Who are your ideal customers? What’s the most effective and efficient way to reach them?
Russell Brunson’s “Dream 100” strategy, outlined in his book Traffic Secrets, offers a powerful approach to reaching your target audience. By identifying key influencers in your niche and securing their endorsements, you can exponentially increase your reach and effectiveness.
Read on to learn how to pinpoint your dream customers and connect with them through Brunson’s innovative techniques.
Find Your Dream Customers
According to Russell Brunson, the “Dream 100” is your path to reaching your dream customers most efficiently and effectively. The Dream 100 are influential figures in your target audience’s online communities. By securing their endorsements, you can capitalize on their reach to generate more sales than by targeting individual customers directly.
Before you can leverage your Dream 100, though, you must identify and understand your dream customers. When you understand what makes your customers tick, you can gain insight into how to best attract them. Then, every ad, post, or content piece you create can effectively connect with your market because you’ll be able to directly address their specific problems and offer solutions they’ll find valuable—and very likely, you’ll be able to do this better than your competitors.
(Shortform note: In This Is Marketing, Seth Godin echoes Brunson’s emphasis on finding your dream customers, but he calls them your “smallest viable market.” Godin explains that, by targeting a focused group with specific needs and values, you can create tailored solutions that suit them perfectly—leading to more powerful marketing and a stronger connection to your customers.)
Who Is Your Dream Customer?
According to Brunson, identifying your dream customer isn’t just about defining a general demographic. You have to dig deep and understand who your customer really is. What do they value? What challenges do they face? How can you solve their problems or fulfill their needs?
Brunson recommends creating a customer avatar: an imaginary yet detailed portrait of your ideal customer that describes their age, interests, spending habits, and frustrations. One way to do this is to examine your own experiences: Since you likely created your product or service to solve a problem you yourself had, you may have been your dream customer at one point. If so, think about what you were going through at that time—when you needed a solution like the one you have now. The problems you once had can point you in the right direction now.
(Shortform note: Customer avatars are commonly used by marketers when crafting sales messages, but some experts note that it can be difficult to come up with a multitude of details about an imaginary purchaser. In The Ultimate Guide to Persuasion, Bushra Azhar instead recommends you focus just on your prospective customer’s “WTF (what the f*ck) moment”—the point where your customer is faced with a problem, feels there’s no way out, and desperately needs a solution. Azhar argues that this is the more important aspect of your customer to identify because it will link your market more meaningfully than superficial details like what hobbies they enjoy or what brands of clothing they buy.)
Identify Your Dream Customer’s Main Desire
Brunson writes that, when assessing your customers, you should start by considering their desires. He argues that, when people make purchasing decisions, they’re always trying to satisfy one of these three core desires:
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships
He emphasizes that all products and services meet one of these needs, and, within those needs, people are trying to move away from pain and toward pleasure. To properly flesh out your customer avatar and fully understand your customer, you must determine which of these desires they’re focusing on.
Brunson writes that, if your product or service doesn’t fit obviously into one of these categories, or if it fits into more than one, you still have to figure out which one best applies and then focus on that. He uses the example of the razor company Gillette. People he interviewed had trouble identifying which category the company fits into—until they saw its TV ads, which highlight the closeness between a man and a woman made possible by Gillette razors and thus appeal to people’s “relationship” desire.
Find Where Your Dream Customer Hangs Out
Once you’ve identified who your dream customer is and what they want, figure out where they gather online. Brunson notes that the internet has opened up avenues to find your dream customer that didn’t exist in past years because it’s created spaces where people who share interests can easily find each other without geographical restrictions. If you can locate shared spaces full of people interested in products or services like yours, you’ve got an easy target market of potential customers.
(Shortform note: Though marketers can find willing customers in shared spaces focused on their interests, it’s important that customers don’t feel marketing messages are overly intrusive. If they feel they’re being surveilled, customers may react negatively and avoid a company instead of engaging with it. Thus, while marketers should personalize their messages to some extent, they must also be sure personalization doesn’t go too far. This can be a tricky balance to maintain, but it can mean the difference between an engaged market and a repelled market.)
Brunson writes that to find these online groups, figure out which of the following your dream customer visits or follows:
- Websites
- Forums and message boards
- Influencers
- Podcasts
- Email newsletters
- Blogs
Narrow in on Your “Dream 100”
Brunson writes that the next step, after you’ve figured out where your dream customer hangs out, is connecting with them both efficiently and effectively:
- Efficiently: Draw in many people’s attention at once, so that you get a good return on your time and energy.
- Effectively: Come across with authority and credibility, so that people don’t ignore you.
To accomplish both goals, Brunson advises that you zero in on what he calls the “Dream 100”: influencers who lead the online communities your dream customer frequents. If you can convince those leaders to promote your product to their followers, you’ll be able to make far more sales than if you tried to reach those followers yourself.
(Shortform note: In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s term for the “Dream 100” is “Connectors.” These are people who act as a social glue and create pathways between other people. They’re the ones who link us to different networks, introducing us to our next job, project, or social venture. In business, Connectors have the potential to efficiently and effectively spread your message or product due to their extensive social networks. Moreover, they lend their credibility to your product or idea, making it more likely for people to pay attention, further bolstering Brunson’s aims of efficiency and effectiveness.)
