Why Defining Your Ideal Client Avatar Helps Drive Business Success

First of a three-part series focused on leveraging the power of an Ideal Client Avatar, where I’ll be sharing not only how to go about defining your Ideal Client Avatar or ICA, but also how to use it to your advantage to drive every aspect of your business from content to copy, and from discovery to delivery. 

 

Today is all about leveraging the power of an ideal client avatar, and how clearly defining your ideal client avatar or ICA helps drive business success.

Identifying your customer or client avatar is a great way to come up with a great answer that’s super fun, super easy and super clear.

In part 1 today, I want to go through some of the thinking around defining Your Ideal Customer: Why it Matters, How to Simplify the Process and Avoid Common Mistakes.

In part 2, we’ll move into the practical process for Creating Your Buyer Persona (where I’ll walk you through an ICA creation exercise & share a worksheet you can use to keep going and go deeper, test it out and so on.)

Then in the final 3rd part, we will focus on How to Harness Your Customer Avatar for Effective Content Planning and Copywriting, which will bridge us into my next planned topics that dive deeper into how you create content and write great copy.

Let’s start with …

 

Why Defining Your ICA Matters

 

An ideal client avatar or ICA is such an important foundation for business building – and we’re going today in part 1, we’ll run through why it’s so important and what it can do for your business downstream. I’m not exaggerating when I say that an ICA will pretty much steer all aspects of your business.

When you look at it from the perspective of the 40:40:20 rule that many marketers talk about – you’ll understand why this is diamond. Let me explain what the 40:40:20 rule is, so we all start off with a clear line of sight here.

Evidence shows that success with a campaign or a funnel is 40% about having the right Audience, and 40% about having the right Offer FOR that audience. And only 20% – the bit we spend the most time creating, building and optimising … only 20% of the whole equation is about the marketing strategy, the campaign mechanics if you like.

The audience and offer will tell you the VIABILITY for building the marketing around it. Get the high-level assumptions right first. And that starts with identifying your ideal customer.

With that said, your avatar is the IDEAL person in your audience for your OFFER.

What this adds up to is that identifying your ideal customer avatar is a big part of what helps you with 80% of your success.

Say ‘oh my word’ out loud if that point just sank in or if you knew it already and you just got laser sharp now.

Now, you may well have done some avatar work before, but for most of my clients, even who have, it’s still a challenge for you to pin down.

If you believe you have this fully dialled in, then this episode and the next part isn’t for you.

For the rest of you, I’m going to explain what an ICA is and why creating one is so fundamental to your business.

Let’s start with thinking about your ideal client avatar as a blueprint.

 

ICA as a Key Blueprint in Business

 

When you hear the word “AVATAR”….do you think of Jim Cameron’s giant blue mythical creatures from the movie Avatar? Well no, we’re not talking about THAT kind of avatar!

A customer or client avatar is a key concept in business development, and one of the most important stages in any offer creation, or marketing and sales strategy.

Working on your avatar is all about identifying who you are targeting – very precisely.

But there are a lot of MYTHS around what an avatar is and how best to define and create one, and if you use it correctly, there are many benefits.

Let’s get clear on exactly what a customer or client avatar is and isn’t, why it’s important to have one, and the steps to creating one.

While many people may buy from you occasionally, there will be a group of people, or type of person – or organisation if you’re B2B – who will come back to you again and again, and want to do more work with you and spend more money with you. This group is known as your segment or target audience. And the distillation of these people into an ideal customer or client, as a single person – that’s known as your avatar or marketing persona – your ideal, perfect prospect.

Now many of you may well have done avatar exercises before, but it’s possible you’re still aiming a bit wide and there’s room for further narrowing down so you use an avatar to your full advantage. And while some of you who have already done some work might realise that as solid a picture as you think you have, it is possibly full of holes.

