You Know You Need to Define Your Ideal Client, Target Market & Niche, Right? (FS208)

We’re willing to bet you’ve heard and read lots of talk about the importance of pinpointing your ideal client, identifying a target market and picking a niche.

Maybe you’re even sick of these concepts? (It’s okay, you can roll your eyes a little!)

You’re probably tired of hearing these buzzwords because they get thrown around way too often without much meaning attached to them.

Rather than simply passing out the same old advice, we’re going to spend this episode breaking down what each one means, and what to actually DO with that info.

So before you skip this one thinking you’ve heard all there is to hear about these topics, hear us out.

Let us guess what you’re thinking right now. It might be something like:

• I don’t want to say NO to potential customers. Can’t I just work with whoever I can work with?
• I just want to [make my product/work with people/write what I want to write]. Why do I have to spend time on this when My Favorite Blogger/Podcaster “does it all”?
• What happens if I pick the wrong thing?

We get it. Today we’re tackling all of these concerns, and we’re laying out what these ideas actually mean — and how you can use them to power your business.

First Things First: Defining Terms You Need to Know

Inside Fizzle there are two courses that dive deep into this stuff: “Book Yourself Solid” and “Defining Your Audience”.

To learn more about Fizzle courses and membership benefits click here.

In addition to downloadable worksheets designed to guide you through putting these much-hyped concepts into real action, we define all of the terms you need to know.

Ideal Client: the individual you want to work with based on their values, qualities & characteristics

This isn’t about some picking some vague “customer avatar” out of thin air. In our Defining Your Audience course, Chase offers an excellent exercise to help you really nail this.

Imagine a specific human being — seriously, call his or her face to mind and write down a name — who you feel especially well-equipped to help. This person is your ideal client.

Inside our community at Fizzle, we often see that introducing a dose of reality here resolves the uncertainty people feel about who they really want to work with.

So pick a real person, and if you can’t think of anyone you’ve ever met that would benefit from your product or service, that’s a red flag too. Perhaps you aren’t clear on how you can help people, or you haven’t hit on the right idea yet.

Target Market: the specific group of people or businesses you want to serve

So now we have an ideal client, but how do we get to target market?

Once you have that “one person” Chase talks about, you can put pen to paper and understand the broader characteristics of the market.

Where does that person shop? What do they like? Where do they hang out? What kind of language appeals to them? What adjectives describe them?

Now we’re heading towards a group of people we can aim products, services and content toward.

Niche: the specific service you specialize in offering to your target market

Many people get to target market only to fall down at the niche part. Questions like “am I narrow enough?” and “how narrow is too narrow?” pop up and cause confusion.

We know it can feel limiting to think about “picking a niche” since the door closes on so many other ideas you might have. Instead, try to focus your attention towards the service you’ll specialize in for this market.

You can always change course later, but for now we’ll select something specific that we believe will help this group of people.

Needs: Pressing problems and urgencies in their life. Typically things you want to move AWAY from.

Desires: Things you want in the future. Typically things you’d like to move TOWARD.

In this episode, I mention Larabar as a good example of a product that integrates all of these concepts.

Not too long ago, there weren’t many prepared food options for snackers who wanted to eat very simple ingredients. Larabar offered a solution: an extremely simple whole foods snack bar with just a handful of ingredients.

These customers wanted to move toward a tasty quick snack they could feel good about that could also be thrown in a bag on the go. They wanted to move away from snack foods that have a bunch of foreign ingredients.

While Larabar is quite popular these days, plenty of people have tried their bars and hate them. Plenty more people will never try them because healthy food isn’t really a priority or interest for them.

This product is not for everybody … and as a result, it’s very much for a particular kind of person. See how this stuff really works in practice?

So what do we do next?

With our definitions in hand, we can ask ourselves some questions that address, once and for all, the “am I narrow enough?” question. Once again, these questions come from our Book Yourself Solid course, so check that out if you want to go even deeper.

Three questions that reveal whether you have a well-defined target market:

1. Do you know where to find these people so you can concentrate your marketing efforts?
2. Do they have existing networks of communication you can use to connect with them?
3. Will they know you’re committed to serving them?

I’m a big fan of that third question in particular. When your ideal client lands on your website, meets you at a conference or finds you on social media, is “what you do” going to smack them in the face?

Will they know, without a doubt, that you’re the go-to girl or guy for them, or will they be confused about whether someone like you really knows how to help someone like them?

If you’re having trouble coming up with answers to these, chances are you’ve got some more work to do when it comes to zooming in on the right market.

There’s lots more where this came from in the Book Yourself Solid & Defining Your Audience Fizzle courses. To learn more about Fizzle courses and membership benefits click here.