Have you been struggling to get your dream client’s attention?
I want you to picture this scenario: you’re scaling your service-based business, helping only the people you want to help with their services. Your clients respect you, pay their bills on time, and you’re able to help them because they’re exactly who you should be working with.
Sound a bit far-fetched?
I get it. When you first start your business you often find yourself taking any and every client you can just to get paid.
But what if you could get your dream client’s attention and get them to actually buy from you?
One of the hardest things about growing your business online is competing with all the noise in the online space and actually getting the attention of your dream clients.
Let’s talk about how to cut through that noise and start landing leads from exactly who you want to work with.
What’s Your Niche?
Before you can really start talking to your dream client, you need to make sure you’re clear on who you actually want to work with.
I’ve seen a lot of business owners, especially service providers, think that they have to niche down to a really narrow thing.
Think of providing accounting services for gym owners.
While having a narrow niche can help you get started, your actual niche might be more about what you do than who you serve.
Niching Down Your Services
When I first started Captain Coder, I thought that I was going to work with other digital marketing experts and be their go-to website person.
The problem with this is that not only was it a narrow niche, but I also found that many of them were apt to DIY their websites because they felt like they understood that part of marketing.
I did what most new business owners do and started taking various clients, thanks to referrals, some networking connections, and Facebook groups.
Working with a few different types of businesses helped to find that I really wanted to work with other service providers like myself, but my main niche was to focus on helping them grow online with their website.
When someone asks what I do now, I don’t even say that I run a marketing agency. I run a website agency.
Your niche should take into account who you want to serve, but you probably also need to narrow down what you want to do when you work with them.
Defining Your Dream Client
If you’re pretty clear on what you do and who your niche is, it makes it that much easier to pin down your dream client.
Let’s take a step back for a second.
Today’s episode is about helping you to break through the online noise and get your dream client’s attention.
Why are we taking time to talk about niches and defining who you serve?
Because if you’re not clear on who you’re trying to speak to, it’s nearly impossible to get them to listen.
When you want to cut through the noise and attract your dream client, you need to do so by making them think you’re talking directly to them.
You can’t do that if you don’t know who they are.
Create a Buyer Persona
One of the things that I teach my students at Wichita State every semester is to create a buyer persona.
A Buyer Persona, or a picture of your ideal customer, is a tool that you can use to create a simple profile of who you’re wanting to talk to. This is fictional, but it can be based on one of your current favorite clients. Especially if you want to attract more customers just like that client.
While many buyer persona tools (like this handy one from Hubspot) will have you focus on some of the demographics of your person, you also want to ensure you’re thinking about what they’re looking for by working with you.
Three important things with your buyer personas are figuring out:
- What are their goals?
- What do they want to achieve?
- What problem are they trying to solve?
You need to know what your ideal customer wants and what problem they’re trying to solve when they come to you. Most of us are motivated by simple factors – increasing our revenue or saving time – but you want to drill down to the core answer. Then, you’ll look at your business and find where your products and services align with solving the problems your customers have.
Breaking Through the Noise
Now that you have a much better understanding of who you’re actually trying to talk to, it makes it far easier to get their attention.
Think about the amount of marketing messaging you’re bombarded with every single day. What ads and posts do you personally pay attention to?
It’s the ones that feel like that company is talking directly to you and what you need.
Let’s talk about 5 ways you can break through the noise and attract your dream client.
What Does Your Dream Client Want?
When you create your buyer persona around a specific fictional person, it’s far easier to know exactly what your dream client wants.
Going back to our example about an accountant that helps gym owners, perhaps your dream client is a personal trainer. You help them keep track of their various Venmo payments, track possible deductions, and then ensure that they’re keeping the most of their money when it comes to tax time.
What does this potential dream client actually want?
It’s pretty simple – they want to keep as much of the money they’re earning as possible. Doing freelance gig work can be a roller coaster of earnings, so as an accountant who helps them you can show them how to spread out their income to make it feel more stable, pay in quarterly estimates so they don’t get a surprise in April, and potentially help them with bookkeeping tasks so they have an excellent financial picture throughout the year.
The key here is to find the motivation for your dream client behind hiring your business – keeping as much of their own money as possible – and then show them how your services help them do just that.
If you’re not totally clear on why some of your clients hired you – ask them! Find out why they love working with you and the main reason they were looking for help in the first place.
