When it comes to growing your business, having one, focused ideal client will make your journey a lot easier and allow you to simplify your strategy. 

However, I’ve been working with entrepreneurs long enough to know that for some business owners, this just isn’t desirable. 

They’re passionate about working with multiple groups of people and perhaps they’ve even created offers to serve different groups of people; and no matter how many business coaches tell them that they need to focus, they just can’t find a way to do this while staying true to who they are and the value they know they need to offer.

If this is you, keep on reading!

Is it Ok to Have Multiple Ideal Clients?

I may be the first person to give you this answer … but yes, it’s ok to have multiple ideal clients.  

I’ve worked with many clients over the years to help them create clear and successful brands that speak to multiple ideal clients … so I know first hand that having more than one ideal client is possible! 

That being said, before we jump into how to serve multiple ideal clients successfully, I want you to know that I only recommend this option if you absolutely cannot find a way to hone your focus to just one. 

There are inherent challenges that come with having multiple ideal clients that will be important for you to consider before committing to this path. We’ll cover those challenges today (so you can go in with eyes wide open) and then in next week’s blog post we’ll cover what you need to do to build a successful business with multiple ideal clients, despite the challenges it may present. 

7 Challenges of Having Multiple Ideal Clients:

1. Writing Your Brand Messaging 

Having multiple ideal clients will make it more challenging to write your mission statement, website copy, marketing emails, elevator pitch, social media captions, bio, blog posts and all other forms of brand messaging because the more people you try to speak to, the more watered down and confusing your messaging can become.

I encourage my clients to “paint a picture” with their words by using specific examples that create an emotional connection with their listener. The problem they bump up against when they have multiple ideal clients, is they have to be less specific in order to make the message apply to everyone they’re trying to attract. When they’re less specific, it’s easier for their message to be forgotten or overlooked.

Not only is their messaging more easily forgotten, but the writing process can be extremely frustrating! You’d be amazed by how quickly ideas become clear and words start flowing once you start writing with a specific ideal client in mind!  

📌⬇︎PIN IT⬇︎📌

2. Building Your Website

When a potential client lands on your website, you want them to immediately know they’ve landed in the right place. The more time they have to spend trying to figure out if your website is for them (even if it’s just seconds), the greater chance they will click away and never return.

With multiple ideal clients, this becomes challenging because it’s hard to write a clear and succinct homepage headline (the first thing a potential client sees) to multiple different people and make them all feel like you’re speaking to them.

Another place this poses an added challenge is with your website navigation. When you have multiple ideal clients, your website navigation becomes more complicated because you need to create a path for each ideal client to seamlessly find the services, offers and resources for them. If you’re not careful, this can lead to a cluttered and chaotic website that turns visitors away before they even find what they’re looking for.

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

With multiple ideal clients, you’ll likely need different offers for each of them to meet their unique needs. With this, there are a few things you’ll need to consider: How will you market each offer? Will you have separate lead magnets, nurture sequences, marketing campaigns, sales pages, welcome sequences, etc. for each offer? This can get complicated and time consuming really fast!

Even creating just one offer for multiple ideal clients comes with its own challenges. For example, an important part of your sales page is to communicate the benefits of your offer in a way that gets your ideal client excited to work with you. But multiple ideal clients will likely be looking for different benefits, so how do you communicate your benefits without being so general that no one cares? It’s not easy.

4. Managing The Backend of Your Business

When you have multiple ideal clients, it makes your backend systems and processes more complicated, which can end up requiring more time and money to manage. 

For example, if you offer separate courses for each of your ideal clients, you’ll need to spend more time and money creating the courses and keeping them updated. 

If you work one-on-one with multiple different ideal clients, you’ll likely need separate onboarding processes with unique welcome packets, intake forms, agreements, and anything else that’s important for your new clients to receive. 

5. Pitching Yourself to Podcasts and Speaking Gigs

Speaking and being interviewed on podcasts can be great ways to get the word out about your business while also offering value. But podcast and speaker hosts are looking for guests who speak about specific topics to a specific group of people. 

If your audience (a.k.a ideal client) is unclear or too general, you’ll be more likely to get passed up for speaking and podcasting opportunities because it’s harder for the host to know if you’ll be a good fit for their audience.

6. Providing Customer Support

As your business grows, having multiple ideal clients can lead to more and more complicated and time consuming support tasks. 

For example, when your business has one, focused ideal client, you can expect similar questions and help requests from your client base. This allows you to create email templates to respond to commonly asked questions and requests so you don’t have to spend time writing a new email response every single time. 

But when you have multiple ideal clients, (and therefore probably multiple different courses or programs to serve these clients) the questions and support requests will be much more varied and more time consuming to respond to because you’ll need to come up with a new response every time. 

7. Cultivating Your Expertise

When you serve one, focused ideal client, you’re able to get to know that type of client, really, really well. This allows you to deepen your expertise and expand your knowledge about what they need from you to get results. 

With a single ideal client, you’re able to go deep in your work with them because you understand them inside and out. Plus, when you work with a similar type of person over and over again, your coaching becomes second nature and your skills advance to expert level because you get a lot of experience under your belt.

Cultivating your expertise with multiple ideal clients takes longer and can be more challenging because you need to develop knowledge about many groups of people. Coaches and entrepreneurs with multiple ideal clients may not be able to take their work as deep, leading to more surface-level support for a wide variety of people, rather than in-depth support for a specific type of person.

That being said, while these are common challenges of having multiple ideal clients, there are some things you can do to serve multiple ideal clients in your business successfully. 

And that’s exactly what we’ll cover in next week’s blog post where I’ll share the exact strategies I use with my clients when they tell me they can’t, or don’t want to, narrow down to one ideal client. 

In the meantime, if you need personalized support figuring out your ideal client (or clients), I invite you to explore how we can work together here.