Create Ideal Client Profile (Client avatar): Free Guide + Template

At the beginning of 2024, I set out to do a complete revamp of my business. This meant a change in domain name (something I talked about in this LinkedIn post) , website design and copy.

But where does that change come from? Yes, it came from a need of wanting to make things more true to the current state of my business and where I want to take it.

But, this change also came from the realization that my clients had changed. Very normal if you’ve been doing it for six years like I have.

From a random assortment of clients whose projects I wouldn’t refuse, I now knew the kind of clients and projects I actually wanted to say ‘yes’ to.

The beginning of my business was all about exploration. Each project felt like opening a mixed box of chocolates, experiencing different flavors like mint versus caramel (apologies to the toothpaste lovers)

And the thing is, as an ardent lover of caramel, I want to keep biting into caramel. 

But when you’re still presenting yourself as an amateur copywriter, it means you have no choice of chocolate, or in this case project. Instead of getting to keep eating and enjoying caramel, the need to keep a constantly flow of income meant i was taking up every single project that came my way.

So in my case, that meant –

As the years passed however, I realized there were certain projects, and more specifically, certain clients who made me feel like I was constantly biting into caramel.

(Yes, I admit – this metaphor doesn’t do the best job because too much chocolate and caramel will make a perosn sick. For the sake of relevance however, bear with me. You and i both know that when we’re doing projects and working with clients who make us feel good, we want to constantly repeat that process).

So it wasn’t just the branding for my new website that needed to change.
It was about attracting the right clients who made me feel like I was enjoying the taste of caramel.

But to find these clients? You should create something called a Ideal Client Profile.

It’s called a lot of things. Segmenting, target consumer profile, etc…

But for the person selling a creative service (and that might be you), let’s just call it an ICP – ideal client profile.

Off with the Old Way of creating Target Audience profiles.

In every marketing and branding class i’ve taken at University – there’s been one thing in common.

Case studies where we had to create target audience profiles. It would look something like this:

• Age
• Name
• Occupation
• Gender
• Income
• City
• Hobbies

And it never made sense to me. In fact, creating these used to infuriate me because how on earth is this information supposed to help you understand your target audience and sell?

Okay, so you’re getting this very basic information down – like gender, income, city they live in, hobbies, etc.

Even if we expand on to include brand archetypes, how does that relate to selling and what you’re selling?

And now, you have to do the same for your creative service?

I admit – when I was starting off with conducting my signature narrative workshops, I would do this same process. But, there were so many questions left unanswered that I think we can improve on this. This new method is something i’m here to help you figure out. 

With the old method, I’ll admit, my trait of being a good storyteller helped me because – i’m great at making shit up (sorry about that).

To substantiate this a little more, here’s an example. 

Let’s say you’re a lifestyle app selling a paid service that helps people practise yoga at home.

Here’s their user profile Susan who is in her early thirties, a dog mom, living in a major city and wakes up at 6:30 am to go for her hot yoga class.

But here’s the thing – how on earth does that make us understand her more?

And to do the same for a single person selling a service? C’mon, i know you don’t want to create a Susan for yourself.

Here’s what I always thought was missing from your typical User Persona.

So, as we can see here, we’re trying to understand consumer perception of this lifestyle app. Why are we trying to understand it in the first place? To make the buying journey easier for them (aka increase ’em conversions).

So in the case of our user person, Susan:

• What’s the reason she’s interested in hot yoga in the first place?
• Why does she want to take care of herself – is it superficial? Did she have a health scare? Or it’s been inculcated in her because her mom used to be an ‘almond mom’.
• Maybe in this economy, a hot yoga class is pricey.
• Perhaps Susan doesn’t even like hot yoga but likes normal yoga – the kind that’s on our app.
• Or Susan is a busy professional who doesn’t have to time to dress up and go all the way to her class. She can just do it in her underwear at home.
• Maybe Susan’s dog is getting old so she’d rather stay at home when she can.

What are all the reasons that would get our ‘Susan’ interested in our product or service?

And specifically, what reasons and behaviours do we want to target in our branding?

See how different this new way of looking at our User Profiles is?

Here’s the thing. Not every single client who comes to you is going to be your version of ‘Susan’.

But their buying behaviours? Perhaps, yes.

And it’s not their buying behaviours we’re interested, but rather how these buying behaviours fit on your clients’ buying journey.

