7 Essential Steps to Market Yourself So You Can Attract Clients You Love

You want to fill your calendar with clients you love when you market yourself.

But given that marketing is 1,000 must-dos, shiny new objects popping up daily, and makes you feel salesey, it sounds like some fantasy, right?

The good news? It’s not crazy if you consider following the essential steps to bring in ideal clients. Set an intention to deeply know your perfect clients and their urgent problems rather than thinking about how it feels to ‘promote’ yourself. Attract dream clients with content that gives them hope for overcoming their pesky problems and reflects your unique expertise.

The best news? You can apply your deep client understanding with these 7 foundational steps, and bring in more of the clients you love.

My Aha! Women’s Earnings Gap Moment

I was a happy-busy small business marketing consultant for 15 years. I delighted in doing Jacqueline-of-all-trades projects like ghost-blogging, direct mail campaigns, and launches. While I loved supporting my clients who were doing amazing work, four years ago I felt an unexpected pull.

It was because I freaked out when I learned this:

Women entrepreneurs own 46% of all private US businesses.

Sadly, women bring in only 4% of the revenues.

While men, owning just over half of said businesses, earn the rest.

Source: American Express

What!?

Taking 1,000 deep breaths, as I’d never seen myself as a mentor, I decided my next best action was to share my foundational knowledge. I created a mentoring program to teach women entrepreneurs how to create content that brings in ideal clients so they can grow their incomes (without becoming marketing experts!).

Again, not ever intending to author a book, I spent 23 months writing and self-publishing, She Markets, A Guide for Women Entrepreneurs. All so I can reach those women entrepreneurs who I might never meet.

My biggest mission when I pivoted from consulting to mentoring, was to empower purpose-driven women so they can impact more clients and earn more income. I wanted women to close the entrepreneurial earnings gap. And that’s still my biggest mission today.

Among the slew of insights I’ve learned since my pivot is, tons of talented, mission-driven women feel like marketing their business is bragging. Which is—to use a technical term—bananas!

Worse, often women feel like it’s ‘tooting their own horn’ to talk about how they help clients. You can guess where this story goes. As a sucky result, too often client-generating activities fall dead last on women’s to-do lists. Can you relate?

To sum it up, I’m on a mission stamp out marketing-resistance (procrastination) amongst women entrepreneurs. Are you with me? Great, let’s dive in.

How to Market Yourself in Manageable Bites

Since it’s nearly dinner time, let’s break it all down into manageable-marketing bites.

First, the good news: you don’t have to become a marketing expert. Yes, dear reader, you can quote me on this. No matter what the gurus say, as a business owner, you don’t have to become an expert marketer. You simply have to become an expert on your ideal clients. Which you already are!

Now, your next task is to organize what you know about your clients into resources you can tap into when creating content. Keep reading if you’d like help doing this!

In the spirit of manageable actions, here are 7 bite-sized steps to make your marketing flow like a beautiful babbling brook. Instead of how you may view it today, as a slog through mud and muck. Sound good? Yay!

Step #1: Set a tangible, 90-day goal for your client generating efforts.

When it comes to bringing clients closer to your business, decide exactly what you want to achieve the next 90 days. Don’t get tied up in knots over this. After all, you started your business to take care of yourself / your family. This isn’t anything new, but you’ve simply got to be proactive about marketing yourself so more of the right clients can find your business and you can be profitable, agreed?

For your first step, I want you to take a stand. Hey, this is private; no one sees it but you. Write down your specific goal in a notebook, moleskin, journal, or your computer. It can be the:

• number of new email subscribers you want on your list
• amount of money you intend to earn in the next 90 days
• number of additional prospective clients you want to add to your pipeline

Select a dollar amount, or number of new prospects or list subscribers, that’ll make you feel accomplished, impactful, and good about your business. That’s all, just put it down. See that wasn’t too bad, right? Keep this number handy as you go through the 90 days.

Step #2: Choose one to three ideal clients to market yourself to.