Have you ever sat down to write a blog post, create an outline for your podcast or video show, and you just froze? Not because of fear or imposter syndrome, because those are 100% real, too, but instead, you froze because you just didn’t really know what it was that your ideal customer wanted or needed from you. This can feel like you’re just pulling any old idea out of the air.

Now, of course, we’ll all suffer from writer’s block at some point, but what is worse is not understanding who it is you’re serving and why. This can be the death of a business.

Identifying your Avatar is not an exercise you sit down in an hour and fill out a worksheet. I have a worksheet that we’ll use, but it’s just a first baby step to brainstorming this important tool for your business.

It is often a very transitional moment when business owners first discover who their ideal client is. Now, look it’s possible to operate your company for years without truly knowing who your ideal customer is, questioning why the sales process always remains so hard and why it never seems to flow.

There’s so much to do when you start a new business, whether it’s your first or 10th business. There’s ad copy to write, landing pages to design, and of course, tons of ads to build from scratch.

Sometimes people get a little bit lost in all of that. They start to create their online presence, and their content, forgetting about the main reason they are doing it in the first place: their customer.

Creating an ICA is the point where every business should start before moving forward. Many have heard about customer visualisation or buyer profiling, but only a few actually do it.

So here are the goals broken down …We’re going to fast-track you through the what, why and how of creating your avatar – it’s an iterative process – the more you test and refine your avatar, the clearer and more defined it will become.

In part 1, this episode, we’ll go through some fundamentals (not that this is basic, we’ll be covering fairly advanced insights here):

• Understanding what an Avatar is (and isn’t)
• Why Getting Clear on your Avatar is Important
• Common Misconceptions & Traps
• Mindset for Success
• Benefits of Defining an Ideal Client Avatar

Part 2, we’ll get super practical:

• Creating YOUR Customer Profile (exercise)

Then in the last part, we’ll turn towards…

• Using Avatar-Driven Marketing & Sales Strategies

That’s the grand plan – lots to cover so let’s get going.

 

Why Is Customer Avatar Creation Important?

 

So you may be asking who needs an ICA? And the answer is ALL businesses do!

Creating a customer avatar may seem like a lot of time and effort to waste on defining a fictional person. And why would you? After all, your marketing probably has plenty of demographic data they use regularly.

But this data is not definitive. What I mean is that even though you may know who  could benefit from your product, program or service, it still doesn’t tell you who your ideal customer is. That’s where fleshing out a customer avatar comes in. (Again, you may have multiple if you’re a segmented business. But for this training, we’re going to assume you only need one.)

Creating a single customer avatar helps you narrow your marketing practices, improve your targeting, and enhance your personalisation efforts, which is particularly important for nurture emails. You can really improve your business from top-to-bottom by knowing who you do and don’t want or expect to buy from you.

Here’s the big promise and why it’s so important…

Identifying your Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA) will help drive every decision for your business from offer creation and marketing campaigns right through to sales and customer service.

Right, let’s dive in … and we’re going to start with a bit of clarification and definitions about avatars and WHY this is worth spending time on to help with the growth and success of your business.

Let’s set the stage with a definition of what an avatar is, what it isn’t (or rather what’s a pointless exercise), and done well … why it’s important.

So first off, what is an ICA –your Ideal Customer Avatar. Well, it’s a single-person representation of the buyers in your market. You may have also heard them called customer or buyer profiles or marketing personas.

Your avatar is a short profile of a fictitious character who embodies your ideal customer — the person you are creating your business, content, products, programs and services for.

It’s your ONE your perfect client – your perfect person for your product, program or service.

ICAs are a critical element to your marketing campaigns, creation of visuals, paid ads, and valuable addition to all your sales collateral. But keep in mind that this is not your AVERAGE buyer — it’s someone you’d LIKE to sell to. In most cases, your ideal customer will offer loyal, repeat business, good referrals, and frequent purchases in return for high-quality goods and services.

