In this episode, I’m going to show you how to know your ideal customer better than your own family does. We’re going to break this down for you into four steps.

The first is choosing the niche for your expert business. We talked about it in previous episodes doing an expertise inventory. In the last episode we talked about the different types of expert businesses there are now we need to merge those two things together. The area of expertise you have where there’s high value and high demand by a market, and then starting to dig into what is that market?

What is the niche that you’re going to focus your business on?

The second step is doing immersion in that niche and doing a lot of research on the submarket that you’re in, the particular niche or topic that you’re talking about and then the customers that are within that, what are they looking for?

What are their pain points, what are their struggles, what are their aspirations, all those types of things.

There’s a pretty deep process of research and immersion that we’ll talk about, which is going to help zone you in on that ideal customer. Once you’ve done that, then the outlines of what that customer looks like from a demographic perspective, from a career perspective, from a where they are within their life and in the particular market that you’re in. You’ll start to have an outline of that and then we want to go even further, or we really want to get down to what is your ideal customer.

Many markets have a whole range of different customers, especially just starting out with an expert business. You want to be going after your absolutely ideal customer, the ones that you want to work with, the ones that want to work with you, where it’s not a struggle to pull them into your realm, into your products and services.

You want to go for the ideal customers first and then later you can potentially broaden out. And then the fourth part is something that you’ll do throughout the first three steps, which is as you’re doing this immersion, I want you creating what I call a pain point file. So we’re going to cover that towards the end of the episode. That’s critical to make getting value out of the research that you’re going to do.