While big brands like Oprah and Brene Brown serve diverse audiences; as a small business owner or coach who’s still striving to stand out in the online space, having multiple ideal clients can make it harder for the right people to find you. 

That being said, it is possible if done very strategically. 

Even though you may not have the budget or reach that brands like Oprah and Brene Brown do, today we’re going to cover the top ways that you can market to, and serve, multiple ideal clients in your business successfully. 

But before we jump in, if you haven’t read last week’s post yet, please read it first because it covers the 7 challenges of having multiple ideal clients that you’ll want to be aware of before committing to this path.

Understanding Demographics and Psychographics

Understanding the importance of demographics and psychographics is crucial in identifying and relating to your ideal clients. 

Demographics refer to the specific groups with which your ideal clients associate or identify, such as age, profession, gender or marital status. 

An example of demographics would be a dating coach who works with single women over 40. 

Psychographics, on the other hand, refer to the characteristics, values, lifestyles, desires, hobbies and other relevant qualities of the people within those groups. 

Here are some psychographics that the dating coach for single women over 40 may want to consider: What do her ideal clients value in a partner? Does she work with women who date only men? Perhaps her clients prefer a certain political or religious orientation. These are all psychographics to consider, on top of her demographic of single women over 40.

It's important to note that simply falling within a particular demographic doesn't automatically make someone an ideal client – their psychographics must also align with your ideal client profile in order to be the right fit to work with you.

When you have multiple ideal clients, you may find yourself serving individuals from different demographic groups. To effectively be able to communicate with these groups and attract them as clients, you’ll need to find the common threads, or psychographics, that tie them together – what values, beliefs, or lifestyles do they share? What is their common desire or challenge?

What if You Offer Multiple Services in Your Business?

While this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, try to stick to just one service or type of offer … especially if you have multiple ideal clients. For example, if you’re a dating coach and a business coach, then you’re not only marketing to multiple ideal clients, you’re also offering two completely different services. 

Sometimes, when two things are related it can be ok to offer multiple services. For example, in my business I work with a lot of healers. Typically, alternative healers offer many different services, such as yoga, reiki, intuitive sessions, guided meditations, etc. These different services can work together because they all lead to a focused outcome that their ideal client desires. I guide people with businesses like these to create packages or programs that integrate the different services in a way that works cohesively together to focus on the clients’ desired outcome, rather than selling them as separate services. 

If you don’t fall into the example of healers above (or something very similar), offering multiple services alongside multiple ideal clients can quickly confuse and complicate your brand. When you spread yourself too thin, you can’t build credibility in any area or become known for something specific because your brand isn’t consistent or easily recognizable. 

For most small business owners, sticking to one service will make your business journey so much smoother, and it will be easier (and faster) for you to become recognized as a leader in your space. 

📌⬇︎PIN IT⬇︎📌

Overcoming the 7 Challenges of Having Multiple Ideal Clients

In last week’s blog post, we broke down the 7 main challenges of having multiple ideal clients. If you haven’t read that post yet – you can do so here. Below, we’re going to explore some tips for how you can overcome these challenges. 

1. Writing Your Brand Messaging 

Serving multiple ideal clients does make it more challenging to write your brand messaging – including your mission statement, website copy, emails, captions, blog posts, etc. We know that the more broad you are in your writing, the more watered down and confusing your messaging becomes (like the saying you may have heard – “when you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one”).

However, it’s not impossible, so if you choose this path, here’s what will be important for you to do …

The first step is to research and segment your different audiences, the same way you’d research and segment your audience if you only had one. By gathering these insights about your audiences’ demographics and psychographics, you’ll be able to more deeply understand the needs and desires of your ideal clients, which in turn allows you to tailor your messaging to speak to each group. 

Writing brand messaging to multiple ideal clients will be easier if you’re able to find a common desired outcome; for example, let’s say you’re a fitness coach catering to two main ideal clients: (1) busy professionals looking to stay fit and active, and (2) seniors aiming to adopt a healthier lifestyle. 

Through your research, you find that the busy professionals prioritize convenience, time efficiency, and stress reduction in their workouts, and the seniors prioritize adaptability, mobility, and social connections. The common thread between these two groups is that they want to live a healthier lifestyle so they have the energy to do the things they love. From there, you can speak to the common thread as your main marketing message. 

Another example would be the dating coach who we talked about above. Let’s say that her two ideal clients are single women over 40 who have never been married and women who have gone through divorce and are looking to date again. While at times, these two women will need to hear different things to feel inspired to hire her – there are some commonalities between the two that she can highlight through her messaging. For example, she could write a blog post about women who start new relationships later in life, and how that’s different from relationships started earlier in life. 