The purpose of a customer avatar is to delve much deeper than broad-scope demographic data can. With these outlines, you not only define who your customer is, but what they expect from your brand, as well. And if you’re B2B, you’ll need to define both your perfect person and your perfect organisation.

Note that you may have more than one customer avatar if your company is segmented in products or services. When it comes to creating a customer avatar, there are a few essential components you should include, such as:

• Defined wants, needs, pain points, and goals

• A well-researched “history” and background

• A detailed profile of not just who they are, but how they’ll use your service or product

An Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA) is a working picture of who you serve that you can use to make decisions about your offer and marketing

I realise I may be labouring the point a bit here, even more than a bit. But it’s important because there are many misconceptions and myths about avatars and what’s you’re aiming for. So I want to open up that box so you don’t fall into the common traps many businesses do when creating marketing personas.

 

Misconceptions and Myths about Avatars

 

It’s not uncommon to hear, especially from service-based businesses like most of yours, that what they offer “is suitable for everybody.” This is where so many business owners fall flat; they have such a generic offer that it doesn’t strongly capture the attention or interest of anyone. Having a niche is key.

You may argue that this narrows your market and the number of suitable clients, but what it actually does is enable you to appeal to an audience that truly values and resonates with what you do. The more you come to know your ideal client, the easier it will be for you to create content that speaks directly to them. You become magnetic. When a potential client feels like you “get them,” your offer becomes so much more appealing.

If I showed two examples of a customer avatar, one that is very broad, and the other that is much more specific, you’ll have one of two reactions. You’ll either see it as super helpful to everything you do in your marketing or you’ll see it as quite restrictive.

But here’s the thing. When you restrict who you’re targeting, it’s so much more straightforward to dial in everything else you do in your business. By narrowing your niche and getting specific about the exact person you want to appeal to with all the nuances of their profile, your messaging, your copy, your webinars and sales presentations will land with more resonance and impact. When you know exactly who you’re talking about and speaking with, that’s when magic happens.

Whenever you’re marketing a product or service, you need to really focus on who you’re aiming all the content at. Ask yourself:

• Who is your absolute dream customer?
• What do they do? What are they like?

These are just a couple of key questions, but there are countless questions that go into figuring out your target market and creating a customer avatar.

So, here comes the million-dollar question – what’s the problem in your business that creating an avatar can solve for you?

• Are you struggling to connect with your customers on social networks?
• Do you know where they hang out online?

To optimize your social media marketing efforts, it’s important to know who your customers are and which social networks they spend their time on.

And these challenges are what identifying your avatar helps with – big time!

But there are also some big myths about avatars, so let’s look at some pitfalls you can fall into.

Done correctly, creating an ICA can focus your efforts on the right people for your business and give you a better return investment: be that time, effort or money (if you get some help with it).

But it’s equally true that if done incorrectly it can waste a tonne of time, effort or money, AND worst still, limit your sales and growth.

I’ve been online since 2010 and I’ve worked with many hundreds of different businesses in all kinds of sectors and industries, big, small, B2C/B2B, helping them with branding, marketing, sales, recruitment and many other dimensions of building a successful business, and what I know and see is that when we started working together, most could not clearly define their Ideal Customer Avatar!

And those that had created them, had created avatars that were totally useless and not driving anything in their business – a pointless exercise.

Here’s what I found: their ideal client avatar either:

1. Way too broad and vague, or
2. Way too specific and full of irrelevant details, or
3. Way too ‘made up’ and not drawing on real life customers or clients, their buying journey or what drives their customers’ buying decisions.

Yet, there’s a tonne of information out there about avatars, worksheets for creating your customer avatar, and again, most of the ones I’ve seen are either way to high level to be of use, or include this massive list of questions most of which are totally irrelevant to what you’re actually selling.

So, I get that it’s probably put a lot of people off bothering – they’re either crazy confused or they can’t see the value in the exercise.

BIG PROMISES, BIG MYTHS …Confusing as heck, right?

