Over the past month-plus, we’ve examined Ideal Client Avatars–a single, fictional individual who represents a group of your Ideal Clients–from just about every angle imaginable.
Today, I want to wrap up this discussion of how to create Ideal Client Avatars by giving you a simple template that helps you describe where your ICAs are today (their “Before” state) and where you want them to be after they’ve worked with you (their “After” state).
In other words, this little template will help you describe the client transformation you want to help the people you work with to achieve.
We’ll describe this client transformation using five short descriptions in each section:
- What They Have–In their Before state, what challenges and issues do they have that they wish they didn’t have? In their After state, what new understandings or skills do they have that they didn’t have before?
- What They Feel–In their Before state, what negative feelings do they have that they wish they could get rid of? In their After state, what positive feelings do they have as a result of learning from you?
- Their Average Day–What does their average day look like Before working with you vs. After working with you?
- Their Status–In their Before state, in what ways do they feel that they don’t measure up to their own expectations or those of others? In their After state, how has their status in the eyes of others improved?
- Good vs. Evil–In their Before state, what “evils” do they have to battle every day (these can be internal or external)? In their After state, what’s good about their life that didn’t exist before?
Obviously, you’ve already explored much of the material you’ll need to input into this framework. When you described your ICA’s problems and gathered their problem language a few posts back, that should give you all the insight you need to fill in the Before section of the template.
And when you brainstormed your ICA’s wants and aspirations in my last post, you were generating material you can now use to fill in the After section.
So now, for your action step, should you choose to participate, all you have to do is use what you already know about your Ideal Client Avatar and fill in the blanks in the template below.
Your Client Transformation Template
Before (Current)
Have:
Feel:
Average Day:
Status:
Good vs. Evil (Evil):
After (Doing Business with You)
Have:
Feel:
Average Day:
Status:
Good vs. Evil (Good):
Ideal Client Transformation: An Example
Now, I know that a completed example might be helpful, so here’s the Before and After section from one of the Ideal Client Avatars for my business, Ed Consultant Marketing.
This ICA is Sara Johnson, an early career educational consultant. She’s 39 years old, married, with two kids. She’s a former middle school STEM teacher who has recently left the classroom. She’s passionate about hands-on science and STEM instruction and has great strategies to share, but she doesn’t have a background in business and is struggling to learn how to run a business while trying to balance her home life and her new(ish) work life.
Before (Current)
Have: She has lots to do as a mother and new business owner. She knows she needs to learn a lot more about running a business.
Feel: She’s fearful that she’s not cut out to be a “real” business owner. She feels guilty when she works on “home” tasks during her “work” time. She sometimes feels lonely and misses the classroom.
Average Day: She gets in short stretches of work but has lots of interruptions. She has to split her time between learning, working, doing home tasks, inventorying/filing, etc.
Status: She sometimes unflatteringly compares herself to “name” consultants. She feels like she knows more than the average teacher and has much to share, but at the same time, she often feels imposter syndrome about not being good enough.
Good vs. Evil (Evil): Not enough time, lack of organization, not enough clients.
After (Doing Business with You)
Have: She now knows what it takes to run a business.
Feel: She feels organized, connected to a network of peers, confident in her abilities, and excited about growing a list of followers.
Average Day: Gets up early and runs the kids to school, makes her coffee, then heads to her office where she gets in solid stretches of productive work.
Status: She now feels like a “real” business owner with a solid understanding of her business model. She feels proud of herself as she steadily creates new content and people begin to see her as an expert.
Good vs. Evil (Good): She spends her time helping teachers be more effective, and through these teachers, she’s helping more kids (especially girls) fall in love with STEM and think about STEM careers.
Ideal Client Avatars: Pulling It All Together
Now that we’ve completed our deep dive into creating Ideal Customer Avatars for your business, it’s time to pull it all together.
If you’ve been following along and doing the action steps each day for the past month-plus, you’ve collected a bunch of details about your Ideal Client Avatar. All you have to do now is put it all in one place.
And lucky for you, I have a complete blank template you can use to gather all of this information (demographics and psychographics, problems and pain points, dreams and aspirations, before and after transformational journey). All you have to do is either post your contact information in the Comments and say, “Send me my template” or email me at willy@edconsultantmarketing.com and ask for it.
And just so you know exactly how it’s supposed to look when completed, I’ll also include the complete ICA profile of the Sara Johnson Avatar mentioned above. Of course, your Avatar will be a teacher or administrator, not a consultant as in this example, but you should be able to translate from one to the other.
And that wraps up our discussion of the second key element of positioning for your educational consulting business–your Ideal Client Avatar.
Starting with my next post, we’ll dig into the third positioning element–your competitors. We’ll go over how to find competitors and how to analyze what they’re doing so you can find the perfect niche in your market that you can dominate.
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–If, after reading my posts about positioning over the past few months, you’re beginning to think that your positioning needs some TLC, just reach out and set up a time to talk.
You might just be a perfect candidate for our Magnetic Marketing Makeover service. We work with you to evaluate all of your current positioning for your consulting business and then produce a detailed report where we explain (with examples from your own materials) where you’re doing well and where things need improvement.
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