Why you may be struggling to figure out your "ideal" client (and what to do instead)

Figuring out an “ideal’ client is something that feminine-led souls can find difficult.

This figuring out the ideal client is a very linear, masculine-focused approach to business, so it doesn’t surprise me that the women I wok with don’t resonate with it. It tends to make us feel boxed in and limited. We then end up spending a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to pinpoint our ideal client.

What I have found, is that often it’s not until you begin sharing and offering your work online, that you begin to see patterns in the type of clients and customers that you’re attracting. Trying to strategically engineer this, on the other hand, does not feel good in the feminine system.

Those who are interested in you and your work, will often be coming in from different angles. There are layers to this, and trying to box people into “customer avatars” can become a somewhat de-humanising and constraining approach to business.

I think that once you have moved more deeply into your business, and you are clearer on what you are offering, there is of course deep value in articulating the main problems and challenges of the people that you are aiming to support through your business. This can be incredibly useful when considering what content you’d like to share, as it allows you to truly speak to those who could benefit from what you offer.

Yet there is also a deeper layer, where our clients and customers are connecting to our business because of the more unspoken values, desires and beliefs that we as business owners hold. Values, desires and beliefs that our potential clients and customers innately sense will be nurtured and understood through engaging with our business. Values that naturally come across, both through the more tangible ways we share and speak about our business (website, blogs and other content and marketing), as well as through the unspoken resonance that people can feel when they engage with our business.

This unspoken resonance is something that I have learnt to trust more and more as I have deepened into my business. I no longer grip tightly to who I attract in. I did this in the beginning- I thought I could control who I attracted in to my work. I had been subtly convinced into the ideal client avatar business model, so I thought I needed clarity around this.

Yet now, instead of trying to speak to one specific ‘type’ of woman, I instead speak to the values and desires within women that mirror my work. At the moment, this includes women who:

• feel a pull towards softening into their feminine nature

• are struggling to make sense of how to honour their feminine essence and soul integrity within the predominant matrices of business

• crave living in a way that feels naturally-paced, supportive and nourishing

• have a high level of energetic sensitivity

• are doing things very differently to their family/social group.

• want to feel valued and supported for being themselves

• feel like they are walking between two worlds

• love doing things in a way that feels organic and non-forced

• find social media overwhelming or uninteresting

• value slow living (yet often have quick minds)

• care deeply, yet may struggle with people pleasing and losing themselves in others

• find it hard to trust themselves and their gifts

• are deeply spiritual, yet also have a grounded, earthy nature

• feel exhausted by relentless self-development and spiritual striving

• are interested in connecting with their deeper spiritual nature

• are extremely sensitive to any marketing/selling that feels forced, manipulative inorganic

• are emotional, intuitive, kind hearted and sensitive

• have been taught that they need to hide their tenderness and sensitivities from the world

• love aesthetics, design and value beauty (in the organic sense of the word)

• have been stuck in loops of achievement and outward performance for much of their life

• are creative, artistic, multi-talented and struggle to ground their ideas

I also find that the women I work with come in at various points on their path or expression.

I explore this in my blog post ‘Which of these 3 feminine expressions are you currently in?’ where I talk about the 3 different feminine expressions that I often see in the women I work with (while also acknowledging that many women don’t fall into just one category, but are often a nuanced mix of all three).

This also applies to my feminine business clients, where sometimes they are at the very beginning of their business, while other times they are years in, and feeling the longing to soften into a gentler way of running and growing their business.

At heart though, most of the women that I work with have had some type of revelation around the significance of their feminine nature- while also struggling to believe that they are allowed, or can trust in a softer, more nourishing way of approaching life, relationships and business.

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Once I realised that I could never box the women I work with into one simplistic customer avatar or niche, I began to relax into trusting that whoever was connecting with my work, was doing so for a reason. And it wasn’t up to me to control that. I focused on the deeper heart of my message. I focused on the deeper essence of me. And from here, I found that things flowed more easily.

And this is why I focus on a gentler approach to online visibility, that doesn’t rely on constant direct posting to the one audience on a certain social media platform. Instead, I use strategies and platforms that support natural discoverability via search engines, so I don’t feel constrained to one type of audience.

Through this approach I can create lots of different content and allow women to find me and connect at any of the various layers. I can speak to lots of different ideal clients, in a way that mirrors the expansive nature of the feminine and the multi-faceted women drawn to my work. And I can create content, knowing that it will continue to be naturally found for weeks, months and years to come- meaning I know that there will always be new women (as well as those already familiar with me) who naturally find my work, without me needing to constantly create new content and offerings, or post on social media.

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interested in learning more?

I support gently passionate women in sole and small businesses to infuse these softer, more sustainable approaches into their own unique business. Explore my self-guided resources if you are a female creative/solopreneur who doesn’t like the idea of needing to squeeze yourself into a box, feels constrained by the opinion of “followers” and doesn’t want to rely on social media to market and sell your work online.

Belinda x

other writings you might enjoy

Gentle marketing and why your ‘quiet community’ are so important to your business (a vital perspective shift to free you from the pressures of social media engagement)

Choosing Not to Sell Your Feminine Soul on Social Media to Grow a Business