If identifying your ideal customer is proving a challenge for you – let’s say it makes you blue in the face! – then yeh, I hear you.

So, I want you to take a moment and think about WHY it’s a challenge for you … what’s the issue you feel you’re facing? WRITE IT DOWN.

Now let’s just put a little flesh on the bones here and get on the same page about what we mean by a customer AVATAR – here’s the science part, the detail around what it is, and in a moment, I’ll also talk about what it isn’t.

 

Understanding what an Avatar is (and isn’t)

 

Generally speaking, as human beings we are driven by our emotions – and then use logic to back up our choices and decisions. In this respect, generally speaking again, we’re pretty driven to move away from pain or struggles and towards pleasure or desires.

This why a lot of avatar work talks about pain points – when you’re selling to individual consumers, this is usually the focus. For B2B, when you’re selling into organisations, those pain points may be more around the market shifts, conflicts and risk management.

For B2B, your organisational avatar is usually more attracted to achievement of strategic goals, like more leads, more sales, better conversions, more customers, and more revenue.

• A customer AVATAR is a detailed profile of your ideal customer.
• An avatar goes beyond a basic set of DEMOGRAPHICS
• It homes in on the PSYCHOGRAPHICS – which capture the emotional tensions, struggles, pain points of your ideal client, and creates a story about what their life is like on a daily basis.

Demographics are the basic facts and are important for ADS

Psychographics are how people feel, think and live, which is critical for COPY.

And just to get super clear on this… The demographics are like the broad strokes, and the psychographics, that’s most important for creating a detailed picture of your ideal customer’s needs, wants, personality, situation, and so forth. This is what informs all of your messaging, your copy, your content, your scripts and pretty much every interaction you might have with your target market.

When you create a clear picture of the type of person you want to appeal to – you’re looking to build a picture of what they are like, not just a set of demographics. That might answer one question of where to look or find people, but it doesn’t help with many of the other challenges. The better you can pinpoint your customer avatar, the more you can align your marketing and your offer with their desires – and the more likely they are to buy – and benefit from – what you’re offering.

Now, there are a few mistakes entrepreneurs make when defining their customer avatar. First, some entrepreneurs cast the net way too wide and define their avatar really broadly. And that kind of makes sense – you want to include as many people as possible. But this approach backfires pretty quickly – because there’s a lot of variability within largely defined groups – and that doesn’t give you any new information about how to reach them.

Say your target audience is “people who are into fitness.” That does narrow it down somewhat – but take a minute to think of just the people you know personally who are into fitness. Do they all want the same things? Probably not! There’s so much variability within that group – people could be interested in weight training, cardio, group exercise, gyms, home exercise, and all kinds of specialized diets, from paleo to plant-based.

Your customer avatar needs a much narrower focus. And here’s the second place that people get tripped up – they swing too far in the other direction – from underdefined to overdefined. They start filling in every single little characteristic of their ideal customer until it’s hard to sort out the relevant features from the irrelevant ones.

You’re probably familiar with the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. Just like Goldilocks, you’re looking for the customer avatar that’s “just right” – not too little information and not too much.

 

Aligning With Your Ideal Customer

 

 

 

There are a lot of different terms that are often used interchangeably and make this all confusing. We don’t have time to get into all the ins and outs – the main point is to understand the layers, for your ICA. You’re homing in on the red bull’s eye – a specific segment of your market, a specific persona in your target audience, and then creating a character that represents the perfect person for your business, product or service.

Why? Because it enables us to create more effective marketing and product development strategies. By understanding the specific needs and preferences of our ideal customer, we can create products and marketing messages that are more relevant and compelling to that ideal customer. That doesn’t exclude those outside the bull’s eye so to speak, it just means we’re focusing on the highest alignment.

