5 Steps to Creating an Ideal Client Persona

Social media marketing can be overwhelming – especially if you have no idea who you’re talking to or what to talk about. Without having an ideal client persona, you’re playing the “hope they find me” game, which rarely ends well. Whether you’re new to marketing your home staging business or you’ve been in business awhile, understanding who you’re marketing to is essential for getting leads and sales online.

When clients come to me feeling frustrated because they feel like they’re doing “all the things” and still not seeing results, then it’s time to go back to basics: creating an ideal client persona.

And if you’re seeing this as a brand new stager who’s literally just starting out, then this is a critical step you should take before you start posting to social media. Why? Because without having a clear sense of who you’re talking to, your messaging won’t be dialed into what they need to see and hear for them to make a buying decision to work with you.

As I often say, if you’re posting on social media without understanding your ideal client, you’re wasting your time.

When I’m working with clients to help them build a solid marketing strategy, one of the very first things we work on is creating their buyer or ideal client persona. That’s because any social media content strategy is based on knowing who we’re going to be talking to. Without knowing that, it’s going to fail.

Understanding your ideal clients and knowing their needs, wants, desires and pain points is critical if you want to create marketing assets that speak to them and move them to work with you. It’s also the first step towards creating your customer journey, which is another essential step in building a solid marketing strategy that gets results.

So, what is a buyer or ideal client persona?

It’s essentially a profile of your ideal client, and it itemizes everything about them that’s relevant to help you create marketing content that will motivate them to buy from or work with you. It’s important for you to understand this not just because you know who you’re marketing to but also to make sure that you’re building your business and marketing strategy that you actually want to work with.

So, how do you create this ideal client persona? Well, there are five distinct steps to take to create this profile.

Create a Client Profile

You want to base your ideal client persona on real customers, so ask yourself the following questions:

• Which clients do I enjoy working with?
• Which clients energize me, and which drain me?
• Which clients pay on time?
• Which clients will pay me what I’m worth?
• Which clients will be the most profitable?
• Which clients are going to provide me with projects that I actually want to do?

Dig into the Details

Now that you’ve got a sense of who you want to work with, it’s time to get to know them really well. Start by defining their:

• Demographics: Age, education, religion, etc.
• Geographics: Their location
• Psychographics: Their attitudes, interests, and opinions
• Behavior: What actions do they take every day?
• Buying Decisions: What information do they need to hear to make a purchase decision?

The better you understand them, the better you can hone your marketing messaging to attract, nurture, and convert them into paying customers.

Define the “Before & After” State of Mind

In order to do this, you need to answer the following questions:

• What do your potential clients have now? What don’t they have?
• What are they feeling right now? What or how do they want to feel?
• What’s their average day like?
• What is their status? How might their status change after working with you?
• What are their goals? How might your services help them reach those goals?

Identify Challenges and Pain Points

Customer pain points are specific challenges or issues that they are facing. Each one of these provides you an opportunity to identify how your unique services can help them overcome those challenges or issues. So now it’s time to:

• Sit down and itemize every single challenge, pain point, and issue that your prospect has. Get detailed. The more problems, the better.
• Once you have those things itemized, for every issue or pain point, write down which of your services solves that issue and how it does that. Map it out.

Find your People

Once you understand your ideal client’s pain points, then you will begin to uncover their touchpoints. A touchpoint is a point of contact between a business and its customers. This is your customer’s journey, and knowing this will help you create curated content that speaks directly to them.

Take the time to do this exercise fully and then map out your prospect’s journey. Once you do both of these exercises, you’ll be in a much better position to create marketing content and create a strategy that will help you get in front of your ideal audience, speak to them, and get them to make the leap to working with you.

Just remember …

If you offer different services and work with different types of clients, you’ll need to repeat this exercise for each client you serve. Their personas and journeys will both be different, so you will need to create unique marketing content for each type of client you want to work with.

It’s essential that you take the time to build this foundation so that you can keep creating mindful and impactful content that resonates with your ideal audience, as it will keep you from wasting your precious time (and money) on marketing campaigns that don’t work.

Need help with this? My FREE 5-Day Supercharge your Social Media Challenge walks you through exactly how to create your ideal client persona, develop content pillars, and supercharge your social media presence. All so you’ll be able to create content that speaks to your ideal client, sets your business apart online, and generates leads and referrals from social media.