And by understanding these specific behaviours, we can understand how to craft our marketing and branding strategies around them. Because the ‘Susan’ who’s trying to save time and a ‘Susan’ who wants to save money on hot yoga are two different ICP behaviours (not even including the others I mentioned).

When you understand the kind of behaviour you want to target, you’ll understand the specific positioning you want to stand on (while the latter’s my speciality as a copywriter, I’ll go into detail about it in a bit).

What is an Ideal Client Profile (ICP)? [Target Audience vs ICP]

Let’s first try to understand what a target audience is. Here’s a definition from Semrush,

A target audience is a group of people that products, services, or marketing efforts are aimed toward, typically defined by traits like age, gender, income, interests, challenges, and goals. Targeting the right audiences can help you reduce costs and increase conversions.
For example, a target audience for a high-end fashion brand might be affluent women between the ages 30 and 45 who are interested in luxury goods.

And honestly, I think this definition can be applied to bigger companies with smaller-priced products. But for creative entrepreneurs selling a high-ticket service, we’ve got to get a little more specific.

You are selling a service that solves 2-3 specific problems.

Target Audience: Your target audience consists of groups of people defined by specific behavourial traits, looking for a specific problem your service solves.

Ideal Client Profile (ICP): These groups of people can be classified by their user profiles or as you might like to call them, client profiles.

At its core, it’s about understand what pain-point your ideal client has and targeting it.

They can be further classified by their pain-points – what is this problem you’re solving that no one else in your market is doing as well as you are?

A little basic? Yes, but it does the job. For example,

Let’s have a look at different Ideal Client Profiles for a Wedding Photographer

Let’s say you’re a wedding photographer who specializes in elopements.

ICP ONE:

One ideal client profile might be someone who’s looking for a wedding photographer who will take care of both the planning and photography.

ICP TWO:

Another client profile might someone looking for a photographer who can get a lot of shots in a limited timeframe.

ICP THREE & FOUR:

A bride who’s looking to get married in an urban location versus another bride looking to get married in a natural landscape would also form two different client profile

And this doesn’t even cover all of the specific problems and behaviours this elopement wedding photographer can cover. Your target audience can be as specific as you like.

It doesn’t limit the clients you will cater to – but it helps broaden your scope for securing them.

How does creating an ICP help you get more clients?

Whenever I’m creating website copy for my clients, I conduct a workshop to figure what my clients’ target audience looks like. From there, we try to figure out who their ICPs are.The most common question my clients will ask, “What’s the use of this?”

Even if you don’t want to admit it – you have limited resources. You definitely don’t have a big marketing budget like some multinational companies. And definitely not one that allows for a long-term and sustainable marketing plan.

Wouldn’t it be better to focus those resources on the clients you like? And the projects you want to do for the rest of your career?

Think of each piece of your marketing. And I mean each piece.

The posts you put out, the graphics you design, emails, blogs, your website copy – the cold outreach, networking, all of it.

If you could actually mold each piece to your ICP, wouldn’t they be more likely to become aware of the service you profile? And eventually, want to work with you?

It’s why understanding and creating ideal client profiles save so much of your time and money.

Here’s the kicker. The more you talk to and understand people who fit your ICP, the better you get at it. This applies to your discovery calls and increasing your chances of converting these leads into clients.

The more you talk to the people in your target audience and the more you try to sell to them – the easier it becomes to actually see what they’re really looking for. To understand those behaviours, you have learn about them.

In a very simple way, creating an Ideal Client Profile that makes most sense for your brand will actually help you save money on marketing while also massively increasing your conversions.

Let me explain it even further.

Why do you need a create an Ideal Client Profile (ICP) for your creative service 

For the purpose of ease, let’s call your ideal client profile – ‘Cleo’ – (‘C’lient I would ‘L’ove to work with at ‘E’very possible ‘O’pportunity.

(You can tell I winged that and i’m not going to apologize for it).

So Cleo here is going to be that girl, like the GenZ say. But really, she’s going to be YOUR it girl.

Now repeat her name after me.

Everytime you write an email newsletter, who are you going to write it for?

You say, “For Cleo!”

Everytime you write your website copy? Who are you going to write it for?

“For Cleo!”

Everytime you put out branding and marketing? WHO ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE IT FOR?

“CLEO!”

But then you pause and say, “Maria, darling. Why am I repeating this abbreviation you just made up?”