2. Building Your Website

With multiple ideal clients, it can be harder to make them feel like they’re in the right place when they land on your website. In this case, your homepage headline will be the most important piece to start with. Your headline needs to speak to the common desire between your various ideal clients, immediately capturing their attention and indicating that your brand understands their unique requirements. 

For example, we know from above that the fitness coach works with busy professionals and seniors who both want to have more energy to do the things they love. While each group has unique priorities, the website headline needs to speak to the common desire: more energy. To achieve this, the website headline could read: “Tired of feeling tired? Reclaim your energy with customized health and fitness coaching.”

Scrolling down the homepage, her visitors would discover two clear paths that direct them to a page on her website more tailored to their specific needs. For example, she might have a program for seniors and a program for busy professionals. In this case, her homepage could feature a section with two side-by-side graphics that read “For Busy Professionals” and “For Seniors”. Each graphic would include a button that links to the unique sales page for each program.

Creating separate paths on your website for each ideal client group ensures a seamless user experience, guiding each group toward the most relevant information or offerings.

Your blog is another place on your website where it will be important to thoughtfully organize the information so each ideal client can find the posts most relevant to them. Utilize your blog’s tagging feature to organize posts written for different ideal client groups, and make sure your blog categories are easily visible at the top, or in the sidebar of your blog so your readers don’t have to go searching.

3. Marketing Your Programs, Courses, Memberships and Other Offers

When you have multiple ideal clients, limiting your number of offers will make marketing your business easier and prevent confusion amidst your ideal clients.

Option 1: One Sales Page for Multiple Ideal Clients

The easiest scenario is to have one offer, or tiered offering at different price points, that serves all of your ideal clients. 

This way, you can streamline your marketing efforts by creating one funnel that leads to the same place. If you choose this route it will be extremely important to find the common threads (as discussed above) and highlight those, using specific language, in your sales page headline, sales page copy and any marketing promotions you use to direct traffic to your sales page.

One way to make sure your sales page copy speaks to all of your ideal clients is to create a section called: “Who is this for?” or “You’ll be a great fit if:” then, in a bullet list under that heading, identify the various types of people and their unique goals that your program will be a good fit for. Most of your readers will pay attention to the points that resonate and disregard the rest.

Option 2: Two Different Sales Pages that Lead to the Same Offer

In some cases, your ideal clients may differ so greatly that having one sales page for one offer may be too difficult to write in a way that resonates with all of the ideal client groups you’re trying to reach.

In this case, you could have the two graphics on your homepage (like I mentioned above, called the “Site Compass”) direct to two different sales pages, even if they do lead to the same offer. 

On these separate sales pages, you can get more specific about how your offer will help each different ideal client, and share the benefits and transformation from different angles. 

This approach works best for coaches and service-based business owners who offer customized one-on-one programs, rather than a group program where everyone who signs up will be “dumped” into one big group with people who have completely different desired outcomes.

Option 3: Two Sales Pages for Two Separate Offers

Finally, you could have two different offers for two different sets of ideal clients … as long as these are related enough to make sense within the same business. 

For example, I wouldn’t recommend offering both a business coaching program for entrepreneurs and a dating course for single women over 40. These are so different that they don’t make sense under the same business umbrella. 

On the other hand, if you’re a fitness coach who has two ideal clients: busy professionals and seniors, you could definitely offer two separate programs that meet the unique needs of each group.

Develop a Content Strategy

This is maybe the most difficult part of marketing to multiple ideal clients, since all of your content is seen side-by-side on each platform. Developing a strategy that allows you to speak to each of these clients, without alienating the other, is key. While each piece of content will speak differently to a different segment of your audience, it’s important to also consider your audience as a whole in everything you share. 

By understanding the interests, challenges, and aspirations of each group (through your market research), you can create blog posts, videos, social media content, podcasts, or other forms of content that directly address their needs. Tailored content establishes your expertise, builds trust, and increases engagement with your brand.

Also keep in mind that the more offers and more ideal clients you have, the more marketing funnels you’ll have to build to fill each program, which can be time consuming and expensive. Your content strategy is directly related to your marketing funnels because a piece of content seen online may be the first step in your funnel. For example, an Instagram post may lead to a lead magnet, that leads to a sales page, that leads to a discovery call with you to talk about joining your program.

