Targeted marketing for maximum profits.

The most successful marketing strategies for small businesses are not about reaching the masses but about connecting with the right people – your ideal customers. This is where the concept of an ideal customer avatar (ICA) comes into play.

An ICA is a detailed representation of your ideal customer, encompassing their:

• Demographics: population-based on factors such as age, race, and sex.
• Psychographics: customers psychological characteristics and traits such as values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices
• Buying behaviours: customers' actions and thought processes which govern when and what they decide to buy and how they use products. It comprises multiple variables, including the customer's motivations, mood, product accessibility and mentality.

It's a fictional persona that embodies the characteristics of the customer you want to attract and more importantly retain for the long term. By understanding your ICA, you can tailor your marketing efforts to resonate with their specific needs and preferences.



The benefits of creating an ICA are numerous:

• Focused Marketing: An ICA helps you define your target audience with precision, ensuring that your marketing messages reach the right people at the right time. No more wasting resources on irrelevant campaigns that fall on deaf ears.

• Personalised Engagement: With a clear understanding of your ICA's needs and desires, you can craft personalised marketing messages that resonate with them on a deeper level. It makes customers believe that you know them and that they are important to you. This personal touch fosters stronger customer relationships and increases loyalty.

• Effective Resource Allocation: By targeting your ideal customer, you can allocate your marketing resources much more effectively, ensuring that your efforts are maximising the return on your investment. No more scattergun marketing that spreads resources too thinly.

• Improved Customer Acquisition: By understanding your ICA's preferences and buying behaviors, you can identify the most effective channels and strategies to reach them. This targeted approach leads to more qualified leads and a higher customer acquisition rate.

• Enhanced Customer Retention: By understanding your ICA's real pain points, you can develop strategies to keep them engaged and happy. This ultimately leads to increased customer retention and reduced churn.

Creating an ICA involves conducting market research, analysing existing customer profiles, and gathering insights from team members. It's an ongoing process that requires continuous refinement as your business and customer base evolve.

Here are some steps to create your Ideal Customer Avatar:

• Define Your Customer Segments: Divide your customer base into distinct segments based on shared characteristics and behaviors.

• Identify Customer Personas: Within each segment, identify individuals who represent the ideal customer for that segment.

• Research and Analyse: Gather data to understand each persona's demographics, psychographics, and buying behaviours by using surveys, interviews, and customer interactions.

• Develop Detailed Profiles: Create comprehensive profiles for each persona, including their age, gender, location, interests, values, motivations, and of course most importantly their pain points.

• Continuously Refine: Regularly review and update your ICAs as your business and customer base evolve.

Once you have a well-defined ICA, you can use it to focus all aspects of your marketing strategy, from content creation to channel selection to ad targeting. This targeted approach will help you connect with the right people, build stronger relationships, and ultimately achieve your business goals.



At Wood and Disney we have been using this process for many years so if you look at our home page we very clearly tell our audience that we are:

"The advisors to ambitious entrepreneurs".



Because ambitious entrepreneurs need structured advice on a regular basis in order to drive growth in their businesses. Wood and Disney have a structured advisory process created over the last three decades based upon practical knowledge and experience of the team rather than just learnt from books.

The end result? Our clients want to build better futures for themselves, their families, their teams and their communities. They want to still have a successful business long into the future to either sell or pass on to the next generation. This is what Wood and Disney excel at.



Wood and Disney have successfully created a structured approach to identifying an Ideal Customer Avatar for any business. We use a combination of market data, your business's Unique Selling Points (USP), your financial data and your goals and aspirations for the future, to identify your ICA.

Identifying your ICA is just the first step. Once we have an ICA profile, we can then move forward to help you to develop your products, services, marketing and systems to maximise the profitability and sales potential of your ICA. Then we set up systems to control and monitor your progress, to keep you on track to deliver maximum profits and stable growth whilst maintaining business resilience.