Pinfluence: The Complete Guide to Marketing Your Business with Pinterest

Defining Your Ideal Client

Do you know who your ideal client is?

I’ll bet that you currently have some customers you love to work with, people who energize and invigorate you. Think of one or two of your favorite clients, and consider what it is you enjoy about working with them. Why do you like helping that kind of person?

Author David Meerman Scott introduced the concept of “buyer personas” in his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly (now in it’s third edition). Scott explains how creating a buyer persona (or ideal client) is one of the most important things your company can do before you begin publishing social media campaigns and reaching out via online tools.

Your buyer persona (or ideal client) is simply a descriptive profile of the kind of client you’re trying to reach. Creating these kinds of profiles is a critical first step in defining your online strategy.

In The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Scott describes the following exercise, which one particular university conducted to define their buyer personas:

. . . if we break the buyers into distinct groups and then catalog everything we know about each one, we make it easier to create content targeted to each important demographic. For example, a college website usually has the goal of keeping alumni happy so that they donate money to their alma mater on a regular basis. A college might have ...