your product.
And what you wanna do with this is try to find different levels, so starting with a surface level problem that you solve for someone and then going into what that actually means for them.
A really good way to do this is to just ask “so what” every time you come up with a problem. So for example you could say:
I write website copy that makes it easier for people to connect with their dream clients and then you would ask yourself “so what?”
Then you might say so that people can spend less time stressing themselves out on social media and more time not working and having fun.
Might ask “so what?”
So that they can spend more time with their families or more time on vacation.
And so on, so then you start to find more motivation, a deeper motivation for your ideal client for what they want and what they actually care about.
This helps you figure out the emotional side of your business and what you are offering rather than just the features.
You really want to focus on the urgency of the problem and also the emotional mistakes that come with it.
Saying that you want a new website is one thing, saying that you want to work less so you can spend more time with your kids is a much more emotional thing. It’s a completely different level of understanding your target audience.
Step 2: Build a Realistic Client Profile
The next thing you wanna do is create a realistic and actually useful client.
And the reason I’m saying this is you hear this all the time, but in copywriting it matters when it matters and why I always like irrelevant details that people somehow just bring up that don’t actually help but people think that they should include them.
And what I mean by that is sometimes things like age, demographics, jobs, language, whatever-sometimes that matters and sometimes it doesn’t.
When you’re creating your client avatar, you want to focus on useful details for your business so things like what is going on in their life or business, what are frustrations, what solutions have they tried that are different to yours, what are their beliefs in themselves, in your products, in your industry, what are their objections-as in “this won’t work for me because…”
Instead of focusing on demographics of like who they are as a basic description of a human, you want to look at who they are in terms of how they behave and specifically who they are in relation to your product.
A very basic demographic thing is just helpful for you to kind of imagine your ideal client in your head, so maybe you just want to give them a name, imagine what they look like, figure out where they shop, something like that. But when you’re developing your ideal client, I want you to get super deep into understanding their behaviour, where they are in their life, and how they feel about your problem and the solution.
Step 3: Use Real Voice-of-Customer Data
The next thing you’re gonna do is try and look for some real customer data research.
Where to find it:
- Customer interviews
- Reviews and testimonials
- Comments, forums, emails
What this basically will help you do is build a more realistic client avatar because instead of just imagining what your client is doing you’re actually doing what they’re talking about. You are finding out exactly which obstacles they have found in using your industry or solution, what they have used instead of using your solution, what they are struggling with, and you can use that to build out your audience persona and get more clarity.
This is really important to do and I feel really strongly about this because I’m a conversion copywriter so I don’t just base my copy or my research on what I do on vibes and I don’t think you should either. I think that it’s nice to use what you think you know and then also use data to validate that and compare it and make sure that when you are building out any sort of messaging or ideal client you are basing it on actual real-world data so that you know what you’re saying makes sense instead of just guessing it.
And do some research to figure out what people are actually saying in real life and use that to inform your ideal client or your messaging.
Step 4: Define Their Stage of Awareness
The next thing you’re gonna do you wanna do is define the stage of awareness
So if you don’t know what stage of awareness is, very quickly is basically how much somebody knows about your industry your solution your product before making a buying decision
Somebody with a very low stage of awareness knows absolutely nothing about your product your solution they don’t really even know that much about their problem or your industry
Someone who is a very high stage of awareness knows everything about your industry.
They know their problem that they know the solutions to their problem.
They know that you offer a product that has the solution and they have already researched you and know about it and they’re almost ready to buy.
You want to figure out where are your audience falling on this scale?
Are they problem or aware?
Are they solution aware?
Or – are they ready to buy?
If they’re problem aware, it means that they know that they have a problem, but they don’t know about
If they are solution aware – they know how to solve their problem they just don’t know where to buy that solution from
And if they’re ready to buy, or most aware, it means that they have found you they think that you are the solution and they might just be comparing you with
You can do some more research into this if you don’t understand a bit more about the different stage of awareness and also how to figure out which one your client or customer might be in but essentially you want to figure this out and add this to your client avatar because this is gonna help you build your funnel and build build out your messaging
Step 5: Turn What You've Learnt Into Messaging
So the next thing you wanna do is start planning your messaging around your ideal client.
