Are You Targeting the Right Ideal Clients? 5 Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them - EP # 242

Struggling to attract high-quality clients, even though you’re working hard on your marketing? You’re not alone! 

In this episode, Maggie breaks down the five most common mistakes small service business owners make when it comes to defining and targeting their ideal clients, and shares practical strategies to fix them.

You’ll learn:

• Why generic messaging keeps you stuck with low conversions and high-maintenance clients
• The real definition of an “ideal client” (it’s not just about demographics!)
• How to update your client avatar as your business evolves
• Why repetition and specificity matter more than you think
• Simple steps to refine your messaging and start attracting clients who truly value your work

Ready to stop chasing everyone and start connecting with the right people? Tune in for actionable insights that will help you grow your business with less stress and more results!

Transcript

EP 242 - 5 myths about ideal clients

Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] Let me say something that may sting a little, if your marketing feels harder than it should. If you are constantly posting, tweaking, explaining, discounting, and if you're still not seeing consistent high quality clients, then there is a very good chance that it's not your strategy.

Or your marketing tactics, but it's your understanding of your ideal client because when you misunderstand the ideal client concept, which I see a lot of service-based business owners do, here's what actually happens. You create generic messaging that sounds. Okay, but really doesn't move your people to act.

Your conversion slate, your conversion rates stay low, and that means you need more leads just to [00:01:00] survive, which of course translates into you working longer. Harder and, and spending your life in marketing. And then you start attracting price sensitive buyers, people who are high maintenance because your positioning doesn't clearly communicate value.

You end up working with those high maintenance clients that are draining. You question your pricing, they don't fully commit, and then you start. Hating your business and start losing motivation to keep going. And because of that, you market more, you post more, you tweak more. You chase visibility, but your return on investment on all the time spur effort on all the time spent effort and money barely moves.

So that's an easy path to burning out. Not because you're bad at business or because you're not working hard enough, but because you're [00:02:00] speaking to the wrong person or worse trying to speak to everyone and anyone who you think can benefit from your service.

So what I wanna tell you is that ideal client business concept isn't just like a cute marketing exercise. It's a decision that leads to your profitability. It's an energy decision, it's a leadership decision. It's one of the most important decisions that you as a CEO make.

In your business because when you get it wrong, it costs you money, momentum, confidence, and a lot of chasing in the wrong direction. So today we're going to fix that. Welcome to the next Diamond Effect podcast episode, and today we will talk about five key myths that serve as business owner believe about [00:03:00] ideal clients that make them run in the wrong direction and live the consequences I just described.

But the good news is once you understand those myths and the right way to think and define your ideal client, you can fix that and you'll see a big difference in your business. So let's get started.

Number one is really understanding the definition of your ideal client because I think a lot of business owners don't fully understand it and think that it's just the person who fits your demographics that you describe. So like a business owner or a woman between 30 and 50 or whatever.

And then anybody who falls in that. That could potentially benefit from your services and use your services is your ideal client. And we'll get in deep, in depth into demographics, down. [00:04:00] In the next myth. But here what I wanna say, an ideal client is not only the person who fits your ideal client avatar in terms of demographics and psychographics and all those things, and also it's the person who wants what you offer and it's open to.

Hiring somebody like you, they might be already looking for somebody like you to solve their problems, to help them with their goals, or at least they're starting to think about that, and now they're just about, they just need to choose the best fit. So your ideal client is not the person who maybe fit all the demographics and all the descriptions that you worked on, but is not open to the idea of.

Getting the service that you offer. Because then what [00:05:00] happens? That person is impossible to convince. You as a small business owner. Don't have the budget and resources like huge corporations to create desires when they don't exist. Or to create some subliminal messaging to convince people who are not even entertaining the idea to consider that the services you offer would be beneficial for them.

So for example. To myself, I like to be active and I like to, you know, be fed, but I hate gyms. There is no advertising out there who can con, that can convince me to go and work out. In a gym, even though from my demographic, I could be an ideal client where I'm a woman, I'm in my perimenopausal years, right?

So midlife strength training and all those things are important. I'm even health [00:06:00] conscious. And I like to be active. But my brain is no gyms. I have a gym at home. I do things at home. I go outside, be active that way. So as you can see, your ideal clients need to be open to your services. So even with me as a business coach, can any service based business owner benefit from business coaching, and could I help?

And yet not everybody sees the value of business coaching, doesn't want to be vulnerable, doesn't want outside perspective, and that's okay. In my marketing, I don't talk to those people. I talk to people who are already entertaining the idea, who are already seeing some of the value of the business coaching, or at least are interested in it.

