Why Business Owners Don’t Need an ICA (Ideal Client Avatar)

[00:00:00] Laura Burnett: Hello everyone. Today we are gonna talk about the seven biggest lies you are being told about business and the leaders. They just don’t want you to know about them. So welcome to nine to Thrive. The lead generation uncovered with myself, Laura Burnett, the tech wiz. My business partner to my left or right. I really dunno where this is playing.

[00:00:27] Laura Burnett: Uh, called Nicky Williams my business mentor and other people’s amazing business mentor who helps businesses move forward. So in this episode, we are introducing you to the seven biggest lies that we feel that business owners are being told right now. And you need to be told the truth. So of course, we’re not gonna tell you all seven in just one episode.

[00:00:48] Laura Burnett: And this episode is all gonna be focused on why business owners. Don’t need an ICA. So you’ve been told a lot that you need one. I am guessing. And if you don’t know what an ICA is, you might know it as an ideal client avatar and it does go under other names which I’m sure Nikki will tell you, cause she’s the expert on this one, not me.

[00:01:11] Laura Burnett: So I am gonna hand it over to Nicky to introduce you to why business owners don’t need an ideal client.

[00:01:19] Nicky Williams: I love that. I’m like thinking what other things, what other names are they called? My goodness. So I’ve spent years teaching. Why. Ideal client avatars are hugely important. In fact, I’ve run five free challenges and day two of each of those challenges has been solely focused on why you need an ICA.

[00:01:42] Nicky Williams: And I have a workbook on ICA that’s. Probably 20 odd pages about the in depth knowledge. You need to know about who you are talking to. And we are talking, um, we’re pretty much there inside a leg of measurements. That’s how much detail I was asking people to find out because we wanted to get them to know about.

[00:02:05] Nicky Williams: What their ideal client think where they hang out all the rest of it, but kind of like, you know, your best friend. And I saw it as hugely important, but what happened on those challenges on day two on the Tuesday was I had a huge, excuse me, drop off. I had probably over 50% of the challenge goers ran a mile.

[00:02:30] Nicky Williams: And that is because it’s ridiculously hard to pick an ideal client avatar. Okay. It’s ridiculously hard and it’s becoming a huge block. I dunno if you think that as well, Laura, it’s a huge, it’s a huge block. Yeah. I think that people. Are really struggling. Cause they’re like, I wanna serve everybody and we are going no, but you’ve just gotta focus on one person.

[00:02:52] Nicky Williams: I used to explain it beautifully with a wonderful analogy. And I remember saying, right, imagine you’ve got a lovely rose garden that you’ve got a prize rose right in the middle. And that prize rose is that one that you wanna really be with. And you’ve got that hose pipe and you are watering the hose and you are directing that hosepipe on that one.

[00:03:11] Nicky Williams: Beautiful rose to make it absolutely bloom. But at the same time, you are trickling out to the rest of the roses. I went through all of this. Rubbish to be fair, to explain why it’s so important to get your ideal client avatar nailed down, but I don’t actually believe that’s true anymore. I believe things have changed radically online.

[00:03:32] Nicky Williams: I think you’ve got to move with the times. I think social media has evolved. Hugely over the last five years. And I think your ideal client are everywhere. So you, you know, it is down to deciding where you like to hang out rather than where your ideal client likes to hang out, because wherever you hang out, you’ll enjoy it more.

[00:03:54] Nicky Williams: Your ideal client will come up. What you reckon and Laura.

[00:03:58] Laura Burnett: No a hundred percent agree. Cause I know, I remember when you gave me that workbook, when I first met you and I think it was a challenge to it. And I remember that workbook and I was like, what I, to what magazine? To read? I don’t even know what kind of magazine I like to read.

[00:04:12] Laura Burnett: Never mind the ideal client, what magazine do you wanna read? And it’s like, how do I know what we should have to read? And then you’ve wasting that many hours thinking about your ICA. You’ve actually  moved forward. I do think it, every, which we obviously will get onto it. You do need some form of ideal client or dream client you choose.

[00:04:30] Laura Burnett: Um, but not to that level of depth, like, know what the algorithm does not know what magazine people reads, unless people talk about their magazine, uh, what books they read or what TV shows read, what places they like to visit the algorithm doesn’t know all that information. Ads do, but, but not the actual algorithm of the general social media posting.

[00:04:53] Laura Burnett: So if we’re trying to get into someone’s head like that, then you start procrastinating and you don’t do anything. You end up overwhelmed, you end up not posting. And like you said, it’s a block.

[00:05:05] Nicky Williams: Yeah. And that’s where I started off. I was thinking, right. Facebook ads do require, or to really hone down your Facebook ads.