You can also reach out in various Facebook groups where you think your dream client is hanging out and ask people to provide 15 minutes of their time for a quick marketing research call. This can be incredibly helpful if you’re shifting your dream client at all or if you haven’t signed the type of client you really want to work with.
Focus on Their Problems and How You Solve Them
When you know what your client wants, it’s easy to ask yourself what problems they have.
As a service provider, your entire business model revolves around solving problems for your clients which makes this step incredibly easy for you.
What do you do specifically to help your clients get over that hurdle and make their lives easier?
For that gym owner, their problem is likely a feast and famine-earning pattern. They have good months and bad months and then they always owe more at tax time than they’d planned for. It’s hard for them to budget and know if they can actually invest in growing their business or not.
The accountant helping gym owners can talk in their marketing about how they provide services that solve those problems. Hiring them means that you can have a stable income and know exactly what your financial year might look like, taking out the guesswork in growing your personal training business.
When you’re speaking directly to your dream clients’ problems and pain points, they’re far more likely to listen. It triggers an “Oh yea, I struggle with that, too!” Even better is when you can showcase how your services help to solve that problem and give them hope that things can be better.
Show the Transformations You Help Get
This is exactly where you tie those problems into the transformation you help your clients achieve.
Your dream client doesn’t just want you to understand their problems. They want to see that you’ve helped other people transform from that issue into something far more positive.
The transformation is quite literally the outcome that your dream client is hoping to get when they work with you. Showing that you’ve helped someone else that looks just like them reach their goals and have a better life because they’ve worked with you? That’s powerful.
One of the best ways to showcase these transformations is to get reviews from happy clients. Ask them to talk about where they were and where your services have helped them end up.
For that accountant, a transformation can look like a personal trainer who was able to invest in their own space, have a stable salary, and always be prepared for the end of year tax time. But the biggest transformation here? An increase in their overall income.
Demonstrate That You Care
I think one of the most important parts about marketing that many of us forget is that we’re quite literally appealing to another human being.
Even if that person works in a business that they don’t own themselves, they’re still human. They still have needs and they’ll be driven by those same problems and issues that an entrepreneur or even solopreneur would.
Marketing is all about psychology and empathy. When your dream client feels like you actually care about helping them – and not just the money they’ll pay you – you’re far more likely to get their attention.
One way to showcase this is by simply asking yourself – why do I understand my dream client better than someone else?
Me, I love working with service-based businesses because that’s what I do. I’ve grown and scaled my business from freelance and built a team. I know what works when you’re working with other business owners and providing services as your main source of income.
I also understand the fear of not always knowing what comes next and not knowing how to run a business because you’re really just an expert at what you do.
It’s easy for me to weave that story into my social media, my email marketing, and even when I’m talking to a prospective client directly.
Make it real and authentic, but never be afraid to demonstrate that you care about them.
Tell Them What to Do Next
Getting your dream client to stop their scroll and check out your social media post is one thing, but if you really want to grab their attention, you have to give them something to do.
How fast do you forget that last Instagram reel you watched? Or do you really remember every email that you read, even from your favorite newsletter?
When you have their attention, you need to capitalize on it by telling them what they need to do next.
Named a “call to action” or CTA, you’re quite literally asking your dream client to take action after you’ve gotten their attention.
This doesn’t have to be a “buy now” or even booking a call with you; it can be as simple as sending you a DM, sharing your post, or downloading your free guide.
Having a CTA on your website is especially important because you’ve actually gotten your dream client to walk through the doors of your business online. And yet, 70% of small business B2B websites lack any kind of CTA.
You can literally get ahead of the competition and grab that dream client just by telling them what you want them to do next.
Attract Your Dream Clients
The only way to run a service-based business that gives you the things you want as an entrepreneur is to work with the right clients for you.
Knowing who you want to work with and how you can help them solve their problems will go a long way to breaking through all of the online noise and fully getting their attention.
The last thing you want as a business owner is to work with people that don’t value you, your expertise, or even your own boundaries.
It’s time to attract your dream clients instead. By following these five steps, you’re going to be amazed at how easy it is to start getting the right people in your orbit and bring them back to your website to generate leads and sales.
If putting together a solid buyer persona sounds overwhelming for you, then I’ve got good news. I’ll be announcing a new service soon that will help you break through that noise, get clear on your dream client, and give you the plan you need to attract them.
Come back next week to learn more!