You want to start looking at the language that you know that using based on your voice of customer research, and you want to start planning out how you want to speak to them.
You wanna start thinking about key messages that you know that they would care about, and things that matter to them – things that are important to them, and things that they value.
Then – use these things to build out a few of your messaging pillars
If you’re not too sure about how to go messaging – this blog post here that will walk you through everything, so you can go and read that, and then come back to this blog post when you’re ready
Mistakes To Avoid
Let’s quickly talk about some mistakes that people commonly make that I want you to avoid when you’re building your client personas:
Building overly complicated or useless personas
We already talked about this but sometimes people go in and they’ll build these client personas that are really detailed in terms of like if they were writing a character for a book and while that can be helpful to make sure that you’re writing to one person the entire time and you can easily imagine your client persona when you are creating content, a lot of the time it’s just not actually helpful for you in terms of selling or speaking to the right people
And what do you mean by this? It would just be people adding details that are not relevant. It will be like they have two kids or like this is the soccer team that they support even though they don’t sell anything relevant to kids and you are not selling something relevant to soccer like you don’t need to know those factors, they’re not gonna help you sell to these people.
Focus all of your avatar information on stuff that will actually help you in your business so like what are they struggling with? What are their problems? And try and keep that like related to your industry and your business not just what are their problems like they’re having a problem that they’re getting a divorce if that’s not relevant to you things like what is their problem in relation to your business
Guessing instead of using real data
The other problem I see a lot (and why I want you to go off and do some VOC research) is people just guess instead of using real data.
They build a persona of a person that they would like to have instead of building real people and so that can slow down their messaging and slow down conversions because they’re not actually saying the right things to the right people because they haven’t done the research
Not being specific enough.
I think we’ve all fallen into this trap as business owners, where we want to sell to as many people as possible – but the reality is the more vague your language and the less specific you are in terms of who you’re talking to, the harder it’s gonna be for you to sell
So an example I’ll give you with my business – I sell website copy packages at a higher rate than some of my competitors, because my ideal clients are willing to invest in high-level copy strategy and SEO.
Either for their first business, or a lot of the time – for a rebrand of their website or their second business, and what they really really need is copy that is going to convert, which is worth premium rates to them.
So my ideal client is NOT anyone who is building their first website, who doesn’t have any money to spend.
I want to work with people who have their services ready, and they know what they’re selling, and they also have a good idea of their brand messaging.
If I work with new businesses, they are not gonna have all of that information, and it’s gonna be harder for me to do my job – so I don’t write content for those people (or atleast, target them as my idea clients!)
That is not my ideal persona, and that’s okay because there are resources for those people.
Like I want you to do the same thing and make sure that you’re writing specifically to the person that you wanna work with who can afford to work with you and that fits your ideal client persona and that you’re also not being scared to exclude people which is another mistake I see people make
You are not for everyone and that’s okay. Some people might get turned off by the fact I swear a lot on my website or I can be a bit serious but I know that my ideal clients that I wanna work with will find it funny and they are gonna wanna work with me based on stuff that will turn someone else off and that people who don’t like me and you should feel the same
A Simple Exercise to Define Your Ideal Client
I’m gonna give you a couple of simple exercises to just very easily figure out your ideal client. Obviously you should add research in VOC data into this but for the basis of this exercise you just need to answer these questions.
Give them a name and some basic demographics – but don’t get too detailed with it.
Maybe give them a picture of who they are in your head, what they do for work and how much money they have, and maybe what social media platforms they hang out on.
Then , you’re gonna list:
- Their biggest problems
- What they’ve already tried
- What they believe is holding them back
- What they want instead
- What they want their life to look like after your solution
And then you’re going to build a persona of who you want them to be based on:
Where they need to be in life to work with you or buy from you
How much money they need to have to work or buy from you
How sophisticated they need to be to work or buy from you
What they need to have ready to work or buy from you
THAT – those answers – is how you figure out your ideal client.
