How to Gain Insights Into Your Ideal Clients

I remember the first time I tried to create an ideal client persona. It was about a year into running my business during a workshop on client clarity for entrepreneurs.

The facilitator told us to close our eyes and picture our ideal client, and then write down as many demographic features as possible from this vision. While we contemplated, our faces turned to the heavens (perhaps hoping for divine intervention) she tossed out a number of questions.

What gender are they? How old are they? What do they do for a living? What is their name?

My thoughts swam unhelpfully. The answers I jotted down felt made-up, but they were nothing compared to what I had to conjure for the next set of questions:

What do they do in their spare time? Where do they go on holiday? What are their career ambitions? What keeps them up at night? What do they dream about in their life? What holds them back from success? Do they have children? Dogs? A partner? What kind of a house do they live in? How much disposable income do they have?

I could no sooner answer some of these questions for a fictional character than I could for myself, or for anyone. The disposable income answer earned a snort from a woman near me – she told me later that she suspected we all answered, “a lot of disposable income.”

The concept of personas has floated around in my peripheries every since – I tried my best to be more specific, and then gave up altogether, feeling like any persona I came up with was baseless and left out many people I work with who don’t fit the profile.

Eventually I crossed paths again with ideal client personas, when working with bigger businesses. By learning it was done on a larger scale, with SEO insights to draw from, I came to 3 conclusions:

1. Ideal client personas are extremely important in creating a brand and marketing strategy that attract the people you want to work with
2. Coming up with useful, inspiring personas require more work than making guesses about past clients and dreaming about future ones
3. Even businesses with the best resources struggle to understand their clients, because they get stuck on exterior details, rather than investigating true personality insights

At its core, truly understanding your clients means taking the wheel of your business and driving it where you want to go. When you understand who your clients are, you also understand who they are not, and this means a lot less time mucking around with expensive gimmicks and more time doing what you do best.

For the uninitiated when it comes to ideal client personas, here are some reasons why ideal client personas are so useful.

A Client Persona

• Is a short (1 or 2 pages) report on a person you love to work with, and who, ideally, loves to work with you. It’s like taking a mental snapshot of a person and describing them in detail.
• Transforms the concept of an ideal client into a real person with a complex personality, specific challenges, and unique desires that are aligned with what you offer and how you offer it. It includes demographic information, but a good persona profile goes much deeper.
• With these insights, you can focus your brand, messaging, services, and even business development based on your ideal client’s behaviours – this helps your business grow in the direction you want.

Here are the ingredients that go into creating a truly insightful ideal client persona so you can start making them for your business.

Client Feedback (past & present)

The first ingredient is client feedback gained through interviewing or surveying past clients you enjoyed working with, current clients, and prospective clients. If you’re an entrepreneur or small business, the best way to go about this is to reach out to them personally and ask if you could interview them for half an hour or so.

During this interview, ask them things like: How did they find you? What was going on in their life that made you an exciting discovery for them? What were their challenges then? What was their experience like working with you? What did they like the most about working with you? What was the result of your work together?

Interviewing is a bit of an art, and the more people you speak with the better you’ll get. You’re looking for the answers that go beyond the obvious. A dog trainer’s client might answer “I wanted to train my dog”, but that isn’t everything. Dig! By doing this, you gain a deeper understanding of the language your clients use, and not just the language you use when you talk about what you do.

*As a fun bonus note, this is what bigger businesses can struggle with. Because their customer base tends to be large and their relationship with their clients more distant, they have to rely on surveys, whereas you can use your deeper relationships to your advantage with trusted, one-on-one conversations.

EXAMPLE: A dog trainer

A dog trainer, on the most obvious level, is seeking an ideal client who owns a dog that needs training. Perhaps this dog trainer has served a few happy clients in the past, and she decides to interview them.

During the course of her interviews, she learns that her past clients found her through word-of-mouth, and are often first-time dog owners without a clue how to train dogs, but interested in doing it right.

They love her approachable, non-intimidating manner and her disarming way of answering questions they wanted to ask but thought were dumb, as if she was reading their mind. In the end, not only did they have a well-trained, lovely dog, but developed a more trusting relationship with their dog. Strangely, a couple of them say, they gained a sense of empowerment during the process too.

Historical Data

Businesses who have invested in SEO have an upper hand on data, which helps answer demographic questions quite accurately. They gather data from their website, ads, social media, and other assets to achieve more clarity about the kind of people interacting with their marketing, signing up for their offerings, and returning for more.