Because when you try to talk to everybody and anybody, your [00:07:00] brain most of the time will focus on the people who are not entertaining the idea, but could benefit from your services. Because usually that's the majority. Of the, let's say, population of your client avatars, who the brain likes to focus on the majority, but then you feel like you have to convince your marketing sometimes.

Seems like you are arguing with people. And then you feel defeated because then you're like, oh, people don't see my value. Or people don't want what they offer. Then you lose the motivation for marketing and you start believing that maybe, yeah, maybe there isn't anybody who wants to work with you because they're not seeing the bio and it's not true. You're just focusing not on your ideal client.

To, just to reiterate, an ideal client is a person who yes, fits your demographic and kind of client [00:08:00] avatar description and. Once what you offer, or at least is open to the idea is entertaining the idea in their brain, and either they're ready to buy and they're just looking for the right service provider for them, or at least down the line, they will be looking for it, but they were already kind of thinking about it.

The second myth and misconception that I see business owners make about their ideal client is that once I decide on my ideal client and I do the exercise and I fill in the workshop worksheet, I'm done forever. I don't have to review it. I don't have to change it, and that's not true. And here are the reasons.

First of all, I believe that as service providers, we can always keep improving our understanding of our ideal clients and getting deeper and [00:09:00] deeper into understanding their problems, how it affects their lives, their challenges, and so on. So for me, it's an ongoing journey that you can just master and improve understanding of the ideal clients you've chosen.

But then the second thing is. Markets shift, right? So how markets or the economy or technology, like outside circumstances that affect your business also affect your clients' lives. So as those things affect your ideal clients' lives there, the way they make decisions and their situation will change. So they will be thinking differently about what they need and what they want, and you need to adjust.

So that constant understanding not only of your ideal clients, but the markets and how it affects your ideal clients is important. Another thing, industries evolve. So your industry can be [00:10:00] evolving or even your business will be evolving. So maybe you started, let's say you are a landscaper and you started with.

Grass cutting and snow removal, and at first your clients maybe were seniors who couldn't do it on their own anymore, or some basic commercial properties when they don't need a lot of sophisticated landscaping. Just simple. Cut the grass, remove the snow, and so on. But then as your business evolved, you realize, hey, I want to do a design and more of a backyard garden.

And with that, you implemented a new service and maybe you're thinking, Hey, I can offer it to my current clients, but your current clients might not. B, the right people for that service. That service might require a brand new defining of an ideal client and client avatar because it will be a different [00:11:00] demographic, totally different market of clientele.

So how your business evolves or even your industry evolves will make a difference. Sometimes the service lines you have will be targeted towards different ideal clients. So each service you offer might require a separate definition of client avatar.

Another example is my own business coaching practice. I have a diamond effect group offer that's really, tailored to starting beginners service-based businesses. So businesses that are, you know, anywhere from one to five years on average in life. There are not yet. They haven't yet crossed six figures of gross income, and there's a lot of other things that go into it.

Whereas my one-on-one coaching practice is for more established business owners who very [00:12:00] often already have teams or at least have. Six figure income and now are looking to scale and expand, which requires usually hiring of new team members. Stronger brand definition. It also requires operational structure and organization.

And so one, so I have two coaching offers that have two different client avatars. So think of that as well when you decide on what services you offer. Another thing that you know, just buzz, the myth of once I define my ideal client and I'm done is when you raise prices significantly. So very often when we start, we're kind of not sure.

We don't have a lot of. Experience maybe yet, or social proof of how amazing we are. So we tend to, you know. Charge lower prices than [00:13:00] a more mature expert business owners who has a lot of social proof, a lot of brand recognition and so on. So when you start raising prices and once you get past certain threshold and your prices have raised significantly, you might need to.

Change your ideal client. You might be shifting market, so maybe you were a consultant or some sort of business to business service provider. When in the beginning with your pricing and types of services and structure, you were supporting solopreneurs. And as you became more and more known, you started getting more institutional clients or maybe small to medium sized businesses that are already have.

More complexity and you started raising your prices. Now your pricing really speaks more and is more in the range of that institutional, corporate, or large, medium sized business than a solopreneur. [00:14:00] Your pricing can also affect who your ideal client should be. Those are definitely considerations, especially when you notice that if you change pricing, the clients who used to buy from you are no longer buying.

That's a very, that's a clear indication you shift markets, and that means you need to redefine your ideal client. You should change your pos positioning, your messaging in order to attract the clients who are now. In order to attract clients within your price range, of services.

The third myth that I'm seeing is when business owners thinks that their ideal clients are just demographics. So the way that you think you need to define your kind with your client avatar is just demographic, meaning their age, their gender, maybe location and income. And that's it. But this is to [00:15:00] surface level.

