Who is my Ideal Client for my Pet Business?

Welcome to the beginning of your new, better understanding of your ideal client! Today we want to walk you through the basics of understanding who on earth you should be trying to sell to. First though, we want to start but putting this whole conversation in context. Let’s look at how this topic fits into your marketing overall…

Here at Working with Dog, we look at marketing in six stages:

1. Attract
2. Discover
3. Engage
4. Convert
5. Measure
6. Improve

If you want to read the full synopsis of these stages, you can do that here… But for now, let’s look at that very first one, the one that I (Nic) spend MOST of my time talking and teaching about: Attraction.

The ‘Attraction’ stage of marketing, is the one most businesses skip. This is where BRANDS are built and refined. This is where you take the time to understand and define WHY you do what you do (instead of just ‘what’ you do or sell). During this stage, there are 6 key things I suggest you get clear on. I call this process optimizing your  ‘6 Marketing Senses’ and it looks like this:

Your 6 Marketing Senses:

1. Sense of Self / WHY do you do what you do? What do you stand for?
2. Sense of Sight / WHO are you for? Who are you NOT for?
3. Sense of Hearing / WHAT do your people want and what will they pay for?
4. Sense of Touch / WHERE do your people encounter you?
5. Sense of Taste / HOW [pre-sale] How do you optimize for the ‘easy yes’?
6. Sense of Smell / HOW [post-sale] How do you keep demand + desire high?

Who Do You Serve?

Now we’re not here today to tackle all the senses (trust me, it’s not something you’re going to figure out fast, it’s a progressive, iterative process!), but we are going to look at #2: Sense of Sight: Who do you serve.

Now, since you’re here in Working with Dog, it’s probably safe to assume your human clients have pets. Probably dogs, mostly, right? So how do you refer to these people, these unknown dog-owning masses? Do you call them ‘pet owners’ ‘pet parents’ ‘dog moms’ ‘pet people’? It could be that what you call them doesn’t matter, but I believe that it does. However what matters more than what you call them, is what you know about them.

So Why Should We Care?

For those of us who operate pet businesses and target this broad, ambiguous market called ‘pet parents’, the real question is who are they? Furthermore, what motivates them? Additionally, based on your unique business model, brand, skills and capabilities, are they really your ideal customer? These questions becomes absolutely essential as we seek to get more clients, earn more revenue and flourish as a business.

Pet Parents Defined

To give us a model for talking about people who own animals, and where those animals fit into their life, I created a model I call the ‘Pet Hierarchy of Roles’ pyramid. This tool identifies essentially three ‘tiers’ or levels where people who care for pets can fit in.

The Three Levels are:

1. Pet Owner [who consider pets to be property]
2. Pet Guardian [who consider pets to be sentient beings and possibly family]
3. Pet Parent [who consider pets to be their children]

If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this is similar, however since pets cannot fulfil their own needs, our pyramid is a reflects the relationship of humans caring for animals’ needs. Therefor, as a person becomes more capable and interested in pursuing their greatest potential as a caretaker of animals, they move up the pyramid.

Additionally, you can see the star-rating under the name of each tier represents the investment (of time, energy and money) in the meeting the animal’s needs.

In this model, pet parents are likely to spend more than pet guardians, so they appear to be the most desirable type of client. However, this audience is also the most educated and discerning, so they can also be a sensitive, high-maintenance type of client too!

Your first job in understanding your pet clients, is to understand where they fall in the pyramid… Are they actually a ‘pet owner’ ‘pet guardian’ or ‘pet parent’? Keep in mind, the ‘pet parent’ is the smallest percentage of the population statistically – pet gaurdians we expect are the largest – so it’s very possible that most of your ideal client actually falls into what we call the ‘pet guardian’ category.

Creating Avatars

Now, it is very likely that you serve more than one client type from the Pet Hierarchy of Roles. Even when you know what level your clients are at in the pyramid (which dictates mostly what they want, need and are willing to invest in learning it/getting it) you still need to know MORE about them in order to sell to them effectively,

Caring for a pet doesn’t define you as a human being, right? You might also be a pilot or a physicist, a wife or a sister, an expert chess player or an avid Seahawks fan [shout out to Seattle!] We need to know more about our ideal client than the simple fact that they have a pet [and we certainly need to know what KIND of pet!?]

