Client Magic Micro Course - Day 1: Understanding your Audience

Before we dive into creating client experiences, it’s important to first ask yourself a fundamental question:

“What motivates your client”?

This question may seem simple, but it’s not always easy to answer. Many businesses make the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone, instead of truly understanding their audience and focusing on a specific way to serve them. But, the truth is that not every client is a good fit for your business, and not every business is a good fit for every client.

Knowing who your client is and what they are seeking will help you create a more targeted, effective client experience that resonates with your audience.

Let’s get started.

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Identifying your ideal client

To start identifying your ideal client, you can ask yourself these questions:

1. Who are they?
2. What are their needs?
3. What are their challenges?
4. What are their goals?
5. What are their values?

Here's a breakdown of each question:

1. Who are they? This question is about identifying the demographics and psychographics of your ideal client. You might consider factors such as age, gender, income, education level, job title, industry, location, interests, and more.
2. What are their needs? What problems or challenges does your ideal client face? What do they need help with? This question will help you understand the pain points of your audience.
3. What are their challenges? What obstacles or barriers are preventing your ideal client from achieving their goals? This question will help you understand the roadblocks your audience is facing.
4. What are their goals? What does your ideal client want to achieve? What are their aspirations? This question will help you understand what your audience is striving for.
5. What are their values? What principles or beliefs guide your ideal client's decision-making? What motivates them? This question will help you understand the core values of your audience.

Once you have a better understanding of who your ideal client is, you can tailor your client experience to better meet their needs, overcome their challenges, help them achieve their goals, and align with their values.

Example

Let’s take a look at an example of how a business might answer these questions for their ideal client:

1. Who are they? Our ideal client is a tech-savvy small business owner in the B2B SaaS industry. They are typically between 30 and 50 years old, with a college degree, and an annual income of $100,000+. They are located in the United States and are interested in personal development and business growth.
2. What are their needs? Our ideal client needs help with customer acquisition and retention. They struggle to stand out in a crowded market and are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors. They are also looking for ways to improve their customer experience and increase customer loyalty.
3. What are their challenges? Our ideal client faces challenges with limited resources, including time, money, and personnel. They are also competing against larger, more established businesses with bigger budgets and more resources.
4. What are their goals? Our ideal client wants to grow their business and increase revenue. They also want to create a better customer experience that leads to increased customer loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals.
5. What are their values? Our ideal client values innovation, transparency, and authenticity. They are looking for a partner who can help them achieve their goals while aligning with their values.

Your ideal client may change over time as your business evolves and grows. Even with just a few short answers, we’re quickly able to start getting to the audience’s underlying drivers for engaging with you, what they are looking for, and what they’d like to achieve.

Some other questions you could ask yourself include:

• What have they done before that’s related to what you are offering?
• How does this interaction relate to what they do in their business/career/life?
• Where else would they go for this kind of solution?

If you want to dive deeper into audience discovery, you may want to sketch out some user personas or even map out a customer journey for your ideal client. These methods can be particularly useful if you are talking to a group with specific needs and challenges.

If you’re new to customer personas or user journeys, there are plenty of guides – to get started, here’s a persona guide from UserTesting.com and a customer journey map by Ideo.

We’ve also got a more course-specific Learner Persona which we often use. Drop us a note to get a copy.

Managing your assumptions

During this process, you may notice yourself making a few assumptions about your ideal client.

The best way to validate (or invalidate) these assumptions is to speak to the people you’re looking to serve. There are many ways you can do this, such as conducting discovery calls, customer development interviews or even send out a simple survey.

Reflection Time

By the end of this lesson, you should have a much better handle on who your client experience is for.

Here a few reflection questions to consider…

• What do you notice showing up once you’ve spent some time identifying your audience?
• Is there a concern they have about this topic you’ll need to address upfront? (in a later lesson we’ll use some facilitation skills to address this!)
• Do they have a high level of experience in a particular area?

Resource: To get deeper into Audience & Topic ideation, check out this bonus resource

With this information in hand, you can more confidently move on to creating outcomes and a structure to give your audience the best possible experience and maximum value.

And that’s exactly what we’ll be getting into during the next two lessons. Stay tuned!

Any questions so far? Drop us a line – we’d love to hear from you.