Redefining Your Ideal Customer

Testing My Assumptions: Pulling Back the Curtain on My Business
The following is the first segment in a 4-part video series that documents the evolution of my young business, in the hopes that others can learn from my experience—my successes, my mistakes, and the process of applying a critical eye to your business as it develops.

Part 1: Introduction—Redefining Your Ideal Customer

Every business starts with a set of assumptions. But as the business grows, these assumptions will be tested. No matter how much you domain knowledge you have, no matter how much you think you know—it will surprise you once you’re hip deep in it. That’s been my experience so far in running my own business.

I’ve got a full 9 months under my belt now, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. The biggest surprises to me were in two areas:

• The profile of my ideal customer/client.
• How to articulate my value proposition.

Each of these things has evolved over the past nine months. What I thought I’d do here is document it in a series of four short videos, exposing my thought process so that other new business owners might benefit from my experience.

Now comes the difficult part—taking what I’ve learned and putting it into action. I need to reposition myself somewhat, and rewrite a lot of my own content. But I have such a better idea now of whom I can serve, and where my business is aligned with the huge need that’s out there.

Let’s start right here—why not?

Here are the newly-defined set of characteristics that make up my ideal client:

1. You want an audience. An audience is your most valuable asset, because you can convert earned attention into capital.
2. You create connections through content. That content might be a book, or it might not. It will probably include a blog (but not what most people think of blogs), and it’s almost definitely going to include social media. A content strategy is how you make all of these things work together in support of your goals, and I can train you how to do that.
3. You want to build your personal brand. You want to establish thought leadership, credibility, and show that you are present—you are a participant. People don’t want to talk to a company or an entity—they want to hear from you, directly.
4. You are an expert or have an interesting story. You want to educate, inspire, or inform. For this reason, non-fiction is the sweet spot of my business, though it can work for other writers and artists too.
5. You are a new player. You are building from a small base, or zero base. If you are established and possess a huge audience already, you have a different set of challenges. Maintaining an audience is very different from growing an audience, and I’m better positioned to help you with the latter.

If that describes you, then I invite you to read my articles about content strategy—how it can help you, and how to implement it for yourself. You can find it all here on my site: http://michaelboezi.com, or you can join my mailing list.

If you find that you need specific help, contact me directly here: http://michaelboezi.com/contact.

I offer a wide variety of services, from coaching and strategizing to writing and editing. My goal is to train you so that you can do all this on your own and not be dependent on me. Most of all, I want to make you successful. It’s all available to you in today’s world—you just need a strategy.

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Copyright 2014 Control Mouse Media, LLC http://www.controlmousemedia.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use is a violation of applicable copyright laws. All views or opinions expressed in this video and its description are solely those of the author and do not represent those of the author’s employers, past or present.

Music credit: Cataclysmic Converter http://bit.ly/cataclysmic-converter.