In Conclusion
Building an ideal client can feel daunting but as long as you’re thinking about what matters then you shouldn’t find this too
I take what I have taught you to heart and make sure you’re doing some actual research and building avatars that you can actually use in your marketing and not just building like these wishy-washy client avatars of someone who shops at Whole Foods and has a dog and then you can’t use that information ever
Your ideal client-you’re allowed to get really specific about it, exclude the people you don’t wanna work with, focus on the people that you want to work with, and set limits of who you do and don’t wanna work with based on what makes sense for your business
And of course you should go and do some research to make sure that what you’re doing is grounded in reality and that you’re not just guessing at it because obviously you want this to convert and if you make up a client that doesn’t exist in real life, you’re probably not going to have messaging that converts
If you need help with this, I am a messaging strategist and I build messaging Bibles and do create client avatars for people all the time, so I help with this.
I love doing this for clients, it was one of my favourite parts of being a copywriter and I would be more than happy to help.
If you want to learn more about my messaging services, you can check out this page here
Step 10: Choose an ESP
Okay, so the next thing you’re going to want to do is choose your email service provider. I’ve left this until later in the process specifically because each email service provider does different things, and whether or not you choose one or the other is going to depend on what you want to do with your newsletter. So you already know the purpose of it, the target audience, and the structure.
There are a lot of different ESPs to choose from. My recommendation is to choose one that is free or cost effective to start if you’re new to growing it, or choose one that has the most features that you need at the lowest cost. Most email service providers do have a free plan. I would recommend going to research all of them. I’m not going to go through all of them here, but I have a post comparing Flowdesk and ConvertKit, which are two that I have used and are very commonly used.
Flowdesk has a free plan, which is pretty limited. It has forms and landing pages, templates, and audience segmentation. It’s great for growing your list, but you can’t actually send emails on it, so it is kind of pointless to have, in my opinion. The next plans are quite expensive compared to others. But if you want to have an email that is really pretty and design is a really important part of your email and structure, which a lot of people, especially service providers who work with other service providers, really care about, you can look at Flowdesk.
ConvertKit has a free plan. It’s great for just sending basic emails and it’s good for archiving your emails. However, if you wanted to have lots of workflows, like different welcome sequences for different freebies, ConvertKit is really limited for that.
Then you have MailerLite, which I think is another good option. The emails are pretty plain, but they do have a good free plan that includes quite a lot of different workflows that you can set up. So if cost is the biggest thing you’re worried about, then MailerLite’s free plan might be the best option for you.
If you’re more interested in design and having really branded emails, Flowdesk might be the right option for you. And if you just want to start really simple and all you want to do is send out a newsletter, then ConvertKit could be a good option.
But go compare each of the different ones yourself.(You can read my blog post to see how I felt about ConvertKit and Flodesk and choose one that will work best for your needs.)
The other thing I would say is if you’re not planning on sending lots of emails and you just want to send one once a month, I would recommend just using a free plan if you don’t have any other workflows that you want to set up, or using MailerLite. If you’re paying a lot for a subscription to an email platform, you should be using it regularly. If you’re only going to use it once or twice a month, I don’t think you should pay for it.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
We’ve already talked about inconsistent sending, but trying to stay consistent is a little bit like posting on socials. It’s helpful, it’s good for your email service provider to trust you, and it’s less likely for you to end up in promotions or spam. If you send very inconsistently, it can signal to email service providers that you’re not as trustworthy. Also, people will forget about you if it doesn’t come out regularly and they’re not looking forward to it.
However, I will preface this with saying do not burn yourself out, and it’s totally fine to take a break from sending emails. If you have to miss a week, your subscribers are not going to hate you forever. It won’t destroy your email list. If you need to take a break, you can just start sending again. If you set up your email correctly and give them a really good incentive and a reason to keep reading, it won’t matter if you miss a few because they’ll still be excited to read them. The main thing is to make sure that you have created an email that people actually want to read.