The question I get asked the most is probably around the difference between a niche and a customer avatar. And they are related concepts, but they are not the same thing. So let me very briefly tease those two apart. A niche kind of fits between your target market and target audience. It refers to a specific segment of a market that has unique needs, interests, or preferences. A niche is often used by businesses to identify untapped markets or opportunities for growth, and to help target their marketing efforts to specific segments of the market.

A target market or niche is a broader category of consumers with similar characteristics. An ideal customer avatar is a detailed and specific representation of a business’s target audience. An avatar can help a business to empathise with its customers and create more effective messaging and products that resonate with them.

With an avatar, we’re homing in on our target audience and ideal customer The point of showing this is not for you to read every word, but to see where your ideal customer avatar fits I the grand scheme of things.

Sure, the rest of the audience might not be the ‘ideal’ but if you aim at the bull’s eye of your target audience, the people in the outer rings will also benefit, but they are not necessarily going to resonate as fully as the ones in that inner red circle. That’s the ideal customer or client avatar you want to identify.

From a broader perspective, you could say that your customer avatar is the ideal prospect that you would like to do business with, while your target audience represents a group of several different customer avatars clustered together.

A target market consists of the consumers that a company is looking to serve with its products and services. The target market can be broad, with many different target audiences, or it can be narrower and serve just one target audience. Companies often determine who their target market is by looking at demographic, geographic, or behavioural characteristics.

A target market is not the same thing as a target audience. While they share some overlap, these are two distinct terms. The target audience refers to a specific group of people within a target market who are the intended recipients of a company’s marketing campaigns. Essentially, the target audience is a subset of the target market, and they are identified by characteristics, behaviours, or interests that make them likely to be interested in a certain product or service.

So a company that sells athletic sneakers might identify runners and fitness fans as their target market. They can then narrow down the target market to identify a specific target audience of women runners between the ages of 20 and 35 who appreciate sneakers that are both comfortable and stylish.

Segments are still large groupings lacking the nuances to understand individuals and their particular needs and drives. A persona on the other hand, is a more finely drawn outline of the dream customer.

Marketing personas bring segments to life, so that you’re able for marketing purposes to define content and media plans.

A niche can be based on various factors such as demographics, geography, behaviour, or psychographics. For example, a niche market might be women aged 25-35 who are interested in sustainable fashion. It’s narrowed down the market but isn’t particularly specific about what makes a customer ideal and doesn’t build up a picture in our mind’s eye to focus our messages on.

While a niche defines a specific segment of a market, a customer avatar defines a specific individual within that niche.

 

Why Business Owners Struggle With Defining an ICA

 

Homing in on your “Ideal Customer Avatar” (ICA) is super hard, super important, AND… if you’re really struggling with it – I understand.. because I really struggled with it too  😅

Now, I call my avatar Jaunty Jerry – with a J not a G, because I’m Jay and because Jerry likes things modern.

Now, Jaunty Jerry is super energetic. He has three kids and a busy wife and they have a dog. He works a 9 to 5 job that’s more like 7 to 10. He’s stressed, he’s often late which he hates. He’s a professional and expert in his field of leadership development, but he’s working for someone else and wants a better life working for himself. He’s super ambitious, he’s started a few businesses, he’s got a vision of success, but isn’t clear on the strategy to build a business that achieves it.

Those types of characteristics that I’ve just rattled off are specific to me and my niche. So remember, you do yours. It doesn’t really work to borrow someone else’s.

When you start looking at things like your ICA’s age, and where he lives when you look at what his income is, that puts us in the demographic phase. I’d like you to step away from that. We’re going to focus more on the actual person, and really understanding this character, this avatar – your ideal client.

So, I’m going to give you five key areas to focus on, and then in part 2, I’ll walk you through an exercise to assist you in identifying where your ideal prospect avatar has the biggest problem that you may be able to solve.

Because you want to attract your ideal client, you’re looking to nail a representation of the perfect customer.

Over the years, not only for my own business but since I do a lot of strategic marketing and brand positioning work with clients, I’ve had to dive into all kinds of courses and guides and templates and worksheets so I could get better at it. Even creating this training, I’ve had to think how can I make it simpler, more structured and more fun!