[00:05:12] Nicky Williams: You do require a certain amount of information, but the, the majority of online businesses, coaches, entrepreneurs do not take up. Facebook ads. So therefore it’s blocking them, it’s stopping them. And because they’re like, oh my God, I do not know who I’m talking to. So I can’t do anything. And then it stops their creation, their content creation, because they’re like, I dunno who I’m talking to, but I’ve gotta know who I’m talking to.

[00:05:36] Nicky Williams: So it really becomes quite an overwhelming block to moving forward. So what we are saying today is just get yourself out there. You know, we have to create. Um, or know who our problem is directed at, you know, so, you know, it could be that if you are a yoga teacher to, uh, people in their retirement age.

[00:06:02] Nicky Williams: Okay, well, that’s fantastic. That is who you are talking to, but we don’t need to know, um, where they live, because obviously it’s going to be online. We don’t need to know, you know, how big they are small. They are. We don’t need to know if they’re blonde hair, black hair. We don’t need to know if they listen to radio too, or if they’re on, you know, heart radio, we don’t, how many

[00:06:24] Nicky Williams: how many children they’ve got, what’s their income.

[00:06:27] Nicky Williams: Okay. Because there’s certain assumptions that we are going to always make when we are on. Um, on social media, when we’re advertising our wears there’s certain situations where we, and I do talk about dream client, but whatever clients you decide to choose, they’ve just got to, got to make the assumption they can afford your services.

[00:06:48] Nicky Williams: So that is just. Done. We don’t need to have to question that. So we don’t have to think, oh, how much income, you know, what’s their, their family, their units income, you know, we don’t need to know, you know, if they’ve got stepchildren, their shoe size, et cetera, et cetera. So we have, you know, I have turned around.

[00:07:06] Nicky Williams: Massively in my approach regarding this. And moreover, what I do is I think that there are so many obstacles that you, as online business owners, coaches, entrepreneurs are facing, we don’t need to put another block in your way. And what I do see is it’s another thing that probably people are making money from.

[00:07:30] Nicky Williams: You guys, because you’re like, I need this, I need this, I need this. So you go, okay, I’m gonna invest in a coach or a mentor or a group program that tells me how to do this. And then I need to organize a, um, small group of people so I can investigate what they really think, what they want, what, you know, you’re doing it all the research.

[00:07:50] Nicky Williams: Actually, we don’t need that. That’s utter rubbish. We do not need that. What do you reckon, Laura?

[00:07:55] Laura Burnett: Nope, don’t agree. We just don’t need it. So like for me, for example, I remember having a really in depth and ideal client, but that never helped me write my social media. It never helped me write my email marketing never helped me talk to a client.

[00:08:10] Laura Burnett: All I know in the back of my head is that when I go onto social media, I am talking to business owners who need help with their tech or email marketing. And that’s all I need to know. I don’t need to know anything else. I just need to know that I’m that business owner. Where most people know, I have a very wide variety of business owners.

[00:08:26] Laura Burnett: I work with. It could be a coach. It could be a brick layer. You know, it it’s one dimension to the other, for me, as long as they’re a business owner who needs help with their tech. For me is that’s all they need such as you could be a therapist. So you could obviously turn that, you know, get this ICA work done if you want.

[00:08:44] Laura Burnett: And you could have an ICA who’s female in her thirties, and she’s always worked in corporate and she’s got two kids who will run riot, but on none of this is actually gonna help you write your social media post. And you’ll naturally never write your post because you’ll just be like overthinking it constantly.

[00:09:01] Laura Burnett: All you’ll need to know is your ideal client is someone in their thirties that is maybe always struggling with anxiety every day and it’s stopping and moving forward with the lives. That could be all the information you need to know. So you do have like an ideal client, but just you don’t need all that information.

[00:09:18] Nicky Williams: It’s a loose one. So when you said about corporates, now, if you are focused on corporates making the leap from corporate to something else, then that’s really good for your content. That’s really fantastic. So there are reasons why you do need to know some information. And there’s reasons not to know some information.

[00:09:37] Nicky Williams: So if you are, you have a product that you sell, then you need to do product research, market research on that. Of course you do. Um, and you need to know ish how you are loosely serving somebody, but take the, just, you know, that every social media will have that mix of people. Absolutely LinkedIn has changed its approach.

[00:10:02] Nicky Williams: Totally. And it’s no longer just a market in your jobs, prospects, um, arena it’s changed. It’s now more of a social networking platform. You’ve got the reels on Instagram, on TikTok. You’ve got Facebook that have now brought in reels. It’s transforming and evolving all of the time. And so therefore we have to as well.

[00:10:24] Nicky Williams: So we adapt our businesses in different ways, and that is becoming looser with your ideal clients. Now I talk about dream clients and, and that’s very, very different to ideal client. Ideal client is very much, um, you know, Who, who, who you’re talking to, what they’re like, what, what gender they are. Um, you know, what age they are, what family they come from.