So, we create what us marketing nerds call ‘Avatars’ – a ‘sample person’ who represents a particular segement of our audience. Personally, I like to give this ‘ideal client’ and their pet, an actual name. (You’ll see a bit more about what I mean in a minute)

To create an Avatar, we need start with the most fundamental and work towards the most detailed information we need to know about our client. We essentially create a story about this particular ideal client. A story based on facts we know, and improvised based on our preference for the type of people we want to hang out with… who we want to be serving.

We want to know our ideal client like a dear friend so we can speak to her like one… Not just by calling her a ‘pet parent’ (a term she may or may not even connect with – no body likes to feel like a statistic or a marketing segment!) 

Creating your Avatars

Included in your Workbook (and shown above) is a resource I use, called the ‘ideal client map’.

This is a tool to help you map out an information tree to create your Avatars: drilling down into detail about our individual ideal clients. We suggest doing one of these for as many ‘avatars’ or ‘ideal client types’ as you can! [it’s a little different if your clients are businesses – but you can use the same idea- more on that below].

We suggest you try to create at least 3 different Avatars for your brand… Feel free to make more!

How To Map Your Ideal Client

The first step is to write into the box which client type from the pyramid this client is…

• Pet Owner [who consider pets to be property]
• Pet Guardian [who consider pets to be sentient beings and possibly family]
• Pet Parent [who consider pets to be their children]

Next, Define This Particular Pet

It can be easier to start this Avatar with the type of pet and work out from there. Are you for dogs? cats? horses? Speak specifically to one at a time. Since we’re dog people – we’re going to run with dog. Next, get specific.

• Dog’s gender?
• Big dog or little dog?
• Purebred dog or mutt?
• Old or young?
• Then we drill down into the details of the dogs NEEDS & PERSONALITY:
• Hairy dog or short-haired dog? (grooming needs)
• Active or lazy? (exercise needs)
• Laid back or nervous? (personality)

You want to narrow it down until you can picture the exact dog, its exact needs and the place it fills in its human’s life. What is their routine? What does the human buy for the dog? What does having this dog mean to the parent and his/her life?

These questions MATTER because they impact the decisions that may lead this pet parent to buy from you!

Next, we look to the parent:

Is this ‘Avatar’ a man or a woman?

What ‘Life Stage’ are they at?

For life stage, I like to use the following descriptions:

1. Young: up to 32
2. Grown Up: 33-53
3. Wise: 54+

At the moment, that roughly means that:

1. Young= Younger Millennial (born before 1986)
2. Grown Up = Older Millenials (Xennials – yes, this is a thing, you might BE one!) + some Gen X
3. Wise = Some Gen X and some Baby Boomer

** THIS IS IMPORTANT TO KNOW so that when you see articles talking about Millennials and Baby Boomers you know where your clients fall in with the stats! 

Ok, next we need to know if this pet caretaker is in a human relationship: ‘single’ or ‘couple’

Now we can drill down into some REAL detail. Let’s say we’re looking at Katie: a woman who is young and single. [I like to assign actual names to each Avatar so I can get to know them properly ? ]

The next categories to dig into or questions to answer are these:

1. What are her values?

What does she believe in, love, hate, and rally for… What is her political stance, her cultural norms, her sexual orientation, her religious beliefs? Does she have any racial or cultural pressures from her family, community or the general public?

‘Value’ Example:

Dog (Her dog is definitely her baby. She has mom guilt because she works all the time, but her dog walker is brilliant and he gets a good run every day. She makes a lot of decisions in life based on him – her car, her condo, even her clothes – that hair gets everywhere!)

2. How does she spend her time?

Where does she work, where does she take the dog, what are her skills/interests/hobbies? Where does she go on holiday?

‘Do’ Examples:

• Work (demanding hours for her marketing manager gig at an agency)
• Gym (at least once a week but she wishes it were more)
• Shop Usually her shopping is online, but once in a while she gets a good saturday shopping spree in at her favourite outdoor mall
• Travel (most of her travel is boring for work – she gets the occasional weekend away with the dog but she’s been planning + saving for that trip back to Europe for the last 16 months – she hasn’t been since high school)
• Volunteer (although not as often as she’d like)
• Dog (she loves to hang out at dog-beach on Sunday to watch him play and there are several  trips to the dog park per week – she wishes she had more time for hiking + adventuring with him – mostly they veg-out together and go for the occasional run when she gets up early enough)

3. What does she struggle with?

What gets her down? Keeps her up nights? What does she worry about or fear? (We’re diving more into this topic next)

‘Struggle’ Examples:

• Body image (uh is that MORE cellulite!? When will it stop multiplying!?)
• Horrible boss (maybe it’s time for her to start looking for another job)
• Never-satisfied, super condescending mom (she wishes she would just back off!)
• Late period (uh-oh!)
• Finding jeans that fit her butt (why don’t they make clothes in human sizes?)
• Broken heart (she wishes he’d call. No she doesn’t. Yes she does!)