This is when if you just define that you talk to everybody and anybody, you become very generic. Where you are not going deep enough to. Stand out. You're not going deep enough to really find your niche and your corner of the kingdom where you attract clients, where they feel you are expert, helping them with their problems and helping them achieve their goals. Right there are the real drivers of buying decisions, or not age or gender or income or location. There are stage in business and life, like for example, you know, if you are a financial planner.

You might be helping people five to 10 years into retirement who are really actively thinking about it and now are starting to worry, where's my money coming from? Or you might be [00:16:00] actually helping, young professionals who are getting promotions and gaining more and more money, and now they have more money than they can manage and they're trying to figure out what can I do the best?

How can I best allocate my money? So it works for me while I'm also working in my career. Another thing is the urgency of the problem. Usually we as human beings and like buyers, we. Act on problems that are the most urgent. They affect us in a way where staying in status quo is no longer an option.

That also goes with the frustration level. So how frustrated we are with the current situation, and our values. So when you identify and when you. Think about your ideal client avatar. You really need to understand their situation. So what is it that they're struggling with [00:17:00] day to day in a, you know, in the area of their life that you're helping them with?

Whether it's health, whether it's their wealth, whether it's their, business or finances or you know, their home, whatever that is, what is keeping them up at night and ultimately. From understanding where they are, their situation, you also wanna know their desires. What is it that they want. Yes, I have a problem and I wanna fix it, but not just for the sake of fixing the problem, there is a desired future that I wanna get.

To, and your service becomes that solution. Those were their situation. You also wanna understand their psychographics, meaning what's important to them when they make decisions? So their values, their risk tolerance.

You know, other decision makers or people who influence their decisions, all of that needs to be understood.

When I coach my clients, I always guide them and [00:18:00] I can really show them very easily in, in any industry how that works and what they need to understand.

So let me give you some other examples. So let's say you are, in health and wellness industry, whether you're nutritionist and personal training and health coach. Okay, and your ideal client, let's say demographic. It's my demographics to women in their midlife, you know, working kids and sowan, they're starting going through perimenopause and sowan, but that's still very generic.

Now, if you think about their problems and what they worry about and how it affects their life, then one example could be, okay, now their body is changing. Not even that they gained weight, but that the way their body looks so much that their clothes that they had even from five years ago, they're no longer fitting and they feel like, you know, it's because they're gaining weight and so on.

So they're starting to. [00:19:00] Eat less or eat the wrong things, thinking that they have to lose weight in order to fit in the clothes. Whereas that might not be true. And you know, I'm not a nutritionist and so on, but you as an expert might think, Hey, like, no, you shouldn't be going into diets because that will put you in the frustration.

It's not gonna give you the results you want. Meaning either fitting with your clothes or understanding that it's your body that changed and maybe you need to change the. Clothes, but ultimately diets are not an option because they'll just send you into, you know, constant hunger and will worsen your perimenopausal.

It will worsen your paramount menopausal symptoms so you'll get even worse and worse in how you feel and this is how it will affect you. The solution is, you know, my nutritional plan or whatever, and then the result will be where you'll feel good, your body will look [00:20:00] healthy and you know, you might fit in your clothes from five years.

Do you now you can see how in depth you need to go. Like for women like that, their value is, I wanna be healthy, I wanna function well, I wanna look and feel well, and.

And also have energy and operate at the high level because I'm still a busy mom with kids driving them every, well, I have a professional career and so on. And when I diet, for example, trying to lose, thinking I have to lose weight. I don't have that energy. So I'm frustrated with myself, with my life and, you know, all those things.

If you are interior designer, your ideal client is not just maybe a person who okay, has. Such an amount of income and values, beauty and sowan. It might be somebody who loves to entertain and let's say if you are specializing in [00:21:00] kitchens, then you know what's important to your ideal client. How they make decisions is they wanna kitchen where they can be proud of or they can entertain and their frustration, what the current one is that.

You know, it doesn't hold as many people. It doesn't look great. So they're not really comfortable bringing people in. They're frustrated every day coming in and having to cook in there and so on. So as you can see, you're diving deep into your client's life. You're seeing them living their live day to day.

With the frustrations and challenges that they have that you can help them with and really understanding what they want on the other side of it, and you have to get this granular in understanding your ideal client and not just age, location, and gender.

The fourth myth I'm seeing service-based business owners fall into, and especially once you're a little bit more established, and [00:22:00] maybe you've been in business for a few years, is that you assume that your ideal client knows everything about you because you have a web. Site that's been developed and there's a good copy in it, and you've marketed your business in social media or you've networked with people on for a few years now and you certain, you know, your strategic partners or clients they've heard.