The next big mistake is writing for yourself instead of writing for your readers. Like I said, you want to pick one target person, one target audience, one dream reader, and you’re going to write every newsletter to them. Don’t write the newsletter for you, write it for your audience. You want to write in your voice about things that are interesting to you, but you always want to make sure that your newsletters are valuable to your audience and that they’re going to be interested in what you’re writing.
Make sure that you are writing for your ideal client, not just anyone, not everyone, and not for you, but for the person who you want to read the newsletter. Make sure that you keep your voice conversational.
Another issue is either using ChatGPT to write it and not editing it so it sounds unnatural, or writing it too professionally. Make sure that you’re writing in a consistent voice.
Don’t overload your emails with too much content. I have made this mistake and it’s something that I’ve had to refine a lot as I’ve grown my business – trying to do too much in each email. Not only did that make it hard for my audience to read the whole email because it was too much, but it also led to me getting burnt out because I was writing really long emails every single week.
You can switch up your format. You don’t have to stick to the same thing every week. You can rotate through different sections, or just make it shorter and focus on something that is short, impactful, and valuable instead of writing a huge essay.
Another common mistake is using too many images. This is something to be super aware of, especially if you’re using Flowdesk. Flowdesk will encourage you to use a lot of their design blocks or images, and a lot of people do. However, email platforms will read those blocks as images. If your email has too many images, it is more likely to trigger a spam filter because it can look promotional, so it might end up in promotions or spam and be less likely for your audience to read it.
So make sure that you’re always balancing your images and your text. I recommend having at least 50% text and 50% images, and if possible, having more text than images.
In Conclusion: Write Something People Would Miss
The test that you want to ask yourself is: would someone notice if you stopped sending?
Would someone care if you stopped sending?
Would somebody email you to say, hey, I miss your emails?
Are you writing something that is so entertaining that it brightens people’s week and they get excited to read it? Are you writing something so valuable that you’re helping people grow their businesses or make their lives better? Are you writing something that is so interesting that people can’t wait to open your emails?
I know it’s easier said than done, but realistically, the difference between a newsletter that people ignore and one that people want to read is something that is actually interesting and that makes their lives better, whether that is entertaining them, helping them grow something, or making them feel better about themselves.
You need to write something that people are going to miss, and that really comes from following those first few steps and making sure that you are planning something that is for your dream audience and that is going to give them value in their life.
And then secondary to that, staying consistent, focusing on building connection, and remembering that that is more important than perfection.
The last thing that I will leave you with is, as always with everything in business, don’t overthink it.
I have redesigned my newsletter and added multiple sections loads of different times.
You are not stuck on one thing.
The best thing you can do is just, once you have a plan and you’ve finished planning from this blog post, just start. You can tweak your newsletter as you go. The best thing about email and newsletters as a medium is you can measure statistics from your sending, you can test different things, you can see what’s working, and you can change it every single week.
Once you have enough subscribers, you can even ask them what they like to see. Don’t overthink it. Just start writing your newsletter, and you can always change it.
The Hot Gossip, The 411
More from The Blog
If you loved this post, and you want to get the 411 on more things copy and marketing – here’s your next read, all lined up.
Hi, I’m Elle
Website Copywriter, Unapologetic Girls’ Girl, And (According To Clients) An “Absolute Dream.”
I’m also an ambassador for romanticizing business and making it fun, an expert in non-toxic conversion copy, a Miranda Priestley apologist, and voted most likely to over-deliver and overshare.
But — you know what else I am?
A girl who’s tired of seeing talented, creative women settling for mediocre copy and generic branding because they think they have to do it all themselves, or they’re waiting for permission to step into their It Girl era and become the hot brand they’re supposed to be.
Which is why I’d love for you to finally get copy that reflects your full potential — even if you can’t quite yet put that into words.