No, dear reader. You’re repeating the name of your ICP.

In this case, it’s the picture of the person (your ideal client) every time you put out branding and marketing so that it stays consistent throughout.

Here’s some facts you might not know about marketing.

• It takes about 12-18 months for branding to stick (i’m looking at those of you who constantly doing a rebrand because you think the marketing isn’t working)
• It takes 7 touchpoints before a customer purchases from you
• You’re overcomplicating marketing (I talked about my honest and personal experience with this in this article)

No, i didn’t pull out these numbers out of my ass – but they’re numbers that have stuck with me from podcasts and conversations with other business owners.

So, if you want your ideal clients to come to you? Your brand has to be reliable – consistent.
What does reliability and consistency convey? Trustworthiness?
And what does being trustworthy get you? It gets you more leads. 

Will creating specific Ideal Client Profiles (ICP) limit your business?

Nope! In fact, I think it opens people’s eyes to who you are.

For example, my ICPs are creative service entrepreneur looking to position themselves as the go-to expert with the help of an authentic brand story.

However, many different brands and companies across the spectrum have approached me. Just a few weeks ago, a tech company asked me to write copy for their website. Two of my clients requested me to write LinkedIn posts for them.

While I did say ‘no’ to both projects (because I have no interest in writing LinkedIn posts or creating copy for the tech industry), the reason I tell you this is because creating a positioning for yourself by understanding your ideal client profile allows you to be clearer on what you sell and opens your work up for opportunities.

By clarifying your stance and who you work with – more and more people get to know and understand who you are.

Allowing you to become the go-to expert.

There’s four parts to creating your Ideal Client Persona (ICP)

1. Build your target audience
2. Interview people who fit your Target Audience
3. Do a pain-point & competitor analysis
4. Create your Ideal Client Personas – no more than 3-5.

While I would love to include a detailed step-by-step process for all of the above, we’d be stuck here all day. And I want to ensure this is relevant to this blog post.

And don’t worry, I’ve provided very helpful tips and a template to help you with points 2 & 4.

A Template to Interview your Target Audience

I planned on initially launching this a freebie, but as you might’ve already read it in this newsletter, I’m a bit of sick of them. 

This was my own version that you can adapt.

The call typically took about 30 minutes (I found it to be better than doing a written questionnaire since I could ask more questions based on their answers). I’ve written the time for each section accordingly in brackets. 

Understand your personal Goal of this Target Audience Questionnaire

• Figure out your goal for conducting this in the first place: My goal with this questionnaire was to get my ICP’s perspective on my service (website copywriting), their perception and ideally, how+why they would want to work with a copywriter.
• Understand what the outcome should look like: Personally, I found that conducting this was extremely helpful in understanding how to position my offer as well as write copy for my upcoming website relaunch. 
• See if you can offer something in exchange: In exchange for doing this call with me, I offered a 1 hour website audit for free. 

Questionnaire

About the business.

This section is where you’ll ask the interviewee questions about their business. Get to know them a little.
On average, this section took me 7 minutes to complete.

1. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your business
2. How long have you been running this business for?
3. What keeps you motivated to keep going even when you run into issues?
4. What are your future goals as a business owner? (specifically 6 month, 1 year and 5 year goals)
5. Explain your service to me
6. What’s your average monthly revenue?

On Problems your Target Audience typically faces.

This section is where you’ll ask the interviewee questions about problems in (your) industry, your target audience typically faces.
Specifically, problems that your service can solve. If your problem doesn’t solve something related to marketing (like mine), adapt it accordingly – I’ve put it in brackets.
On average, this section took me 9 minutes to complete.

5. Rate your <marketing efforts> on a scale of 1-10
6. Why do you think it’s not a 10?
7. What would make it a 10?
8. What are your thoughts on <marketing>? Specifically <online marketing>?
9. What stresses you as a business owner?
10. Where do most of your leads come from? 
11. On avg how much do you invest in the business?
12. How much do you invest in <marketing>?

On an additional note, if you’re struggling with trying to figure out what industry you’re in and its related problems, I’d recommend first creating a generic target audience profile.

Their Relationship with similar Service Providers.

This section is where you’ll ask the interviewee if they’ve previously worked with businesses who provide the same service as you. Ideally, you will interview at least one person who’s worked and not worked with someone like you.
On average, this section took me 3 minutes to complete.

