Finding Your Dream Client

Where can I find people to buy from me?

This is probably the #1 question I get asked and rightly so! We need people to serve. We want to find people who will interact with our content, learn, grow and share. We also want them to buy, right?

It all begins with your ICA, your Ideal Customer Avatar. You may have heard this term thrown around and it might have confused you, but basically, this is ONE person, your dream client. Depending on where you are in your journey this person is either made-up, representing your vision of an ideal client, or is based on a real person or combination of real people you’ve worked with before.

If you haven't worked with people yet, or not with people you want to work with, then your ICA can be a made-up person representing your dream client. This is a great starting point. But here's the thing, it needs to be just one person. I know this idea is really hard to take on board when you are starting out because you want to serve everyone. You don't want to narrow your market, and you don't want to constrain things. You want to reach a lot of people because you want to make a lot of impact.

Listen, I know you have a big heart, and I know that you want to serve lots of people. I want to help you serve lots of people, but if you are sharing a generic message for all the people to cover old and young, male and female, online-based and product-based - whatever it is - then you are saying nothing, my friend. If you want to reach the right people and have them pay attention to you, you have to speak to them specifically.

Important: Picking an ICA doesn’t mean that you can only sell to one person. Your product or service may be great for lots of people! The critical thing to understand is that your messaging needs to speak to one person. This is marketing my friend. When you speak specifically to your ICA you attract your dream clients. To clarify: your messaging, your online presence, the social media channels that you pick, all depend on who you are talking to, and you need to pick one person to see results. Your actual product however, can serve many different kinds of people. Make sense?

Let's talk a little bit more about picking your ICA because this is something that a lot of people are really super resistant to, but believe me, it’s something you get better at over time. Let me give you some examples from my own journey.

I started in finance, got an MBA from Columbia Business School and then went into marketing working for Sainsbury's. After 5 years and two kids I left to raise my family and went on to have two more kids. I spent quite a few years focused on being a mom to my 4 kids because that was my priority. 5 years ago, I retrained as a health coach and opened a practice. I was targeting busy mums but was attracting entrepreneurial women. That led my business to evolve into working with women in business with a focus on productivity. Based on what my clients were asking of me, my own businesses evolved to teaching newly entrepreneurial women how to find clients and make money.

At every step of this journey, my ICA changed and so did my messaging. As a health coach, I spoke to busy moms. Next it became entrepreneurs and then more specifically, female entrepreneurs. That was too general, and I refined it to female entrepreneurs who were moms. Then I had busy female entrepreneurs working from home, and right now, my ideal client is you, female entrepreneurs starting online businesses from home trying to crack the magic of finding clients and making money.

Do you see how that's a really specific category of female entrepreneur?

Once you know who your ICA is, you need to start fleshing them out. When you communicate, you want people to say, “how did she know what I was thinking?” or “it feels like she’s in my head.” When this happens, you have someone who will engage, click, look to find out more and buy.

It begins by discovering who the clients are that light you up. If you haven't worked with people who lit you up before, who would light you up? Who is that dream person, that one person? Once you have that, you need to start diving deep into who that person is. That work is the crux of creating a great ICA and delivering effective messaging that will talk to your people and set you apart from your competitors and all the online noise. It's not just about demographics, but that's a good starting point. You want to give this person a name. What do they look like? Are they married? Do they have kids? Where do they live? What does their house look like? How much money do they make a year? Figure out those things because they’re important. But then you need to really drill down and ask some big questions.

First of all, what keeps this person up at night? What are they struggling with? What are their pain points in relation to the product or service that you sell, and more generally in life? What are they worrying about? For example: “Are my kids on the internet too much?” “Am I a bad mom?” “Is everyone going to find out that I don't know what I'm doing with my business?”

Then you explore their dreams. What are their desires? What are the things that are going to light them up? What do they want in this world? What do they want for their business? What do they want for themselves? Write these things down, make a list, brainstorm and figure out what it is they truly want.

Now that you have their pain points and their desires, let's figure out a little bit about what they do and how they interact. What kind of social media do they participate on? Does this person hang out on Facebook? Do they hang out on Insta? Are they a LinkedIn person? Are they on Twitter? Do they scroll? What do they stop to look at? What do they like to do in their free time? What magazines do they read, if they do at all? Do they buy all their stuff online? Where do they like to shop? What are their favourite brands? What do they like to eat? Do they like to go to restaurants? Do they like to interact with their friends?

Okay, pandemic aside, what do they like to do in their free time? Do they like to go to the theatre? Do they like to go to the movies? Do they like to go dancing? Do they like to go to Wrestling Mania? What is it that they like to do? What makes them happy? How do they interact and engage with others? You want to get in front of them where they are. If you figure out where your ideal client is, then you can talk to them in non traditional places where you might be able to stand out more. 

For example, if you're in my field and you're talking to women who are building a business from home, then you can target yoga and workout sites because these are things that these sorts of women tend to prioritise for themselves. The sort of things they buy, the kind of forums they go on, the exercise place they go to, are opportunities to think outside of the box and share your messaging in a different place. Maybe it’s something that you can even bring into your messaging.

This is the heart of ICA work. When you hear people talking about, "Oh, I'm doing all this work." This is the stuff. Listen, I'm going to be honest with you. It's hard work, but it’s worthwhile work. If you take the time to do this, you are going to save yourself hours, weeks and months because you will have the right messaging from the start. You are going to go to the right places where your ICA is hanging out and find your dream clients faster.

We've covered quite a lot here and I hope it doesn’t feel overwhelming. You don’t have to get this done in a day. Give yourself some time. I know it can be hard to go through this alone which is one of the reasons I’m currently building a membership site to cover these kinds of topics in depth. Inside that membership, I'm going to give the exact steps that I use for figuring out who your ICA is. There's so much more you can do like interviews and surveys, but that's for another time. This lesson has more than enough to get you started. 

Let’s recap: take these steps to figure out who your ICA is.

1. Pick one person.
2. Give them a bio: What’s their name? Who are they? What do they care about? What are they worried about? What do they aspire to? Answer all these questions.
3. Dive into their behaviour: Where do they hang out? What do they like to do? What do they not like to do? Dig deep.

That is your ICA, my friend, and that is the first step in finding clients that are dying to work with you.

I'd love to hear from you and find out what you discover. If you’re stuck, let me know in the comments below or pop me an email at [email protected]. I answer all my emails, and I would love to hear from you and help you move forward.

Committed to your success,

Marina x