The Perfect Client

Public Relations. Marketing. What's the difference.

Welcome to the NewsBusiness blog. NewsBusiness is a Public Relations (PR) Marketing firm based in Brisbane, Australia. We work with entrepreneurial organisations that want to get their message out (online and offline) with a judicious mix of media coverage, email communication and great website content. David Bateson, Director.

A blog about Public Relations (PR) Marketing

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Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | Uncategorized | admin

The perfect client - a myth?

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Is there such a thing as the perfect client? Whether there is or not, the exercise of working out what a perfect client looks like for your business is incredibly helpful in marketing and promotion strategy planning. It’s also an approach that can help you focus the mind on which media outlets to target from a media coverage and PR point-of-view.

How you decide who your perfect client is, is up to you. If you have access to sales data and related customer profiles, from customer surveys for example, or information you gather from customers at point of sale, then you don’t have to do much imagining – just look at the data, and the beginnings of a profile of your perfect customer/client will emerge.

But to really use the technique to best effect you have to drill down beyond simple demographics. You need to ask the following sorts of questions:

How old is my perfect client?
What sex?
Married/single?
What car do they drive?
What are their hobbies?
What books do they read?
What newspapers do they buy?
What TV programs do they watch?
What internet sites do they visit?

This is not an exhaustive list, and will vary depending on whether you are targeting consumers or businesses, and within businesses whether you are targeting owners or employees.

Unless you have an incredibly detailed customer survey form, you’re unlikely to know the answers to all these questions! But it’s important to at least go through the process of working out what the answers might be. Once you have a set of answers, you are on the way to knowing how to communicate with your perfect client and how to influence their buying decisions.

Whereas in the past it might simply have been a question of where to advertise, now the perfect client exercise can help you to decide which media to send news releases to or to pitch story ideas to and which publications (or websites) to offer to write articles for.

At News Equals Business we use the perfect client exercise early on in engagement with our clients, to make sure that the PR marketing strategy we recommend is truly in line with what they want to achieve.