11. Have you ever worked with a <freelancer/agency> in the past? How did that go?
12. What gets you interested in working with someone in the first place? 

On an additional note, question 12. helps you understand what they’re looking for from a similar service provider to yourself.

Their Perception about your Service

This section is where you’ll ask the interviewee questions about their thoughts on the service you provide. This section is where you’ll need to adapt the questions accordingly for your service. It will also be the longest part of your ICP interview.
On average, this section took me 12 minutes to complete.

13. Do you have a <personal website>? Rate <your website> on a scale of 1 to 10.
14. What do you think would get it to a 10?
15. How much do you think <your website> contributes to <a sale>?
16. How do you typically evaluate different options when considering investing in services like <website cop>y?
17. Have you ever worked with a <website copywriter> before?
18. What are some of your fears about working with a <copywriter>? 
19. Do you have a <sales page>? 
20. Can you describe your frustrations with your current <website or landing page copy>?
21. What opportunities do you see for improvement or growth by investing in <website copy services>?
22. Would you prefer if someone you’re hiring has their prices on the website>

How to adapt these Questions specifically to your Service Business.

This questionnaire would look a little different depending on your service. Think about three things when adapting – your industry, your niche and the clients you want to work with.

You can also remove or add whatever question you like – it’s your questionnaire, after all. I recommend not interviewing your previous clients, solely because I found a little bias crept in while they answered some of these questions.

Remember, the goal is to understand your target audience and ICP.

How do you find people to answer these questions?

You post about it.

I posted on LinkedIn and a few business groups I’m a part of. I also just asked people I have a decent working relationship with – if they knew anyone who’d be willing to do this.

Because I offered the website audit for free, a lot of people were more than ready to take it up. Perhaps you can offer something in exchange for their time.  

How to Create an Ideal Client Profile(Template)

1. Basic information

Name and certain personality traits.

2. Their work and income profile

This is where you describe the kind of work they do – whether they’re a business owner like yourself or describe the job or industry they work in.

3. What kind of lifestyle do they live?

Now, this might not necessarily be relevant to what you’re selling. However, having this information on hand can help you understand their moods and behaviours.

For example, if you’re a business coach, your ideal client persona might be a working mom who’s trying to take her business from $5k a month to $10k a month – but has a laundry list of items on their to-do list that makes them feel overwhelmed.

Maybe you’re a mental fitness coach targeting entrepreneurs in their 40s dealing with a mid-life crisis.

Or perhaps you’re a sales coach looking to target freelancers on the neurodivergent spectrum and who struggle with executive dysfunction.

A good way to figure this out? Ask your previous clients.

4. Motivations

This is where you really ask – what motivates them to continue even when things suck? When it seems like things are going nowhere, when the going gets bad?

Maybe they want more money or desire a better lifestyle? The reasons could vary from something as simple as wanting to decide when they wake up or needing more freedom to manage their poor health.

Or it could be mental health related – they want to stop feel stressed all the time or overcome feelings of indecision that are ego-based – perhaps they want to feel proud of the work they do and if so, can you connect it to the service you prove?

5. Goals

What goals are they chasing, specifically? Is there a future version of themselves, where they’ve achieved what they’ve been wanting to achieve?

And is there a way for you to help them get to that point?

6. Challenges

What are the challenges they’re running into, trying to achieve this goal?

7. Needs

What is the gap between their challenges and goals? What are their needs at this point of time?

8. Pain-points

What are some pain-points they’re struggling with?

9. Your solution

How are you helping them solve these specific pain-points, specifically in relation to your service?

I don’t have to mention this but, feel free to use it for personal use – but not for commercial purposes. 

Don’t overcomplicate it 

Your Ideal Client Persona is a general idea of a person that you’re picturing in your head everything you do marketing or branding. So, you don’t need to overcomplicate it.

So, when you’re writing an email copy, it’s not going to be Hell {first name}. It’s going to be, “Hi, Cleo.

And yes, I give you permission to name them CLEO 😉.  

But if you don’t want to do it yourself,

How about I help you create your Ideal Client Profiles (ICP)?

It’s a part of my Signature Narrative Process. Before I write your website copy, I interview up to 3 of your previous clients or ‘ideal’ clients to understand what they’re looking for.

In the meanwhile, if you’d like to get these blog posts in your inbox, subscribe to my newsletter.