Over the past few posts, I’ve talked a lot about the first aspect of positioning your educational consulting business as the go-to service provider in your niche: your Persuasive Persona.
And that was important information, as you need to present yourself as the face of your brand in such a way that you’re attractive to your Ideal Clients.
But that begs the question (or rather, questions, plural):
“Who ARE my Ideal Clients? Who am I called to serve? And how can I serve them well?”
These are crucial questions for the success of your educational consulting business. You have to know the answers to these questions–and I don’t mean know them in general, I mean know them in depth–if you’re going to succeed.
And the tool that will help you focus all your copywriting and content marketing efforts is your Ideal Client Avatar.
How Does Your Ideal Client Avatar Focus Your Marketing?
Why is it so important to know your Ideal Clients so deeply?
Well, think of it this way…
Let’s say you manufactured and sold beach products. And not just any beach products, but the very best beach products.
- You have beach towels that are thick enough to protect beach-goers from the burning sands and soft enough to make them feel all comfy as they lie on them, watching the tide come in.
- You have beach umbrellas that are attractive, easy to set up and tear down, and so sturdy that even the strongest breezes won’t blow them over.
- You sell molds for sand castles that are so innovative that the little ones can pack them with damp sand, flip them over, lift the mold up, and have a sand castle to rival Disney’s fairy castle.
Obviously, you’re going to make a killing, right?
Well, only if you market those products to the right people.
Try selling these wonderful beach products to the Inuit people in Canada. How many sales are you going to make?
That’s right, zip. Because they don’t need your products. They aren’t your Ideal Customer. They are, in fact, the opposite of your Ideal Customer.
But what if you could get your marketing materials and ads in front of people who have just booked a beach vacation for the coming weeks and are in the process of actively deciding what they need to take with them on the trip? Those people would snap up your products like they were going out of style, right?
The products haven’t changed one iota. The offer is still the same. But now you’re selling your products to an audience that WANTS what you have to offer.
That’s how crucial it is to know your Ideal Clients well.
How Does Your Ideal Client Avatar Differ from a Video Game Avatar?
But there’s a challenge here, and I’m sure you’ve probably already spotted it…
Your audience is made up of many individuals. They have some things in common with each other, and they have many differences. How are you going to know all of these various individuals in depth?
You aren’t. You can’t.
But never fear–you don’t have to know all of these individuals. You just need to know ONE representative person that stands for your whole collective audience.
And we call that one, representative individual your Ideal Client Avatar (or ICA).
The idea of an “avatar” is well understood in today’s culture. How could it not be, with video games being as popular as they are?
But just to make sure that we’re on the same page, here’s a definition of the video game kind of avatar. We can start with this definition and modify it:
An avatar is a graphical or virtual representation of a person, character, or idea in a digital space, such as a video game or online forum.
Now, let’s modify that for our purposes…
In our case, we’re probably not going to draw or represent our Avatar in a visual way, so we’ll change that first part to a “written representation.”
Next, we’re going to eliminate “person” and “character” because, unlike with video games, where one avatar represents one game player, our Avatar is going to represent a collection of individuals who make up our audience.
And then we’ll revise that last bit of the definition so that it matches a business purpose.
So, that gives us something like this..
An Ideal Client Avatar is a detailed written description of a single individual client that represents all the best clients in your business’s audience.
When you create an Ideal Client Avatar for your business, you create a single fictional character that is reflective of the kinds of people you want to sell your services to and work with. Note that we want to describe and attract “the best” clients, not just any clients.
Once you’ve created your ICA, you’ll be able to create all your workshops and programs and write all of your marketing materials for those programs using this single person as your intended audience.
Believe me when I say that creating your ICA will do more than just about anything else to bring clarity and focus to your business-building efforts.
Over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll walk you through a step-by-step process for creating your very own Ideal Client Avatar. At the end of each post, I’ll give you a simple action step to complete that should only take you a few minutes.
Do these action steps as we go, and in no time, you’ll have built a solid “starter Avatar” that you can start using immediately in your business.
So stay tuned…
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–If you already know about Ideal Client Avatars and have already created one or more of them for your business, please follow along as we go through this series of posts, anyway.
There’s a good chance that one or more of the actions steps I suggest will give you ways to tweak what you currently have in order to make it even more useful.