But you have to understand, identifying your avatar takes time – and you have to be okay with the fact you won’t crack it in one go…

Give me a thumbs up if you’re willing to go a few rounds on this with me today. Not just sit and read or listen, but actually have a go, make a start.

And this way, you’ll get more out of this.

 

Mindset for Success

 

Why we’re talking about mindset here is because avatar work takes quite a bit of DISCIPLINE – discipline to work through the process, to get curious, and be willing to iterate, to create, test and refine. And it can take a while to get your avatar really dialled in enough to be useful to your business.

Here are some typical mindset blocks to alignment that I see with clients when they first come to work with me:

• I don’t want to narrow down, I can help/sell to everyone

• I don’t want to niche down and limit myself this way

• Fear that you’ll create the wrong ICA,so instead you avoid it altogether

• ???

(Give me a virtual nod if you know you say these or other similar things to yourself or your coach if you have one, when you hear about niching down or creating a very specific customer profile.)

If you among the first two – well, think again. Narrowing is marketing 101 – you simply can’t talk to everyone, the message is too blurry, too vague, it isn’t striking, so catches no one’s attention.

The problem with this thinking, this mindset, this belief is that …having a fuzzy ICA sets up all other aspects to be fuzzy!

You therefore spend so much more time and money on marketing that is only mediocre. If you’re paying for ads with a fuzzy target, you’ll end up paying way more just to reach enough people. And there are a tonne of other advantages that having a clear avatar brings you.

And remember, you’re marketing to real human beings. People want to feel you are talking to them, personally. Individualisation – and the personal connection that people feel – is the holy grail of great marketing – people don’t like to be just one in a crowd who are being talked to or sold to.

So don’t be afraid – better to create one and test it, refine it than not do it at all.

 

Examples for Broad vs Narrow ICAs

 

Here are a few ICAs that are too broad:

• Working women, 20-50
• Male entrepreneurs who want to close more sales
• Or (typically): “I can help EVERYONE!”

When you over worry about getting too specific, you end up defining your target audience in broad terms like: “a divorced, educated, 50-to-65-year-old woman who wants to start exercising again.”

That description sounds promising at first. However, a lady who has cycled avidly and continuously for her whole life but now has knee issues is very different from a woman who has spent the last 20 years travelling as a corporate executive with no time for exercise and terrible asthma.

If you never focused on those kinds of specifics, you would miss the chance to demonstrate a true comprehension of the unique wants, difficulties, and objectives of your ideal audience.

Where we also often go wrong is we go the other way, and add too much irrelevant information.

A Customer Avatar is NOT every detail about this person down to the colour of their shoelaces. You want to understand factors that are indicative to their values, beliefs, and behaviours

Be wary of the “theoretical perfectionism” trap. It is unlikely that you will develop an avatar so perfect that hordes of that clone will show up at your door and throw money at you.

Putting masses of effort into overdeveloping your ICA is a form of resistance, where you’re trying to avoid testing. But you’ll never be able to get things 100% perfect when working in theory. Instead, you need to consider what is it that you want to know in order to be as certain as you are going to be.

A couple of other traps I hear people falling foul of all too often are:

– I have no idea who my ideal customer is, so I can’t create an avatar

– I already work with clients, I know what they need, so this doesn’t apply to me

For those who just haven’t gotten started on identifying an avatar, this can come from a place of fear that you can’t do this and not being clear on your ideal customer will just keep stalling you in moving your business forward

If you think you already know what they need, so you don’t need one, then test that out. If you know what they need, all your marketing messages must be landing and converting into sales, right?

Even if YOU are sure about what they need, do they? Are you meeting them where they’re at in terms of what they think they want and their awareness of the problem or solution?

You need to speak to them in a way that they can really relate to and that’s the symptoms of their dilemma, pain or challenge.

