Today, we’re talking about how to attract more of your ideal clients. The first step? Defining exactly who your ideal client is.

Start with Your Existing Clients

Most business owners already have an existing customer base, which is a great place to start when figuring out where and how to market to attract more of the clients you love. Take a look at your current database—hopefully, you’re using some form of CRM or record-keeping system to track at least basic client details.

Let me walk you through how I would approach this using my past beauty therapy business as an example. This will help illustrate how you can apply the process to your own business.

We had a client base of a few hundred people. To identify our ideal clients, I started by analysing major differences within our customer base.

Step 1: Identify Key Demographics

The first factor I would have looked at was gender. In New Zealand, women were by far the primary users of beauty therapy services, so that was our largest segment. However, targeting "women" as a whole was too broad—we needed to narrow our focus to make our marketing efforts more effective.

Step 2: Narrow It Down to Repeat Clients

The next thing I would have analysed was our active client base. Using our CRM, I would have run a report to identify:

• Clients who had visited in the past three months
• Clients who had visited two or more times

We wanted to focus on repeat clients because they were more profitable than one-time visitors. To refine this even further, I could have filtered for clients who had visited three or more times, depending on how large the remaining group was.

Step 3: Identify High-Spending Clients

Next, I’d have sorted this group by spend per visit, because not all clients had equal profitability. For example, if we spent 30 minutes with a client who spent $30, they weren’t as profitable as someone who spent $100 in that same timeframe— maybe they bought products while they were there, had a high-end facial, or bought a gift voucher.

Sorting this way helped us identify our most profitable clients, not just the most frequent ones.

Step 4: Find Common Traits

Let’s say I was left with a group of 200 women. From there, I’d have looked at the top 20–30 spenders and started identifying patterns:

• Where did they work?
• What industries were they in?
• Did they go to the gym?
• Did they shop at the same stores?
• Did they frequent the same restaurants?

Because we were in a mid-sized city, it was relatively easy to spot these commonalities. If you're in a larger city, you might need different segmentation techniques, but the core approach remains the same.

Step 5: The “Crush or Cringe” Analysis

At this point, I also ran a “crush or cringe” analysis on the list. Sometimes there’s measurable metrics that help with this, but sometimes this is purely a gut-check exercise – for example:

• If a client called, would I be excited to speak with them?
• Or would I dread answering the phone?

The goal here is to attract more of your favourite clients and fewer of the ones who drain your energy. By eliminating the “cringe” clients, I’d have been left with a list of ideal customers who were both profitable and enjoyable to work with- how awesome is that!

Step 6: Find Where They Hang Out

Once there’s a really clear picture of my ideal clients, I’d start looking at where they spent time:

• Workplaces & industries: Many were professionals—lawyers, hairdressers, admin professionals, and for some reason we had a lot of medical workers!
• Social media: Were they active in certain Facebook groups?
• Restaurants & local businesses: Were there common places they dined?
• Professional associations: Did their industries have trade shows, newsletters, or networking events?

Step 7: Target Your Marketing Efforts

With this information, I could now strategically market to them. Some ideas could be:

• Partnering with restaurants: Offering our branded gift vouchers to the restaurant to give to their customers when they knew they were celebrating a birthday.
• Advertising in industry newsletters or professional groups that we knew our ideal clients would read.
• Collaborating with local gyms or wellness centers.
• Running targeted social media ads based on interests and location.

By focusing our marketing budget on places where ideal clients already were, we could significantly increase the chances of attracting more of the right customers—without wasting money on broad, expensive marketing that didn’t get the right message to the right person.

Key Takeaways

If you take one thing from this, it’s that the best way to get more ideal clients is to analyse your current best clients. Find out:
✔ Who they are
✔ Where they spend time
✔ What they have in common
✔ How to reach them effectively

By using this approach, you’ll be able to spend your marketing budget wisely and build a business full of clients you love working with.

If you have any questions or want to dive deeper, feel free to email us at [email protected] - we'd love to hear from you!