Portia R. Jackson

As a former rocket scientist, Portia is all about what is effective and efficient when it comes to strategy. She used these same strategies to leave her job as rocket scientist and go into full-time entrepreneurship.

In an environment where so many bite-sized pieces of information and “strategy” are thrown around, it can be confusing. Confused business owners don’t make money. People should listen to her business strategy advice because it is simple, effective and Portia has thousands of ad campaigns to prove it.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Portia’s success

Creating an ideal client profile for better marketing results

Result if you follow the steps in Portia’s session

Better messaging by creating a profile on your ideal client and gearing your marketing to speak to that person instead of your whole list

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

The first step is to get clear. And I like to kind of break this down into the demographic side of my ideal client as well as more of like the psychographic side. So when I say demographic, I mean male or female, what’s their age? Where do they live? You know, if it makes a difference what’s their ethnic background or their religious background depending on if that suits your business or not. If it doesn’t make a difference, you can skip over that.

But then the other side are going to be more of like the feelings and thoughts things. So what are their pains? You know, what are they? What’s keeping them up at night? You know? So as entrepreneurs, a lot of times we’re like, well, where are we going to get the next sale? Where’s our next client?

You know, if your ideal client is a working mom, trying to get more sleep? Well, maybe what’s keeping her up at night is her baby. And so she’s looking for specific sleeping strategies for her toddler, her baby or something like that. If you’re working with dentists, what’s their number one struggle? Is it getting clients in the door, or is it converting client?

So you really want to know, what are their thoughts, their feelings, what’s going through their head, and that’s when we can get into some of these other strategies on how you can know what that is specifically, but the number one step is to get very clear on who is your ideal client.

The other thing I like to do after getting those details is to actually get a picture of this person. Now I’m not saying just take a picture of a stranger or somebody like that on the street. You can pull it off the internet, right? But I wait to speak to one person. So once you get very clear on the details of age, location, their thoughts, their feelings, make this a real person.

So anytime you do anything in your business, you’re talking to this one person. And even though you might be sending this out to thousands of people on your list, or even just a few hundred, there, when they read that email, it’s going to make them feel like, Wow, he or she really gets what I’m trying to say.

So name the person, get a picture of them, like start talking to them as if, hey, I’m going to help out Joe in my business, or I’m going to help out, you know, Sarah, or Rachel and my business and they embody who your ideal client is.

All right. So I’m just trying to grab a picture in my mind. Yeah. So we’ve got a picture of this person, we’re kind of giving them a name. We’re given all these demographics. Like, are we just putting it on a piece of paper and sticking on the wall for ourselves or what would you normally recommend?

Typically starting out I would say, you know, get the picture, of the name. I like to put mine just in a Google Doc. I love Google applications for pretty much everything in my business, that keeps me organized. And then I would keep it just in electronic form for a couple of months as you continue to refine it.

So if you’re starting in your business, or you know, let’s say you’re a few years in and you’re like, man, I just can’t get past this point, you might have to actually go back to the beginning like the basics of this and start over and then get that you feel like you really embody it. And once you feel like hey, I’ve really connected with my audience, then you can print it out and put it next to your computer.

And I like doing this because it’s like a visual reminder of, hey, am I speaking to let’s just say, for our ideal client is Sarah. Is Sarah really going to resonate with this copy? Is Sarah gonna like this email? Is Sarah gonna stop and look at this Facebook ad? Is she going to give me her name and email for this opt in and it becomes less, oh, let me speak to everyone, and it goes down to this one person.