 

To Have Or Not To Have (An ICA)…

 

What happens in your business when you don’t have a clearly-defined ideal client avatar?

Example: Wellness Coach

• “I help people live healthier, more fulfilled lives.”

It’s unclear:

• WHO you help?

• HOW you help them?

• If they’re a good fit for you?

• What result you can deliver?

How can the right person raise their hand and say, yes! I want that! If you’re being FUZZY.

Let’s flip it to what happens in your business when you DO have a great ICA?

• Example: Wellness Coach
• “I help busy professional women over 40 who hate dieting to lose weight, lean up, and improve their health by building a pile of healthy habits”

This is called an Instant Credibility Statement (or ICS), and it is a high-level starting place. It works really well because even with that level of detail, it gives a clear sense of who is a fit, and also pushes out who you’re not targeting.

 

Avatar Case Study

 

Let’s take coffee as an example to explain the concept in simple terms. I think this came from one of Melinda Cohan’s trainings.

If you sell coffee, then most people in theory may drink it. But not all of these people are your customers, and not all of them will be your ideal customer.

• Some will drink coffee every day, others only occasionally.
• Some will be happy with the cheapest instant coffee; others will choose expensive beans to grind at home.
• Some will only drink coffee at home, while others will only drink it while they’re out.
• Some will only buy takeaway coffee, others will prefer to sit and drink their coffee at leisure, with friends or whilst reading, or working on their laptop.

From this list, you can appreciate the coffee shop may not just have one ideal customer. And they might not be a brick-n-mortar business. Let’s say they import high quality beans from South America and sell via a website. And you may have two ideal customers:

• A young professional who is living alone or with their partner.
• A middle aged, well-travelled couple.

There will also be vastly different PEOPLE in the spectrum of coffee drinkers, from teenagers who’ll respond to challenging, youth-focused messaging, to older people who’ll prefer more traditional campaigns. And spending power; some may love expensive coffee but have an instant coffee budget.

So you see, while ‘everyone’ may drink coffee, there’s a huge range of differences to when, what, how and why they do. And no single marketing campaign can talk to all of them.

It’s fine to have more than one target audience. But homing in on your IDEAL customer, your one perfect person – is going to help enormously. You can then plan general marketing messages, as well as separate campaigns that speak precisely to your individual avatars.

 

Key Benefits of Creating a Customer Avatar

 

Let’s swing back to the problems that having an ICA solves for in your business, WHICH of these has been the biggest challenge for you: messaging, finding, connecting, closing, delivering results?

Now let me summarise why creating an ICA is fundamental to easy and effective marketing and sales in how it solves these bottlenecks.

In a nutshell, here are the key benefits of creating a customer avatar

#1 – It helps you understand your target audience better.

#2 – It helps with your MESSAGING for all your copy, content, and branding for products, and services so it resonates with your core target customers.

#3 – It helps you identify the best marketing channels to FIND your audience, and avoids wasted time & money.

#4 – It helps you do more cost-effective advertising.

#5 – It helps you have more authentic conversations, CLOSE more sales, and build a loyal following.

#6 – It helps you SERVE your best customers in the way they like and need.

#7 – It helps you make better business decisions.

Getting on board with, and putting work into ICA work has been a real game-changer for pretty much all my clients’ businesses.

So hopefully, I haven’t over-egged the cake here (British expression) meaning I’ve enriched but not overdone baking in the point that having a well-defined ideal client avatar is something you skip to the detriment of your business success.

In the next episode, part 2, we’ll go through an exercise together where you’ll actually create your ICA. And even if you think you already have one, I believe this will make it much clearer and much more specific …so that then, in part 3, when I talk about how to use your ICA to drive your content and copy, whether you’re writing from scratch or using AI and tools like ChatGPT, you’ll be able to hit the ground running.

Deal? Good – I’ll see you next time – bring something to write with!

Ciao, ciao

Jay xox