Defining your ideal client: How to START
This is a question I’m asked ALL the time; maybe second only to pricing questions. How do I get started on identifying my ideal client?
There are countless articles on how to do this and most go like this: Where does your person shop? Where do they live? How old are they? What is their career? What do they do for fun?
This seems simple, and yet with all the resources out there, it’s still such a mystery and so many continue to struggle. Why? It comes down to two things.
1. We don’t know who we are.
If you don’t know who you are creatively and a business owner, how can you know who you want to attract? And if you tell me you know and you say: “People with money” and “people who value photography” - I’ll tell you that those are lovely and we wish these elements of every client, but this really doesn’t define a tribe. What’s the remedy? To know thyself. Work through these next elements:
What do you really want to photograph?
If your first answer is anything! Everything! then I want you to stop, and reflect. Especially when we’re new, all photography can be appealing - you’re giddy with the possibilities of a camera and the creative results. There is no reason on earth you can’t photograph whatever you want on your own time, but for the sake of pursuing a business and being profitable, you absolutely have to rein it in and pick a place to be amazing and shine. That becomes the foundation of your brand message and your unique marketing proposition and will eventually help inform your marketing strategies. As individuals, we all have things that we’re drawn to and repelled by and it’s by design because we are born with a temperament and traits and grow up in certain environments exposed to different things and develop preferences based on these things. Do you see every movie that comes out, or do you prefer comedies or romances? Do you eat at any restaurant or do you prefer Italian? You just have to sit with this for awhile, and experiment. You will start to find patterns of what you like but you have to really invest time in the process. Really sinking yourself into a particular genre and giving it all of your creative energy can make magic. Other stuff can always be peppered in as personal work, or special projects so you can still retain that outlet, just make sure it has its place within the larger picture.
What are your values, as a person, a creative and as a business owner?
Your values can help determine how and why you want to offer the services you do that are on target with the genre you want to photograph. For example, if you strongly value artistic qualities, that can translate into a fine art offering and that sets the tone for your branding and positioning yourself as a fine art or fantasy/composite photographer. If you value convenience, then it could be about crafting a process that makes things super-easy and fast for clients that saves them time and effort, which can be a key tenet of your brand promise. If you value aesthetic, then it’s about creating a specific look and feel with outfits and background colour palettes to define a super-signature look. If you highly value respect, it helps you say no to clients who put out a vibe of being difficult or asking for exceptions off the bat. Write out a list of values and then imagine what kind of branding and positioning it can translate into. From here, it’s like puzzle pieces, fitting it together to come up with a blueprint of your photographic and business identity.
What have you discovered in your SWOT?
You’ll find this exercise here - helping you identify where you excel and where you have gaps, and what’s around you that may affect your business. Where this really packs its power is to glean some marketing strategies that reflect your values.
2. We psychologically resist it.
We may think deep down that defining a specific client will hamper efforts to start making money, and that’s the goal when starting out. If you restrict your client to a very specific profile, it will make it harder for you to find those specific people, and you already are unsure of how, and while you’re in the throes of trying to figure it out, there are masses of people you could tap into to start bringing in dollars. You don’t want to exclude anyone waving a buck. Or do you? Read on:
Break the myth of needing to serve everyone.
When we start a business we are eager to find clients, start making money and build a portfolio. And that overwhelming desire makes it hard to consider that you shouldn’t offer your services to any living, breathing, human that can ever potentially contact you. Why would you turn any business away? Isn’t any money better than no money - even if it’s not enough to cover expenses? Especially if you’re stalled in wanting to photograph everyone and everything, this psychological combination is powerful enough to override the counter-intuitive concept of reducing your pool of potential clients.
When you hear “define your ideal client” and especially when you hear “describe one person, an avatar”, you are interpreting as restriction. And restriction is bad, it’s small numbers that makes it feel like you will not be profitable. What is the population of the nearest city-centre to you - for me it’s 1.75 million. Even if you live in small towns with a few thousand people - can you serve a few thousand? If you price yourself profitably, you only need to serve a fraction of the population. And who will pay those prices? Your ideal client! When you finally break down that barrier of thinking you want to serve everyone, then you become more open to understanding the process of profiling who you want to work with and when you find those people they pay what you ask and you are on your way to being profitable.
Once you’ve moved through these barriers, you can start putting things together:
THE MESSAGE: Brand building and awareness. Write down who you want to photograph, what you feel your signature style elements are, and your values. Translate that into words for your website, pick out portfolio images that match closely, select colours and fonts that support, do a mood or vision board to ‘see’ things cohesively. Then, create a plan to implement these elements into your website, your media outlets, your communications with clients. Down to what you’ll say in every inquiry email!
THE PERSON: Take a stab at profiling a client. Close your eyes and imagine a dream person contacting you. How do they inquire, what do they say? How does booking go? When you arrive at their house, what’s it like? What do they value? What do they have on their walls, in their closets and in their fridge? What does their family look like - big, small, chaotic, calm, what is their decor - borderline hoarders or design magazine? Cozy or sparse? What’s important to them? How do they treat you? How does photo delivery and purchase go? What happens after delivery - you become friends on FB, they write you great reviews, they refer their friends, they order your largest canvas? Write this all down and learn more here and here about the process.
Look at your SWOT to find clues where you can get THE MESSAGE to THE PERSON. The ways you will do this become your marketing strategies and actions. Write them down, assign dates, and that my friends, is the marketing plan that you will follow fanatically, like your business depended on it. Because it does!
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