4. Where does she buy stuff?

Online, in person, for herself, for friends, for her dog – food, clothing, electronics – where does she choose to spend her hard-earned cash?

‘Shopping’ Examples:

• Amazon: Who doesn’t?
• Zappos: Shoes!
• Flash Sales: For clothes, travel, coupons – yes please I never knew I needed that!?
• Designers: Kate Spade, Coach and the occasional Louboutin (they’re totally for work, though)
• Athletics: Nike, Lulu Lemon, REI
• Groceries: Whatever is closest + Whole Foods  + online groceries
• Brands at the mall: Victoria’s Secret, Anthropologie, Nordstrom’s, Macy’s (plus a sneaky bit of TJ Maxx)
• Electronics: Apple for phone /computer, Samsung for TV, Bose + Sonos for sound

5. What media does she consume?

What shows does she watch on TV? What social media is she active on? Podcasts? Blogs? Magazines? Where does she get her news, gossip, advice & entertainment?

‘Media’ Examples:

• Netflix: Enough said.
• Guilty-Pleasure TV: Dancing with the Stars, Real Housewives, the Kardashians, American Idol
• Movies /Films: Anything with Channing Tatum, Ben Stiller or Amy Schumer. Most of the epic series’ – old and new (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings… ) she doesn’t take film super seriously she just wants to tune-out and relax.
• Blogs: She follows a few fashion blogs religiously she also loves Design Sponge + Design Milk (and of course Dog Milk) but she doesn’t have as much time as she used to to read blogs
• News: She gets the news feed straight into her phone to browse headlines when she wakes up

Social:

• Facebook (pretty much all the time – definitely at work!)
• Twitter (mostly when she wants to complain about something)
• Instagam (when she wakes up, goes to bed, or has a free moment to browse)
• Pinterest (3-5 x month or more when she’s got a project coming up she wants to get inspired for)
• Youtube (she uses youtube to create music playlists for her while she’s working or to look up how-to do something)
• LinkedIn (she has a profile but pretty much only updates it if she’s networking or job hunting)
• Books: She likes an occasional challenge (something political or intense) but a lot of her reading is self-help or for just for fun: finally just read Big Magic, she read Harry Potter and totally loved all the Twilight + 50 shades books (although she won’t necessarily admit it) she loves the Jamie Oliver 15 minute meals cookbook
• Magazines: Marketing, Real Simple, Sunset, Dwell and the occasional sneaky gossip mag (usually on the plane or at the salon)

These questions MATTER because they impact how you are going to reach your ideal client and how you’re going to appeal to them when you do!

Whoa. That’s a lot.

The idea here is that we write her into existence. Imagine you’re writing the character of a novel or screen play – that’s how well you want to know her – her back story – her motivations, struggles and quirks. This exercise is NOT meant to eliminate everyone but Katie (although you will push some people away and that is GOOD), it’s meant to get you so clear on who Katie is (and the 2-5 other Avatars your create) that you create a habit of SPEAKING DIRECTLY TO HER when you’re marketing.

In other words – your content will be written for Katie (or one of your other Avatars). Makes it a lot easier to think of ideas now, doesn’t it, now that you know who Katie is and what she is into!

What if My Client is a Business?

If your primary Avatars are businesses, we suggest that you start by doing this exercise as-is, with the consideration that the person you’re mapping, is that businesses ideal client (rather than your own). Ultimately, it’s typically pretty critical that you understand who your business client is trying to sell to.

If you want more guidance on targeting businesses – reach out on Facebook or in our Live Q+A.

Your Challenge

Now Hop on over to your Workbook and fill out the ‘Who is Your Ideal Client’ section!

Grab Your Ideal Client Workbook

TELL ME MORE ABOUT IDEAL CLIENTS

 

Posted on February 6, 2018