In recent posts, I’ve been writing about how to create an Ideal Client Avatar (ICA) for your educational consulting business.
We’ve talked about…
- What an Ideal Client Avatar is
- Why it’s so important to have an ICA
- Why you might need multiple ICAs for your business
- and in my last post, we actually started building out an Avatar for your business by brainstorming some key demographics and psychographics of your Ideal Clients.
Now it’s time to get into the MOST important aspect of this work…
Your ideal clients’ pain points!
Now, I don’t mean physical pain. What I’m talking about are the frustrations and fears the people in your audience are dealing with and want to find solutions for.
This isn’t a new concept. We could hop in the way-back machine and go back to Sigmund Freud’s “Pleasure Principle,” where he talked about how people are motivated by their search for pleasure and their wish to avoid pain.
I don’t think anyone doubts that pleasure and pain are the primary motivators for most of our actions.
But if we had to pick one side or the other to emphasize in our businesses, I’d definitely go with pain points in marketing.
That’s because years of research have definitively proven that, of the two, the wish to avoid pain is the bigger motivator.
Include Your Ideal Clients’ Pain Points in your Avatar
So, how do you use this information as you create your Ideal Client Avatar?
Simple…
Put yourself in your Ideal Clients’ shoes and brainstorm a detailed list of all their frustrations and fears.
- What about their work do they wish they were better at?
- What do they fear is making them look bad in their peers’ eyes?
- What keeps them up at night?
- What problems do they wish they had a solution for?
Use all of your experience in working with your Ideal Clients to generate a list of answers to the questions above. If you have communications from these people where they talk about these questions (emails they’ve sent to you, comments they’ve made to your social media posts or blog posts, etc.), mine those materials for ideas, as well.
The more detailed the picture you can create of your Ideal Clients’ challenges, the more you’ll know the kind of offers you need to create to help them overcome those challenges.
And that’s information they’ll willingly pay good money for!
So that’s your action step for today. Generate your list of your ICA’s pain points and add it to the demographic/psychographic material you generated previously. In my next post, we’ll add another element to your Avatar to flesh it out even more.
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–If you really want to do this right, the best way to understand the pain your Ideal Clients are in is to actually ASK them about it.
Email a bunch of people you know who fit your idea of your Ideal Client and ask if they’d be willing to talk to you for 30 minutes on a Zoom call about the challenges they face in their jobs.
Try to get at least 10 people on calls. Ask them, “What are the three biggest challenges you face in your job today?”
Record the calls, run transcripts of the calls, and see what they have to say.
This is the very best market research you can do, and it will open your eyes to ways you can better serve your audience. I promise!
