As you may know, Jo & I are the founders of 7-Figure Back Office as well as the wellness platform Total Wellness Club.
For fun, last year, I started working on the Total Wellness Total Wellness Club YouTube Channel. When I began, I didn’t really know the profile of the people who would watch.
It’s not a unique issue, it’s an issue many wellness entrepreneurs seem to face when they start out. But we’ve been in business a while, so we could make some assumptions—based on what we’d done before—and we could make some other guesses.
If we’re honest though, with new projects, defining your ideal client can still be like looking for a black hat in a dark room.
And there’s a reason why I’m saying this…
When you are in start-up, or developing a new product line, you don’t always know who the buyer will be, until you have enough data. Until that point you are still assuming and guessing.
For the Total Wellness Club YouTube channel, enough data on this occasion happened to be 30,000 video views. We didn’t choose that number, it just turned out to be the point when we noticed YouTube had graced us with some helpful data.
Very helpful data… as it happens… and I want to share what we learned when we look at it…
What We Could Already Predict
We could make some assumptions about our ideal market up front. Here’s what we knew… then I’ll tell you how we knew that…
- Our videos would resonate with people who were more likely to take a proactive view of their health
- Our viewers were likely interested in learning more about their well-being
- They would also be looking for natural solutions
- Have an understanding that prevention is better than cure
We can predict this because that’s what our video content includes, because these are core brand messages and if that’s not “you” we can’t help.
Nora D. Richardson, brand manager at Total Wellness Club and consultant with 7-Figure Back Office says, “To find your ‘right fit’ audience—the audience who will automatically gravitate towards you—you have to be clear in what you stand for first.”
Picking Out Information Within The Data
These days demographic data, isn’t quite the same predictor that it used to be. In the good-ol’ days, marketers knew certain people would do certain things at certain ages; but the way the world has changed, means almost anyone, at almost any adult age, can do almost anything at any point. But there is an interesting quirk to be found in the demographic data YouTube gave us…
The quirk is that certain age groups think in certain ways. And when you know this, and appreciate it for the gold-dust that is, it can transform your marketing… and your sales… and maybe… even your life!
At the risk of over promising… Let me explain…
The data YouTube gave us on the Total Wellness Club channel told us we were appealing mainly to two age groups:
- 25-34 (AKA millennials/ GenY)
- 45-54 (AKA Genx)
If you add this up we’re talking to millennials and parents of millennials. In other words, millennials and the people who, by-and-large are responsible for the character development of their children.
Being in the 45–54-year-old category myself, I assumed this might be our main demographic age-range drawn to us – as in, like-attracts-like.
Turns out… I was wrong!
The channel is watched by slightly more 25–34-year-olds, and they not only click on more videos, they watch twice as long as their elders (which is ironic, when you consider this generation is often criticised for having the attention span of a goldfish, by the generation dropping off twice as fast!!!). IKR!
Maybe they are also messaging friends, playing play-station and chatting to a friend while watching my videos… I don’t know!
A Deeper Dive Into Defining Your Ideal Client Profile…
My next questions was why?
Sometimes the “why question” isn’t the most aspirational of questions. Sometimes it’s exasperational! As in, “Why me?” which is pretty much the crux of my question.
“Why are they watching me?”
Maybe I reminded them of their parents?
Surely not!
But maybe… unconsciously… I was tapping into something…
A conversation with my eldest (who is aged 27 and a younger-millennial) was revealing…
My eldest runs his own YouTube channel. He’s a skeptic who we encouraged to “think” and “not follow,” who we encouraged to ask questions and be rigorous —an attitude born out of my own childhood and generations frustrations of being encouraged to conform and do as asked.
In conversations, over months, as we spoke about YouTube, it dawned on me that as my own YouTube channel grew, I would also want to be rigorous and ask questions because honest reviews and quality information is what I wanted to produce. Yet, all too often I am so open minded my brain might fall out.
