“WE GOT HARRY POTTER WANDS!”
My team member Vanessa burst out laughing as I jogged toward her, brandishing the box.
“WHAT!? What is this?” she asked, still laughing.
I smiled at her.
“Barbi sent us Harry Potter wands.”
I saw it click for her as she connected the dots and grinned.
Earlier this year, Vanessa and I were brainstorming with Dr. Barbi Honeycutt, one of our longest client relationships, about some interesting ways to work with her content and blog taxonomies. The goal was to make her innovative and tip-focused blog posts more accessible for a new target audience—without disrupting other areas of her site and while remaining SEO friendly.
In one of the e-mail threads, Dr. Honeycutt jokingly offered to award us with “chocolate, wine, Harry Potter wands…” etc., if we could help her work through the issues she felt that her content and site organization were facing.
Vanessa and I immediately joked about the Harry Potter wands being our ideal prize, better than any chocolate or wine—we’re self-described HP nerds. As we worked through Barbi’s site challenges, subsequent email threads were labeled “the Harry Potter Wand conversation.”
Months later, issues resolved and new solutions working in her site, Dr. Honeycutt stayed true to her word – and sent us each a Harry Potter wand.
Dr. Barbi Honeycutt is one of our entrepreneurial web clients. We work with many like her—brilliant folks with business savvy and incredible talent, who are becoming more and more well known, and whose innovations need to be felt through a website that pushes boundaries. We love being a part of their entrepreneurial adventures.
That’s one of our client types. Trough Reify’s own adventure, we’ve identified and expanded on ideal client types, in both our web and our e-learning services.
We have specific questions for each of these target client personas, and our understanding of their needs and our interest in working with them evolved only through a serious, cautious, results-focused relationship. We build new services and try new projects only when we feel those relationships will be mutually beneficial; we’re quick to consider potential barriers and to seek collaboration and synergy.
With client personas identified, we can better talk about Reify’s services, better target RFP opportunities, and better identify when we are – or are not – the best fit for a potential project. When we aren’t, we know it, and we do everything we can to get that client to the right group.
Reflecting on today and Barbi’s wonderful gift, I appreciate the work we’ve done to carefully carve out our understanding of target clients and client personas. I’m thankful for the chances we get to work with wonderful entrepreneurs and small businesses like Barbi, and for the other ideal client types we’ve identified through the years.
I can see, more than ever, that finding and targeting ideal clients is more than just business savvy.
It’s magic.