My industry tells you to select a target market or a niche market. I detest this method. The pitfall here is, when you’re told to “identify your target market” like many entrepreneurs, you may end up describing the clients you want in a general, vague way. And because no one explains the difference, you may settle on an age group and income level and consider yourself done. In today’s content-crammed world, target markets don’t cut it. Here’s why.

Your ideal client is a composite profile of the characteristics & attributes of the kind of client you want 1000 more just like.

Let’s say you’re a health coach in Los Angeles and you decide that your target market is: career women between ages 40 and 50 who live in LA. Hum, that’s a ginormous number of women. How do you drill down to who your women are, and what they specifically want to achieve with their health?

You might say okay, my ‘niche’ market is busy, career women between ages 40 and 50 who live in LA.

Here’s how even a niche market fall short. It’s a bit more focused with ‘busy’ career women as a niche, but still, a ton of women are busy. From that description, can you vividly picture one, actual, real woman? Nope. Sadly, it’s impossible to start meaningful conversations with thousands of women.

And your goal with messages and content is to ‘talk’ to your ideal client, so she knows that you understand her and her problems.

So now, make a bold choice. Of all of the dozens of client types you COULD serve, narrow it down. Choose one to three specific client types that you’d love to have 100 or 1,000 more just like. Click to this post for 7 questions to answer when getting clear on who exactly your ideal, dream clients are.

Step #3: Drill down & identify the top 5 most pressing problems for each client type.

What’s a pressing problem?

Your ideal clients' most pressing problems are the ones they're willing to PAY to solve.

Because you’re an expert, you’ll likely list 10 or 20 problems in your field that your ideal clients struggle with and should solve. Nice start! And yet, you can be more deliberate. Circle the 5 problems your clients are willing to pay anything to solve.

Why? Because those are the persistent, urgent, boulder-sized problems you want to discuss in your marketing content. That way, potential clients will click through to read, watch, or listen to your mind-blowing webpages, blogs, and videos, won’t they? And happily, you won’t struggle when it comes to getting the content together for your blog.

Step #4: Create your marketing content plan.

What’s a marketing content plan and, for gosh sakes, why do I actually need one?

Glad you asked! Your #1 priority when it comes to a road map to bring in dream clients, is your marketing content plan. Really? Yep, because,

The strategic foundation of your marketing:

talking to the RIGHT potential clients,

about the RIGHT problems.

Hence, we won’t be successful at reaching our people without a content plan that’s tailored to a ‘T’ to our ideal clients’ state-of-mind. That is, what are the exact problems your clients are focused on solving, right now? Please, don’t fall asleep here.

Wait, there’s more. Here’s another reason you must become clear on your ideal clients are AND the problems they’re looking to pay-to-solve. Because, as they thumb through inboxes / social feeds you want them to click on the amazing content you poured your heart and wisdom into, don’t you?

Back to your content plan, as you create it you’ll also decide how often you’re going to produce content. Choose the format and frequency of your content. Be sure you can keep up with the schedule you settle on. To help with your decision, what are you most comfortable doing?

• Do you love to write? If so, blogging maybe your content of choice.
• Maybe you’d rather have as close to a ‘real’ conversation with future clients as you can. If that’s you, record audio podcasts or videos.
• Or you can record videos and turn them into audio podcasts as a second piece of content. That way you have multiple ways for clients to find you online–and you only recorded your info once!

Ultimately, your goal’s to find the content creation method that feels comfy for you, and secondly, that makes it easy for you to be faithful to your schedule.

Ask yourself, what’s the format that’s going to make it easiest for you to connect with your audience? Is it talking and recording a video or podcast?

Some women tell me it’s easier to simply turn on an audio or video recorder (or a phone app) and start talking. They feel more connected by picturing clients and speaking to them as though they were sitting across the table. They say it’s easier to speak from their heart, by recording their advice and wisdom.

Others prefer sharing ideas and recommendations by writing blog posts or emails to their list.

