How Do I Attract My Ideal Customers?

If you’re in business you’ve probably already worked out that the “wrong” customers send you broke.  They are the ones that want a top quality job instantly at the lowest price.

These people are not interested in working with you for your mutual benefit; they’d probably be happier if slavery were re-introduced and if you were their first body.

So how do you find sufficient good customers to build yourself a strong and profitable business in which it’s a joy to work?

The first step in the process may sound a bit trite, but it is as simple as drawing up a list of the characteristics that you find all of your present (and past) best customers have in common.

Here’s a simple step-by-step process for winning great customers whenever  you want them:

1. Draw up a list of the essential common attributes of the very best customers in your industry.  Those may include:
   • Annual sales value
   • Number of employees
   • Corporate structure (private or public company, Government department, contractor)
   • Presentation
   • Mindset of management (progressive, oriented towards investing in their people, etc)
   • Location
   • Market sector
2. Work out where they gather:
   • Do they frequent certain associations, events, conventions or watering holes?
   • Are there some places where your advertising or promotions are more likely to be seen by your ideal client base than others?
   • Do your ideal clients tend to locate their businesses or their homes in certain locations?
3. Work out what they read:
   • Magazines, newspapers, blogs
   • eNewsletters
   • Certain TV or video channels or sites
   • Resolve to advertise or publish in the areas and in the media that your ideal client is most likely to use – and nowhere else!
4. Survey some candidates to discover what they are looking for in an ideal supplier (you):
   • Once you have identified your ideal client, select the cream of the crop, put together the 10 most important questions you could ever ask them, and survey a sample of them.  If this is not marketing I don’t know what is, by the way.  I’d expect you to get some “bites” in the process, as well as some invaluable data on what type of information, service or products you should be promoting to these folk.
5. Create a contact system that is low effort which you can maintain over time.
   • It is said that in this day and age of information overload that you don’t gain “mindshare” (aware recognition) for your brand or your product until you have had at least 7 varied contacts with an individual person.  That is one helluva lot of contact, and few of us could support that level of effort – if it were personal and customised.  So, how can you establish a process whereby your best prospects will be contacted by you on a regular and varied basis so that on that one occasion out of ten when they are actually ready to buy (or consider buying) what you are selling, you are there in their field of attention?
   • Here’s a tip:  If you contact people on a frequency of less than once every 13 weeks they forget you.  If you contact them more often than once every 10 weeks you probably become a pest.  Work it out for yourself.
6. Create a quick response system.
   • No point in creating a great contact system if you muff the opportunity when someone responds to your efforts.
   • Make sure you have thought out what to do and say before you get your first response then make sure that anyone else in the business who is likely to take an incoming response, knows what to say and what to do to heighten the likelihood of success for both you and your about-to-be newest client.
7. Keep your promises!
   • Last but not least:  Make sure that whatever experience, service, outcome or feeling you promised during your marketing and promotional phase, is delivered in tact, perfectly and completely to those who respond.

You might read this and say to yourself, “Yep, that sounds right, but who’s got the time to do all of this?”

The answer is simple:  Those business owners or managers who have realised that working for the wrong customers just keeps you busy and broke, and have decided to do something differently for a change:  to reserve, put aside, make the time to create the type of process we’ve outlined here; and then make the resolution to apply them.

If you choose to become one of those managers, stand by for a whole different customer experience!