Whether your business is approaching an upheaval or you are in the process of bringing your brand to market, analysing, discovering and targeting an ICA is imperative to keeping your brand subjective, niche and focused.
When conducting and researching for your ideal audience, many tailor demographics into wealth sectors, age groups, buyer and spending habits and hobbies, this gives us a broad outline to target our marketing campaigns and specify our PR readerships, but digging deeper and conducting a personal ICA discovery will aid in capitalising on a specific individual.
What is an Ideal Customer Avatar?
It is a detailed profile of your ideal customer, avatar aside, you may never find a perfect client, but characterising an ideal avatar, removes the ideology of grouping and categorized assumptions and focuses on one individual outline. Discovering your ICA, means going deeper into any other marketing persona and provides marketers with more direct tools of access.
The first stage of creating your avatar starts from looking at your existing client base, analyse your current clients and process each attribute of their brand, logo, colour theme, standpoint and media outreach, next, explore what signifies your partnerships and collaboration with them, this could be something like, holding charity events or welcoming guest authors.
Perhaps in this task you discover your ICA is already one of your clients, in this case, network efficiently to grow your client base around this customer. If you are a business just entering the market then attending business and networking events helps to find individual attributes, somewhere in the market is your ICA and most likely easier to find than you think.
TIP - having a global avatar in mind will also help give your business an international objective and reel in clients from all over the world.
Here is an example of an ideal customer avatar I use:
Meet Lukas, he lives in Geneva owns multiple businesses, has a passion for travel and spends most of his surplus income on luxury toys, he owns a private plane, a super yacht and a 7-bedroom vacation home on Mustique island. His average earnings are £2million to £5million per year and he is continuously looking for new ventures. He is a ruthless businessman and spends his fortune lucratively, he enjoys the fame and stature his wealth buys him and enjoys showing it off. His demeanour is exuberant and extravagant, his purchasing habits are one off pieces and money can’t buy items. Family is important to him and curating experiential travel itineraries to spend 4 months of the year on his superyacht is imperative to him. It takes a lot of time, effort and devotion to gain his trust, and he despises personal social media and any photographs of him.
By focusing on favourable characteristics, you can begin to seek out new customers surrounding your chosen ICA and be subjective to those not meeting the criteria, however sectors of wealth and current exposure is something you can capitalise on, so bear in mind, finding individuals with near perfect attributes, whom may be lacking your specialised skills will secure you wining that bid.
Be specific but be demographic, if you evaluate your attrition rate and find your product or business outreach is only reaching a specific audience, perhaps only male or female, Gen-Z or Baby Boomers, then explore building in multiple ICA profiles. You may be unintentionally leaving out a whole host of potential clients, be intentional with your ICA on who you are including and who you are excluding.
You will have different psychographics for each, which is great for companies with multi-dimensional sale objectives, within my business I focus solely on luxury, which covers a host of yachting, automotive, horology, aviation and more, so understanding personality influences and subsequent behaviour can greatly improve outreach methods, advertising style, and building an overall emotionally compelling brand.