4. Managing The Backend of Your Business

As a Virgo, I believe that staying organized is always important ;-) but it becomes especially important for managing the backend of your business when you have multiple ideal clients! To avoid time consuming (and costly) clutter and chaos, you’ll want to invest time and/or money into setting up clear, easy to navigate backend systems for your business.

There are many tools and software products out there to help with this, but the ones that I use and love are Dropbox, Trello and Kajabi (this is an affiliate link).

I use Dropbox to store backups of all of my membership content, coaching call replays, blog posts, brand assets, and email templates.

I use Trello to organize workflows, communicate with my team on projects, manage my to-do lists, outline social media content, structure programs and more.

And I use Kajabi for managing the front end of my website, blog and membership, as well as essential backend systems, like my email funnels, shopping cart and checkout pages, automations, online forms, events, affiliates and so much more.

In addition to staying organized with tools and software, another thing you’ll want to consider when you have multiple ideal clients is your onboarding process. You’ll likely need different agreements if you have separate programs for separate ideal clients, as well as different intake forms to gather the most relevant details you need from each client before you start working together.

Having your onboarding materials, including welcome emails, created in advance so you don’t have to recreate them each time you sign on a new client is a huge time saver. While I don’t work with private clients in this capacity anymore, when I did, I used a tool called Dubsado to manage my onboarding processes, which made the process streamlined and efficient.

5. Pitching Yourself to Podcasts and Speaking Gigs

Most podcast hosts and speaking opportunities look for speakers on very specific and focused topics – which helps them create clearer titles and marketing materials for their podcast. If you have two different offers, speak on two (very) different topics, or work with two different types of people (who may not be listening to the same podcasts), then it may be harder to pitch yourself as a guest speaker. 

However, one option here is to have two different speaker sheets geared towards two different main topics, clients, or services. Typically, podcasts or other speaking opportunities will specify what they are currently looking for in a guest speaker. This makes it easier for you to submit whichever of your speaker sheets is more applicable to the current opportunity. 

6. Providing Customer Support

When you have multiple ideal clients, and potentially different offers, there is the likely possibility that you’ll receive more varied questions and requests from your client base. When you’re just starting out and only working with a handful of clients, you may be able to help them on a one-by-one basis with their questions as you won’t be overwhelmed by endless possibilities of requests. However, as your business grows you may struggle with an inundation of different questions. 

One option is to use your early experiences with various clients to create an FAQ base that you can pull answers from as you grow. Another option (once your business is ready for it) is to hire two dedicated support teams – one for each ideal client or offer. 

7. Cultivating Your Expertise

When you serve one, focused, ideal client, with one offer, you’re able to get to know them really, really well – which allows you to cultivate deeper, more specific knowledge that you can then become known and remembered for. 

You absolutely can cultivate knowledge and expertise on a variety of topics, but there is a point where it can become too much. My general rule is to keep it as minimal as possible – the more topics and ideal clients you have, the longer it will take to deepen your knowledge on each topic, and become known for it. 

And if you add in too many (I’d say 3 is starting to tip the scale), you risk not being able to take your knowledge and expertise as deep as some clients may need to feel like they can trust you, and you’ll definitely be more difficult for your ideal clients to remember when they need your help.

Case Study: Earth Magic Academy 

To illustrate the challenges and strategies of marketing to multiple ideal clients, let's consider the example of my client, Earth Magic Academy, a husband-and-wife team catering to diverse groups, including kids, women, and men. 

The task of making their brand clear to such different audiences was daunting. However, by focusing on the characteristics and qualities of their ideal clients, they were able to find an underlying thread to connect their messaging and bring their brand together in a way that made sense to each of the various ideal client profiles they had.

The key thread for Earth Magic Academy was the pursuit of clarity and purpose on one's life path. This overarching theme became the central message displayed prominently at the top of their website. 

As visitors scroll down, they encounter different paths tailored to the various specific groups, providing a personalized experience for each audience segment. For example, the "Kids Classes" path emphasized the importance of self-discovery and growth for young minds, while the mens and womens paths highlighted deepening your connection with nature to nourish yourself on every level.

This approach allows Earth Magic Academy to engage multiple ideal clients while maintaining a consistent brand identity.

While marketing to multiple ideal clients can present challenges, finding the common thread that ties them together is crucial. By understanding the shared characteristics, values, and aspirations of your ideal client segments, you can create a brand, and content, that speaks to each of them without alienating the other, AND that inspires each of them to take action and work with you. 

No matter who your ideal client is, or how many ideal clients you have…  

I’m here to support you in creating a purposeful, archetypal brand that makes money AND makes a difference. Explore how we can work together here.