How to Identify Your Target Audience & Create Your Ideal Customer Avatar

When you know your people, you know what to say to them that’ll turn them into brand fans and repeat buyers. That’s why it’s so important to identify your target audience and create your ideal customer avatar.

Don’t be like me — when I first started my business, I was promoting my services to anybody and everybody that would hire me. Working for Budget Betty’s and people that questioned me at every turn. It was the perfect breeding ground for my imposter syndrome to thrive, and that kind of thing can set you so far back in your business.

Research shows that organizations with a strong ideal customer profile achieve 68% higher win rates than those companies that don’t (SuperOffice).

I want you to succeed, babes! So in this post, we’re getting into:

• The difference between a target audience vs. an ideal customer avatar (ICA)
• How to find that information
• How to create your ICA
• How to implement that

Understanding Target Audience vs. ICA

Your target audience is a group of people most likely to respond to and resonate with your product/service messaging. An ICA is the best-case profile of your dream customer.

Think of it this way — if you had a stadium full of people that would want to buy your product, but you really want the people in the front-row VIP section to buy your product, the people in the stadium would be your target audience and the VIPs would be your ICA.

The people in the broader target audience might share some characteristics with your ICA — demographic stuff like age, gender, education level and income, etc. And you need that base level information to understand your target audience.

But your ideal customer avatar gives a lot more detail to who that dream customer is. What their overarching dream is, and what they want from the products they buy to help them achieve that. How they perceive a product or a brand, their buying behaviour, their personal values, where they’re at in life, all that jazz.

Ideal Customer Avatar Example

(spoiler: it’s mine!):

Meet Rumi, a is mission-driven, outspoken, cares about their community, and values quality and communication — from the people they hire and from themselves. Rumi could be a man, woman, or not conform to any gender — and they could be white, Black, Brown, or another person of colour or marginalized group. They’re a small business owner with a small, but might team, bringing in $100k-$1M+ in revenue per year — either with digital products, physical products, online programs, DFY services, or all of the above. They want to get to/keep making 7+ figures, and know that their copywriting is a big factor in that — but they’re busy, and don’t have time to do it themselves or pass it off to their existing team. They have a lot of goals — launching a podcast, writing a book, optimizing their online presence for search engines and more.

Ideal Customer Avatar Formula

[Name] is a/an [archetype]. They are a [identifier; e.g., business owner] making [annual income; e.g., $500k per year] in [where they’re located; e.g., the U.S.], and they want to [achieve a main goal; e.g., start making $1M every year].

[Name] [how they live; e.g., work completely online, communicating with their small team via email or Slack. When they’re not doing that, they’re picking their kids up from school or creating content].

They’re [personality trait(s); e.g. mission-driven, hardworking, the human equivalent of a warm hug], and they want [what they want from you/themselves; e.g., to get more fulfillment from their work and really feel like they’re making a positive impact].

[Name] wants to [achieve big goals; e.g., write a book, launch a podcast] and [how they’ll make that happen; e.g., they’ll be a perfectionist to a fault].

[Name] [their big values; e.g., advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and wants the products they buy to give them a lot of bang for their buck].

Research Foundation

So how do you get to that point? With research, of course!

Market Research

There’s a lot you can do without ever talking to a member of your target audience to get to know them.

You can look at industry trends on platforms like Statista, SEMrush, The Pew Research Center, and research reports you can find on Google to understand your target audience.

Doing competitor analysis is also good, because you can see how they talk to their readers, what their buyers say in posted reviews, and even get a feel for what their readers care about most in how your competitor talks about themselves.

Finding market gaps is also important because it shows you untapped areas of the market that you can explore, and identifies opportunities to capitalize on. SEMrush is a great tool for this (and everything else, really)

Voice of Customer Research

This is where you’ll really start to learn who your dream customer is, and begin to build your ideal customer avatar.

How do you do that? Social listening for one, which is going to social media platforms and other places your ICA would commune and seeing the words and phrases they use, what they talk about, etc.

You can also engage with them in these places and build a relationship. Connecting with your people is a long game of experimentation and discovery, so you’ll have to respond to a lot of comments.

During this time you’ll get a feel for the community dynamics, language patterns, shared experiences, and their cultural values. You can also find this in market research, but people tend to share more on social platforms — so you’ll find more insight there.

Then there’s my favourite kind of consumer research: ✨interviews✨. I love a good consumer interview because you can ask your dream customers questions that glean so much insight. You can do this in-person or virtually (which will probably get you more participants) on places like Zoom, Google Meet, Butter, and more.

Always ask for consent to record the interviews, and maintain anonymity.

Surveys are a good alternative to this too. You can use the same questions you’d ask in the interview as survey questions, on platforms like Google Forms, Typeform, etc. Chances are you won’t get to conduct many interviews with a big enough respondent pool, but interviews are ideal.

Creating Your ICA

Step #1: Demographics

You need to gather info about their:

• Age
• Where they live/where they’re from
• Income
• Education
• Occupation

This is base level stuff that tightens up your target audience pool.

Then Step #2: Psychographics

This is more in-depth information like their:

• Values
• Interests
• Lifestyle
• Personality traits

— which will help you start to actually craft your ideal customer avatar.

After That, Step #3: Behavioural Patterns

This is the meat and potatoes of your ICA — the insight that will help you craft messaging that resonates with your readers. Things like:

• Buying habits
• How they make decisions
• Brand preferences, if they have any
• What platforms they use

Finally, Step #4: Pain Points & Desires

To really connect with them and get them feeling like “Oh, they really GET me” you’ll want to truly understand their:

• Current challenges
• Future aspirations
• Emotional drivers
• How they define success

What To Do After You’ve Created Your Ideal Customer Avatar

Make sure your brand voice and personality is set up to appeal to this ideal customer avatar. You can work with an expert to develop your brand voice, or get someone from your team to do it!

Download my free Brand Voice Guidelines Workbook >>>

Then, talk to them! You can do “message testing” by writing a bunch of copy and getting multiple people that fit your ICA to read them and give their two cents. What they thought about it, how it made them feel, if it makes them want to take action, etc.

Common Mistakes

• Don’t try to target everybody, like I did at the beginning of my business. That’ll just split your attention between too many kinds of people, and you won’t end up serving anybody.
• Making assumptions instead of relying on the data. When I first started my business, I assumed that anyone who needs copy would trust me because I posted only educational content that proved I was credible. And that in order to charge more, I’d have to work for pennies first. But I didn’t know about spec work then, didn’t factor in everything I was learning and doing at the corporate job I was working at the time. But I found that once I rebranded and redefined my ICA and promoted a retainer that would appeal to them, I booked more. Because I found data that supported my idea to rebrand and focus on women & BIPOC small business owners that need someone to take this off their plate without sacrificing on the quality they put into everything they do
• Missing cultural context. Again, I was trying to be for everybody at the beginning and, not going to lie, I felt like I was whitewashing myself. I mean look at these early posts! That was not me. But tapping into my own culture, and using that to connect with my ICA? So much more my style, and it’s paid off.
• Lack of specificity. I know you’ll feel like you’re limiting yourself, but you’re really being selective in the best way. You deserve to only work with people that are your ideal.

Next Steps

• Do research to understand your target audience, and use the formula above to craft your ideal customer avatar
• Download my free Brand Voice Guidelines Workbook to develop a brand voice that would appeal to this ICA.
• Book a free 20 min. Pick My Brain session to ask my opinion on your ICA and brand voice
• Book a 90-minute intensive to get some swipe copy examples you can test
• Book a 1:1 intensive Brand Voice & Messaging Development service if you need to completely overhaul how you communicate or you’re starting from scratch