And talking like this led me to another discovery…
Talking To Your Market… In Their language…
All ideal client profiles have a language—a way they speak.
While I raised a millennial, I was also introduced to the language of memes.
When I look back at some of my videos—the ones where it’s just me, and I study them—I can see little phrases and mannerisms that probably connect with 25-34 year olds. I say things, or do things in a serious video, about serious stuff, that take the tension or anxiety off the topic with a bit of humour or a rant. I also leave in my mistakes and make light of them and treat time in front of the camera as playtime.
And it seems to work.
Psychology Of Your Ideal Client
Millennials have little trust in governments, banks and the mainstream media. They don’t trust authority as a whole and they lean in to conspiracy theories and will be triggered if you push too hard. They want facts and figures and proof. They value their peers’ opinions—they grew reading them on Facebook. They use reviews as proof of products and services before they buy and if there is no review, more than 70% will go elsewhere.
This is why we say, if you want to help this generation of 12.6m in the UK and 72 million in the US live longer, healthier lives, you must collect and use reviews in your marketing materials if you want to be given a second thought by this group. Get started here
Meanwhile, the Gen X group—14 million in the UK & 65 million in the US—have had their wealth compromised by the dotcom bust and the banking meltdown as well as sky-rocketing property prices. They carry the highest levels of debt of any generation and they are caring for their aging parents as well as their kids. It’s little wonder then that they feel the pinch of time, and the stress of life (and totally understandable that I struggle to hold their attention through a whole video!).
How Are You Using Data To Inform Your Business Direction?
Data provides us with so much juicy information. In the early days you collect data by listening to your clients or asking them specific questions. You can also do this in coaching sessions, or via surveys or polls. As the business grows you can collect data from campaigns, analytics on platforms like Facebook and YouTube, your CRM and assessments and quizzes.
Jo Fellowes, the Total Wellness Club COO and co-founder of 7-Figure Back Office, a consultancy that helps wellness business scale, says, “There are many data points and data can feel overwhelming. They key is to select the data that has an impact and use it to inform next steps.
“For example, a sales page might look attractive, but if the conversion is low, it’s not serving you.”
Steve Auchettl at SMA Digital, a premium and bespoke quiz marketing company that helps coaches and consultants develop self-qualifying pipelines helps his clients use the collected data in two ways.
He says, “Constantly analysing and improving each touch-point is a crucial component of all online marketing. For example, our assessment quizzes offer two areas of improvement, based solidly on data…
“The first is the data you collect about your prospect. This gives you data for a client discovery call, enabling you to know their biggest challenges before you even speak.
“An added benefit of collecting the quiz data is that, over time, you can see where the majority of your markets biggest challenges are, and create new products or services accordingly.
“The second crucial component is the conversion data in terms of converting visitors into leads. We see the average quiz having an opt-in rate of around 15% to begin with. Within a couple of months of optimising, we normally see this grow to anywhere from 40 – 65% opt-in rate. This has a HUGE positive impact on the number of leads coming in, the number of sales and of course a much bigger ROI.
Chris Wharton from Ready Steady Websites helps his clients create website and membership sites. He advises, “Data should inform the design process from branding all the way through to the website, sales pages and funnels. Knowing your audience is imperative for conversions, your website needs to talk directly to your ideal client. It’s also important to continually review conversion rates as these may change over time as your audience grows. Split testing and A/B testing can also be a really effective way of increasing conversion points across your website, where you change something small on a sales page for example; a group of visitors get one version of the page and the other group gets the other version of the page, you then look at the data and pick a winner”.
Conclusions About Defining Your Ideal Client Profile…
The data I’ve shared here can help Total Wellness Club going forward because it informs me about who I am attracting, not who I THINK I’m attracting. It tells me whose attention I am holding and for how long.
It tells me not to change much in terms of my video delivery, but it suggests that if we introduced more memes, we might attract more attention on other platforms like Instagram or Facebook.
My questions for you are:
- What data is important for you to know?
- What does the data suggest to you about how can you use it?