Choose the content creation method that’s going to work for you. Honestly, the quality of your online presence depends on you developing and posting content. Consistently.

Your Online Presence Matters

Unfortunately, some entrepreneurs don’t think they need to be concerned about their online presence. Before you jump on that bandwagon, consider this: what do you do when someone recommends an expert? The first thing I do is Google the person’s name, don’t you?

So, since we agree that everybody googles anyone who’s recommended to us, do this for yourself: search your name often. Make sure you’re happy with the results that come up.

Do yourself a quick favor and check these:

• When a potential client finds you on LinkedIn, does your profile reflect how you’re helping clients today?
• Do you have social media profiles that you’ve ignored for months or years?

To put a bow on it, the best way to stay on top of your online presence is to ask:

1. Do you want future clients to see your online search results?
2. Does each page result represent how you currently serve clients? And not in the past?
3. Do you need to update profile details / information that doesn’t reflect the full value you provide your clients now?
4. How well do your search engine results contribute to the credibility you’ve earned? Do you need to change them?

Google a few experts in your field, you’ll find that LinkedIn ranks high for most business owners and professionals. Here's how search results come up for me, LinkedIn is high.

And here’s one more reason to create content on the regular.

• If you’re like 99% of entrepreneurs, you want to grow your email list.
• The best way to increase your list it is to provide consistent content that’s intriguing, irresistible, and fascinating to your dream clients.

After all, the only reason you should ever create marketing content is to educate, inspire, inform, or make your clients laugh about their pain points. If you can create content that makes your people smile while sharing your insights, go for it!

Step #5: Brainstorm content titles and email subject lines.

Here’s the fun part, you’re going to come up with catchy titles for blogs/videos and email subject lines for your list. To find helpful tips about how you can create catchy titles, check out this post.

The reality is, there’s no substitute for coming up with a catchy content title that expresses exactly the problem and outcome your clients are looking for that you’ve just described in your post. Experts say that 90% of your audience reads your title, headline, or subject line before they decide to click through to read your content.

All that to say, with a little practice you’ll be an awesome titles-writer!

As you write a subject line, close your eyes and ask yourself how would your ideal client describe this topic? Don’t be clever. Instead, be crystal clear with the words in your titles and subject lines. As much as you can, use the same exact words your ideal clients use to describe their problems.

Step #6: Create your 90-Day Client Connection Plan.

Your 90-Day Client Connection Plan is your guide to track of each piece of marketing content you intend to create and publish weekly. Your content may be blog posts on your website, social media posts, articles or short update-posts on LinkedIn, podcasts, or videos on any of your channels.

Your Client Connection Plan eliminates the dreaded dilemma of asking yourself, “What should I do for marketing today?”. Instead, you can spend your valuable time creating marketing, messaging, and content to share stories about the kinds of people you help and the ways you help them.

I recommend a spreadsheet to keep your topics organized. That way, after you decide how often you’ll create content, you can plug in your topics by the week.

Yours might work like this:

• Publish marketing content about the top problems for ‘Perfect Client A’ the first week of the month.
• Publish your content about the top problems for ‘Perfect Client B’ the next week, and so forth.

Or if you publish more or less frequently than once a week, find a rotation that works for you.

Want more detail about how to do this part? Find it on this post.

Step #7: Calendar your marketing commitments to yourself.

This is where the rubber hits the road, you must set an intention to support yourself.

Marketing yourself and your business is as crucial to your success as providing excellent service to clients.

When it comes to putting yourself out there with your online content and presence, fulfill your commitment to yourself. They say, self-care is just as important as caring for others.

Think of marketing your business this way, it’s self-care for your business.

What’s Next?

As you can see, these 7 steps give you some tips about how to strengthen your client-generating skills.

If you’re looking for more specific step-by-step guidance about creating marketing content that brings in your dream clients, you’ll enjoy my book. She Markets, A Guide for Women Entrepreneurs provides deep detail, how to exercises, templates to follow and more. You can find it here on Amazon.

I’m so rooting for you,

~ Cynthia