Targeted Marketing:
How to Attract the "Right" Clients

As a business owner, you know a great deal about how to accomplish what your customer wants. You've invested time honing your skills, streamlining procedures, and you've learned enough to get to where you are today.

Along the way you've likely had some clients who asked you to do the type of work that you enjoy most, and they paid well for your services. And maybe you've had some bad ones - nightmare jobs, slow-pays, and even a few heartaches.

Taking the bad with the good is part of life, obviously. But there are some things you can do to attract more of the types of clients you would most like to work with.

Targeted marketing helps you draw the best clients to your business and weed out the rest. It's the old 80-20 rule: 20 percent of your efforts produce 80 percent of your results, and vice-versa. The key is to identify and then focus on leveraging that positive 20 percent.

Finding the Best Clients

Before you can use targeting marketing to find more of the types of customers that are best for your business, first you need to clearly identify who they are.

We tend to want to do business with people who reflect our own values and standards. In short, people who are like ourselves. For example, if you're a fairly calm person, you probably wouldn't be comfortable doing business with someone who constantly operates in chaos.

While this may seem pretty basic, our values run deep into our subconscious and affect our decisions more than we might realize. But rather than focus on the psychology, the first step in targeted marketing is to realize that what you value is what you attract.

Drawing "the right clients" requires knowing what works for you and what doesn't. If you look back on the jobs that brought you the greatest satisfaction (and likely the greatest rewards), you'll see some common themes. Likewise for the jobs that you didn't enjoy.

The next step is to write down the qualities that you would like to find in every client. It helps to note that if you hope to find clients with standards that are different from your own, you'll have a tough time keeping them in the long run. On the other hand, if your standards exceed those of your clients, they'll have a hard time keeping you in their service because you will be drawing other clients who respect your values.

The reason for this is that over time our standards and values become apparent to each other, and we will respond accordingly. And, we always have the option of adjusting our standards. In doing so we adjust the standards that we expect from those we do business with.

Promoting Your Standards

Linda Novy sums up the importance of aligning your standards with those of your ideal customer.

"We always look for the values of any service provider that we work with," Novy says. "The key is to understand your client's values and to share them."

Novy is president and CEO of Gardeners' Guild, a commercial landscape maintenance firm that serves clients throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. She suggests that one of the best ways to communicate your values is to get involved in your community.

"Businesses are always looking for opportunities for exposure in the community that don't come across as ads, but as contributions that reveal the qualities and values of their companies. You can do that through business organizations or your local Chamber of Commerce, or by volunteering services to local charities. By giving back, you develop community name recognition. And one of the best ways to get the word out is to use press releases."

The tie-in to the local community is important for getting press coverage. While the media typically ignores press releases about company activities, it's much more likely to respond when the company contributes a benefit to the community. Some of the most effective coverage for companies comes from being included in the press release from the organizations they sponsored.

Associated Business Values

Prospective customers also evaluate your company based on who you've done work for in the past, and will be more interested in your services if you've done a good job with some local well-known businesses that they respect. The second-party "testimonials" - the implied confirmation of your values by way of your affiliation with locally respected businesses - go a long way towards effective targeted marketing.

"We look for clients who will give us credibility," says Dave Penry of Pacific Landscapes in Rohnert Park, CA. "Not the image of it, but the substance. If we pass their muster, then it elevates our status to potential customers."

Penry points out the basic steps to framing your company's targeted marketing base:

understanding your competition
defining the niche in which you want to work
setting up a framework for the specific type of work you want to do
knowing the type of client that's going to get you to the type of work you want to do.

"It comes down to having a good business plan, which includes a marketing plan," Penry says. These are basic business principles that any company - whether they're a start-up or have been in business for years - needs to have. It doesn't matter whether they build widgets or plant trees, if they're running their business as a business.

Image and Substance

"You need to brand yourself in every way you can," Penry suggests, pointing out that people develop an instant impression of a company's values based on what they see. "Clean facilities and vehicles, well-maintained equipment, and how employees are dressed say a lot about a company. It's about professionalism. All of this goes into image and targeted marketing.

"Finding the right clients for your business is not that hard to do. There are some basic steps that really do work. If you're diligent and implement it, you'll see some great results."

Targeted Marketing:How to Attract the "Right" Clients

Finding the Best Clients

Promoting Your Standards

Associated Business Values

Image and Substance

Targeted Marketing:
How to Attract the "Right" Clients