What you do and, and that's usually not true. It's just your brain getting bored of you. You know, speaking about your business and about how you help people and talking to your client, your client over and over, and making you believe that. Your familiarity with your own business and you really knowing it inside out is, and your knowledge is the same.

Your ideal client has the same knowledge because you've been talking about it for a few years now, and of course that's not true. First of all, you always have new people entering your audience. So whether it's people signing up for your newsletters, new people you met in networking, people following you on social [00:23:00] media and so on.

So you always have new people who don't know anything about you. And maybe they didn't even go on your website because they met you on networking and they connected with you on LinkedIn. You also can't expect them to be scrolling through a year worth of posts to figure out what you do.

Another thing is your ideal clients are focused predominantly. On their lives and their problems and their challenges. And until they have a need to solve the problem or until something is important in the moment, they are not going to remember what you do and how you can help them from six months from now when maybe they were open to the idea but they weren't ready to buy it.

And just the regular, you know, science shows that. Even a person who is, wants to hire you and is looking for a solution, they need anywhere from 16 to 30 [00:24:00] touch points to really understand how you can help them, for them to start seeing. You solving their problem, helping them get to their goals.

When you think about 16 to 30 touch points, that's a lot of touch points that can span throughout some time just because your person might not see every one of your posts, or if you're networking, they might not be at every networking event or meeting you go to. They might not have time to go in depth through your website in one sitting.

So repetition is key and never believe your brain telling you, oh, you are talking about the same thing over and over, that's not true. Yes, there's positioning and messaging and in-depth understanding of your ideal client.

That's important. And if you are not having that right, you could be talking about your business a lot and nobody will, will resonate. But once you [00:25:00] have that nailed down and it's good, you still need a lot of repetition. For people to remember to integrate, to fully understand. When I was a corporate leader, I learned that really firsthand when I would have to train my team members.

On new process or new technology or new client over and over and over again, over a prolonged period of time. Time for them to integrate it. And then still occasionally I would get questions about something that maybe we trained on and we covered just because it also takes time people to absorb the information and really integrate it and know it inside out.

So repetition is key. Leaders repeat themselves all the time, and that's part of marketing, constant consistent marketing and just attacking what your messaging from many different angles. [00:26:00] So then different clients can. Resonate with it because you know, even if you have three ideal clients that fall into the in-depth, you know, description that you have, there's still three different people.

They learn differently. They retain information differently. They come from different backgrounds. Some need more touch points, some need a little bit less.

And then the fifth and last myth I wanna talk about is that believing that just because you can help. Anyone, you should stay generic. And the fear that if you get too specific, you'll miss on opportunities. And with that also thinking that if I just need to stay generic and I just need better marketing tactics and that will get me more leads, that could not be further from the truth.

Because when you just stay at the demographics level, let's say women, 30 to [00:27:00] 50 homeowners, or anyone who wants to have better finances, you really don't resonate with anyone. Your messaging becomes generic because you're not inclined to go deeper into understanding your lives, their situations, their values, and you know what helps them make decisions. So then of course your marketing won't convert and you'll just rely maybe on referrals. Referrals or on discounting your services or being, you know, the cheapest person on the market. That doesn't allow you to get very clear and position yourself as the expert, the service provider for your clients to go to.

When you are more specific in your messaging, because you narrow down and by narrowing down could be the situation your client is in. Not just the demographic. Narrow down your specific messaging will [00:28:00] attract. Better clients, they'll make faster decisions. So your sales cycle will lower and you'll build higher trust.

And with that, like just going to different types of marketing tactics, hoping that your generic. Marketing will convert better just because you're doing SEO and ads and reels and funnels is wrong. You just lose time and money trying all those things and the conversion will be the same. Okay? If you have a low conversion.

On organic marketing, throwing money at it will not improve conversion because it's not the money that improves conversion, but it's a specific messaging and positioning that does. So I always tell my clients, it's actually better to figure out your positioning, your messaging, get deeper, know your ideal clients.

In organic marketing with organic [00:29:00] marketing strategies, and once you see it converting really well, then invest money into ads or some funnels or you know, hire an SEO expert to help you.

' cause very often it's not the traffic problem or visibility problem. But a positioning problem that creates low conversions. So thank you for listening. I hope that was helpful and Will. Okay, so thank you for listening. Go through all those myths. Look at your ideal clients, see how you can improve your understanding and with it, your positioning and messaging to them.

And if you need help, this is one of the things that I do with all my clients to help them increase conversions and make more money. W with less time or [00:30:00] within the same resources. Book a consultative. How you can connect with me is through my website, StarWay to leadership.com and book a complimentary consultation from there.

Have a fantastic week. Talk to you soon. Bye.