Smaller businesses and entrepreneurs don’t have as much data to work with, but you can still conduct an analysis on the people you have worked with before. The aim here is to unearth those patterns that connect people you instinctively and honestly like working with. Personally, I think it’s ok at this stage to come up with a ballpark in terms of age range, gender, location, and other details. You also need more than one persona if your services are differentiated!

EXAMPLE: A dog trainer

Now that the dog trainer has spoken to her past and current clients, she can examine some of the external details they have in common. She might notice that they are more often young couples in their 20s and 30s with big dogs, or that they are single people who have loftier goals to train their dogs for agility and share her joy of competition and precision. Maybe they tend to live in urban centres, and maybe more of them tend to identify as women. This is all helpful demographic info to keep in mind.

However, all businesses bring in a variety of people as consumers. Just because the dog trainer notices that she serves a lot of young people doesn’t mean she must refuse to work with older people, for example. The purpose isn’t to create rules, but to clarify intentions for the future. This is where a lot of businesses get stuck. A single persona profile is a very small box indeed.

This is where the secret sauce comes in: the third side of this puzzle.

Personality insights

Personality insights are buried deeper than our consciousness. You may ask your client about their challenges, their desires, their dreams, their fears… and they’ll answer you as best they can, but they don’t know the whole truth. As the expert on your clients, it’s your job to understand how their mind works.

Along this line of thought, a popular Hubspot blog about business personas echoes my suggestion to conduct interviews with past, present, and prospective clients, with an interesting caveat: “Through these interviews, you’re trying to understand your customers’ (or potential customers’) goals, behaviors, and motivators. But keep in mind that people aren’t always great at reflecting on their behaviors to tell you what drives them at their core.” 

Their advice in light of this is to ask more “why” questions, which can certainly help you drill down deeper, but you’ll always hit a wall because people often simply don’t know why, no matter how willing they are to be transparent with you. All they can do is speculate.

In other words, we are quite blind to our own behaviour. But when we understand how people tick, we start to see what kind of people are attracted to working with us beyond demographics. To gain personality insights, we need to dive below consciousness into the collective unconscious. This is where archetypes and BrandPsyche live.

How archetypes help you understand the psyche of your clients

Archetypes reflect deeper characteristics we share with others –our fears, our goals, the darkest parts of ourselves, how and why we get in our own way, our gifts… we are not alone in these. However, people are unique, and in the context of business, we can understand personality generalities and apply it in more nuanced terms to what we offer people and what they experience with us.

For our trusty dog trainer, this means figuring out:

• Why do the dog trainer’s clients really want to train their dog, beyond just wanting an obedient dog? How do they envision their life will change when they have a well-trained dog? What inspired them to get a dog in the first place? Why is companionship important? Why is trust important?

• What do they struggle with on a personality level? And I don’t mean, “they don’t know how to train a dog” – that is one of those external factors that they would admit to without understanding their own driving factors. I mean, what makes them fearful of having an untrained dog? What makes them doubt their ability to be a good, responsible dog owner? Do they doubt their ability to lay down the law when their dog misbehaves, or to be decisive?

• What do they desire from the experience of dog training? Ask a prospective client and they might say they want it to be easy and structured. And you could pat yourself on the back and move on. But this is another incomplete answer. How do they really want to feel during the training process? Empowered? Supported? Knowledgeable? Connected? What kind of a relationship do they want to develop with their dog, and what does a “well-trained” dog even mean to them?

When you put these three puzzle pieces together – first-hand accounts from clients, demographic data, and deep personality insights – what you receive is an ideal client persona that is based on a real human you love working with, including deeper insights on what their true driving factors, goals, and challenges are.

Here is what the final result might look like for our dog trainer:

The dog trainer recognizes that she loves working with people who don’t just want a well-trained dog, but a dog that can compete in agility or be trained for specific jobs. Sure, she can help regular people train their dogs to do the basics, but that’s not what lights her up. Her ideal clients, regardless of their demographics, have a precise, competitive streak. They love dogs, and have generally had dogs in the past. What they really love about competition is a feeling of oneness and deep teamwork with their dog. Their enjoyment and satisfaction goes beyond a walk in a park with a ball – they and their dog have the best time together when they’re training and learning.

Now she can focus her brand and marketing efforts towards speaking directly to people like this, instead of diluting the message to everyone with a dog. These people might be a variety of ages, genders, and maybe even economic class, but generally they will find kindred spirits inside her training studio on a special level.