[Thriving Creator Podcast] Episode 3: This is who your ideal customer REALLY is (because they're not who you think they are!)

Hello, and welcome to this episode. Let me ask you a question, have you ever created an ideal customer/avatar profile for your business, only to be a little confused as to the kinds of people who you are attracting? Discover a better way of establishing who your customer really is. Listen now to find out who your customer avatar really is and how you can develop the perfect profile.

Episode 3: This is who your ideal customer REALLY is (because they’re not who you think they are!) – Podcast Transcript

Hey, Thrivers. I’m Sara Nguyen, creator of Thrive Video Academy, and I’m here to help you go from stuck and overwhelmed to becoming a confident, profitable and thriving creator. Join me here each week for honest conversations about what it really takes to become a successful YouTube creator without compromising your creativity, sacrificing cheeky drinks with people you love or downtime for yourself.

You’ll hear about the hard lessons I’ve gone through, so you can avoid making the same slow and costly mistakes on your journey, as well as my secret weapons to help you deep and do the work it takes. I’m so honoured and grateful to have the opportunity to share this together with you right here on the Thriving Creator Podcast.

I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get started. I’m going to be talking about how to create your ideal customer profile. Now, what is an ideal customer avatar? How do you create one?

I’m going to cover all of that, and not only am I going to cover that I’m going to do it in a slightly different way. If you are familiar with the concept of a customer avatar or ideal client, and it really makes you want to throw up every time you have to go and correct one, I’ve got a better system for you, creating your ideal client profile.

Let’s have a look at this because if you’re a business owner, you know that you’re supposed to create this persona of who you want to target and who you want to, buy your products and services. I wanted to look at this in a new way so that you can have a profile of someone who is incredibly connected to you.

An incredibly connected customer avatar gets you, understands what your message is all about. They understand what you’re offering. The problem with a customer avatar, it’s that what we’ve been taught and what, I guess, I wouldn’t say that it’s the wrong way to do it, but the traditional way of identifying a customer avatar is that you create this imaginary person who you believe is someone who will buy your products and services.

Your customer avatar is a profile of who your ideal client is. So ideal clients, people who will buy your products and services, can afford it. Customer avatar is the profile of who they actually are.

The traditional way is to make up this person, who’s a combination of a bunch of demographics, geographics and pretty much taking a guess of who you want to actually attract into your actual business. But the problem with creating a customer avatar where you have this fictitious person, is that because you’ve made this person up because you’ve taken a guess of who they are, so what normally happens when people create a profile of their customer avatar is they’ll say something like my customer avatar is female.

She’s probably aged between 30 and 40, I may be replicating my past up here, she likes to do yoga. She likes to eat burgers. She earns about a hundred thousand dollars and she lives in an apartment.

And the problem with this is that this person is imaginary. They’re not real. And then you end up trying to create all of this content for this fictitious person who doesn’t exist. And you really do end up with this crazy person who attracts the strangest people into your business.

If you’ve ever created a customer profile and you’ve had just the weirdest people in your audience, this is probably one of the reasons why. It’s probably because you’ve created a customer profile or customer avatar of this fictitious person.

And then you just bring in the weirdest people and you’re kind of like, these are not my people. It’s really different to the people I would want to work with. Therefore, when you’re trying to connect with them, it’s really difficult because you end up with a schizophrenic personality and then the strangest people coming into your audience.

The way that I want you to think about your customer avatar is not necessarily as someone who’s fictitious that you make up, that you would love to buy from you. I think that’s an old way of creating our customer profile. And I get, it’s a starting point, but I think today we’re much more evolved than that. Instead of thinking of your customer avatar as this fictitious person that you’ve made up, think about your customer avatar as yourself.

You’re looking in the mirror, your customer avatar is you. And I know there’s a big argument where people say, you’re not your customer. Well, actually for the most part you are. And let me explain why.

You are your customer avatar or the past you is, the past version of you is, and you are your customer avatar and the perfect candidate for your customer avatar because you understand the struggle, you understand the pains that they’ve had and you know what it takes to get from where you were to where you are now.

You can now connect with this person as opposed to this fictitious person that you’ve made up. And everyone I know who goes through a customer avatar goes through an ideal customer profile exercise where they have to make up a fictitious person.

It really feels just frustrating. But when you think of it as you are your customer avatar, the past you is, it’s so much easier to connect. It’s so much easier to understand the pains because you went through it, right?

And it’s your experience and it’s your knowledge and you’re looking in the mirror all these pieces make you your customer avatar. But now that we’ve identified that your past self is your customer avatar, how do you then create this profile of the past you, right?

