12: The Real Method of Identifying Your Unicorn Clients

When starting my business, I kept hearing – you have to do the ideal client avatar exercises. So, being the good girl I am, I listened to all these experts saying that to me, and I did exercise after exercise, a worksheet after worksheet on creating an ideal client avatar. While I was doing them, I kept thinking- How in the world is this helpful? I am just making stuff up, this doesn’t make any sense.

Then I actually remembered- I have a Master’s of Science in Marketing Strategy! I studied this stuff, we did this stuff. And what did we do? We did market research; we didn’t make up stuff about a magical imaginary person.

• We looked at facts
• We looked at data

So, how can I use the same principle and apply it to my little fledgling business at the time? Well, I talked to people. I set up a bunch of calls. There’s a workbook that you can grab on my website, on the homepage, it’s called “Get Inside Their Heads”, which will walk you through this exact process that I did.

I asked tons of questions, but I started with two things, and this is where my method differs from a lot of the others that I’m seeing online. This is why my method works because it’s based on two different elements.

The two elements look at are demographics and psychographic. You start to build a picture of what you think your ideal client is, then you’re going to have these conversations with people who fit this bill, and then you decide if they are actually right or not.

Demographics

• Are they entrepreneurs?
• Are they corporate? 
• How much money / income / revenue / profit are they making?
• What stage of business are they in?
• Are they married? 
• How old are they? 
• Where are they from?
• Where do they live?
• What languages do they speak?

The thing is, for me personally, as a business and marketing strategist and what I do, demographics are really not that important and this is why I kept getting stuck with my unicorn clients initially. There are very few demographics that actually affect whether someone is an ideal client for me, to you it might. Go through some of these ideas for demographics and see which ones are actually important for your ideal client. 

Psychographics 

• Are basically personality traits:
• what are they like?
• what makes them them?
• what personality do they have?

Now, this is where the magic happens! For example, this was a big change for me, when I started getting much stronger with the language I used, going from-Oh yay business and marketing strategy, let’s grow your business (which is very very generic and vanilla) to- Grab your wand and let’s slay your strategy together. Because I want people who are ambitious, who are passionate, who are fired up, who are energized.

The third step is the journey.

• Where are they now and where they want to be?

It’s very simply, going from A to B. A is where they are now– what are their current frustrations and challenges, what annoys them, where are they stuck.  B is their destination, it’s all about aspiration and hope. That’s where they want to be, that’s the ideal situation.

A fun question to ask here is – If I could wave a magic wand, what would your life or business look like?

That’s a great question to ask anyone who you think could be your ideal client to give you a lot of information and data. Because you can then use all the stuff that they say in your copy.

Love + Magic,

Maggie