Successful Business Tips – More Info

Determine who your ideal client is & get to know them REALLY, REALLY well. Until you know who your ideal client is you are going to really struggle in business. The first step is to identify a market that has a big god-awful obvious problem OR is irrationally passionate about something. It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway as so many people miss this obvious point) that your ideal client should be easily able to afford the things you are going to sell them. Next you need to work out the following; what age are they, what sex are they, how do they earn their living, how much do they earn, what do they do for fun, what pain do they feel, what aspirations do they have, where do they hang out online, what do they read, what do they watch, what is your name for your ideal client? Until you get a really good handle on who your ideal clients is and what they want (rather then what they need) your marketing is going to suck (in the words of our friends across the pond!). You need to be able to talk their language, using their words to describe their situation, as if you were sitting in a pub, sharing a pint.

Work out what they want (rather than what they need)

You need to do some key word research here because I guarantee you will be surprised! You need to imagine your ideal customer sitting in front of their computer, on a Friday night, glass of wine in hand. Put yourself in their shoes, and imagine what you would type into Google if you were them. They will either be typing in their problem….Or their perceived solution to their pain. And you need to be aware that people buy on emotion not logic, so if you have a product or service that provides a solution to a problem, your customer will be more likely to buy what they want (a great outcome) than what they need (a solution to their problem). You also need to know what your customer is typing into Google on a Friday night, so that you can name your company (and therefore your website) something that will give you a search engine advantage over your competitors.

I’ll give you an example:

I was working with a new internet marketing mentoring client recently, who had bought his domain name and already started setting up his website. He had previously chosen a domain name which he thought would “speak” to his target market – he works with high level executives who were either looking for a new position, or had been made redundant and were looking for their next position. First up, his site was going to be a commercial site and therefore the “dot info” domain he had chosen was inappropriate for his site, he really needed and We checked out the word “executive” and it turns out the actual phrases that over 27,000 of his potential future customers are typing into Google are “executive jobs”, “senior executive” and “executive search”. That’s over 27,000 searches EACH MONTH on Google UK alone, on EACH of those phases. What a marketplace!

So it stands to reason, that in order to get in front of that ravening crowd of hungry customers, he needs a domain name that a) says what he does on his tin and b) contains the key phrase that everyone is actually using to search for him by! Sadly the domain name he had chosen contained a phrase that did not appear anywhere on the list of words that people are actually typing in the search engines and so it had to go. We went looking and my client was able to secure a domain name that contained not just one, but three of the actual words people are looking for.