I’ve got a couple of questions. I’ve got five today. The first question. Think back to you, your past self, before you went through all the transformation to be able to offer the services and products that you do now.

Ask yourself what was, your past self, so what was his or her number one struggle? And with this question, you’re really uncovering the pain that they had, the pain that you had, and you can answer this very well. Especially if you’re in the health niche.

I think this is a really powerful question to ask, because if you’ve gone through that weight loss or health journey, you know exactly what it’s like to struggle, right? And you can articulate what that struggle is and write down what your number one struggle was before you went through all of this transformation.

It could be a range of things for my particular customer avatar. The number one struggle was having confidence to put yourself out there. The struggle was being on camera. Write down whatever your struggle was.

That’s the first thing. So the second question to help you create this profile is how did the problem show up for you back then? What did it look like? What did the fear, what did the pain look like?

I’m using the health example to give a demonstration on, but if it was that you were looking to lose weight and struggling, was it that you were overweight? Was it that you had health problems? Was it that you’re unhappy?

How did your problem look like to you, your past self? Write that down. These are really powerful questions and these are much more powerful than creating a fictitious profile of a person who may live in a certain area, who’s a certain age.

These’ll really help you identify the fears, frustrations, the needs, desires, and all the psychological things that go on that help you really connect with someone. The third question is what’s the real reason that you weren’t able to solve your problems back then, right?

This one really looks at what were the beliefs that you were holding at the time? For me, at the time before I learnt how to go live on camera and how to use the video, the reason that I believed that I didn’t want to go on camera was that I was afraid of the camera, but that’s not the real reason.

The real reason was that I was afraid of judgment, like most people. That’s the real reason. The surface reason is that yes, I’m afraid of the camera. I’m introvert. But the real reason is that I was afraid of judgment.

I was afraid of looking like a failure and also afraid of being embarrassed. What’s the real reason that you weren’t able to solve your problem at that time? Really, really powerful question. It sounds simple, but really digs deep into the mindset and the beliefs that you were holding at that time.

Why did you think that things didn’t work for you? Like why did you think that even though you tried all these things, that they didn’t work? What did you try and why did you think they didn’t work? Once again, we’re looking at the experiences really powerful question.

And we’re looking at, once again, the beliefs that you had at that time. And the last question that I have is what beliefs did you need to let go of in order to break through? So you, as your customer avatar, the past version of yourself, went through a transformation.

You learn all these things, you applied all these things, but in order to get from point A to point B, where you were to where you are now, you had to let go of a lot of limiting beliefs and you had to let go of a lot of fears. What are they?

What were they that you had to let go of? For me, I had to let go all of the fear of judgment, right? I had to let go of the fear of people judging me, the fear of people judging my business and whole bunch of things, that I wasn’t good enough, a whole lot of things that I had to let go of.

Write them down. And these are such, I think, confronting but beautiful questions as well, because when you realised that, yes, you are your customer avatar, and then you go through these sets of questions, it’s a little bit emotional to see that, okay, these were the struggles that I had. The problems looked like all of these pains.

I wasn’t able to work through it because I had all of these limiting beliefs. I tried a bunch of things and they didn’t work because… and then you look at, then I let go of a bunch of stuff and what they were. And if you look at all of these traits, these profile elements is what makes up your customer avatar.

These are the five that I would ask to get started. And these are the questions that will help you surface the traits of a customer avatar. Now, once again, why do you even need a customer avatar? It’s a good question, because sometimes I feel that you get given all these things to do for the sake of it, creators what analysis, creator ideal client profile.

The purpose of creating a ideal client profile and our customer avatar is that it gets you very clear on who you want to attract, and you go through these steps to create this profile of someone who you understand. And then you’ve got all the pain points and then you know who that person is.

And then that way you can also repel people who you don’t want to attract. And when you’re creating content, think back to, okay, what was my experience back then? What did past me need that I can create for them?

What sort of content pieces, what are the products and services that past me would have really needed to move through all of this stuff? And then it also works in terms of not just creating products but in terms of the content that you create and the messaging that you have.

So it becomes really powerful and a really helpful way of helping you actually attract, and you want to attract people like yourself. Hopefully you found this useful, and this really was a bridged cut down version of coming up with your customer avatar and your ideal client profile.

I hope that you go through these questions and then it helps you really uncover all the psychographic, all of the mindset, all of the beliefs. And that is a powerful customer avatar profile. One last thing before I go, I created this podcast as a reminder that you are not alone in this.

Growing with video is hard, and I want to be here to help and guide you and others through it. If you found this podcast episode helpful, please leave a review. This helps Apple and the algorithms put my podcast in front of more people just like you. I’d be incredibly grateful. Thanks for listening.