[00:10:46] Nicky Williams: What, what radio station listen to. I talk about dream clients, as in, who would you love to work with? So if you’ve ever worked with somebody and you go, oh my goodness, that, that gr that guy was an absolute dream. Uh, if I could work with somebody like him every day, I would. Now that’s a dream client. Laura was a dream client and so much so that she’s like my business bestie.

[00:11:09] Nicky Williams: Now my podcast co-host, you know, it is amazing. Isn’t it? How online business and networking, communicating with people really evolves. And I would say more over anything with ICA. Is just network. Talk to people, get to know people because even if the person you’re talking to isn’t your dream client, they might have in their network, somebody that is your dream client

[00:11:37] Laura Burnett: a hundred percent.

[00:11:38] Laura Burnett: And I always think back to reels are a big thing right now. Aren’t they reels and TikTok. And if you were super, super, super niche and you’d really got an ideal client and you were doing a reel just specific to. 30 year old with two kids. Who’s in corporate and has a three star house with two bedrooms.

[00:11:58] Laura Burnett: You would actually never get found on a reel because you’ll be using hashtags. So niche that they only get searched, maybe 10 times 20 times. They’re not cause nobody listening to this can tell me that they’re put into their hashtag that you are going on reels to watch you wouldn’t search hashtag.

[00:12:16] Laura Burnett: Three story bedroom house with white windows. You don’t search that as hashtag, so you don’t need to know that for big extreme. I know, but hashtag you don’t need to know that everybody searches hashtag business owner, hashtag entrepreneur, hashtag business mom, you know, they, they search big things. So yes, we still need to use some niche ones.

[00:12:38] Laura Burnett: Like I might. Hashtag active campaign, hashtag whatever software I might be using, or if you’re dealing with anxiety, you might search hashtag, um, anxiety, phobias. So you might, you know, a little bit of niche there, but you don’t search hashtag women with anxiety in thirties. We just don’t search it, do we?

[00:12:56] Laura Burnett: So if you start being too niche, you just won’t get found. Cause social media is too big. It is way too big. And it’s about getting yourself known.

[00:13:04] Nicky Williams: Yeah. And that’s very much what we said earlier about finding that platform, that social media platform. That you actually love to use, like Laura loves reels and she’s really amazing on it.

[00:13:16] Nicky Williams: Fantastic. Love it. So she’ll, she’ll be all over Instagram and TikTok and all the rest of it. Whereas that’s not my, my bag at all. It’s not something that I would naturally be able to like, just put together because she’s just a, just fricking do it person. Whereas I. I’d have to make a plan and then another plan of action.

[00:13:34] Nicky Williams: And so therefore LinkedIn is a better approach for me and a bit better platform and I enjoy it much more. So I hang out very much on, on LinkedIn, whereas Laura does LinkedIn, but also she can approach these other platforms as well. So it’s about getting on that platform that you absolutely love. Because once you love, love it and comfortable, then you can start talking to the people that you wanna talk to, the people that you wanna work with and start shouting from the rooftops about what your, what you love and what your thing is.

[00:14:05] Laura Burnett: Exactly that. So in a nutshell, are you being told  that you need to know your ICA. More than you know yourself. Cause you do pretty much when you do these, um, workbooks, like, like Nikki had for 20 page notebook, um, you know, you know, so much about this ICA, it blocks you. So you do not need that. You do not need that block.

[00:14:26] Laura Burnett: You just need to know broadly the kind of people you want to support and then get yourself out there. Well, that’s all you need to know. So that is number one of the biggest lies. We have six more to come, but also. In September, we have an amazing masterclass coming up where we’re gonna revisit the seven biggest slides that we’re talking about on this podcast and more, and you are invited.

[00:14:52] Laura Burnett: If you wanna join us on this masterclass, ready for September. Join us by going to the thrive business academy.com. Slash masterclass, you know, keeping visual URL as simple as possible. It will be in the show notes as well. So you can just click it and make it super easy. And you can join us in our masterclass where we are gonna talk more about the seven biggest lies you’re being told about business.

[00:15:14] Laura Burnett: That leaders just don’t want you to know. Cause a lot of people you will notice. Just stuck in the past, the teaching, the past, you know, it drives me crazy and saying when I do things like my marketing classes, cuz so many people are teaching the old ways and it’s about learning the new ways and adapting, like Nicky said earlier in this episode.

[00:15:34] Laura Burnett: So that is it from me and Nicky, unless you have anything further to add Nicky?

[00:15:38] Nicky Williams: No, that’s all wonderful. And don’t miss the masterclass, cuz it’s going to be absolute epic. How can you not have these two nutts in your life in September? So join us and it’ll be fabulous.

[00:15:51] Laura Burnett: It certainly will be. So thank you for joining us on nine to Thrive lead generation uncovered and make sure to go out to thrive business academy.com/masterclass, and yes have an amazing day, everybody or night, depending on whenever you listen.