Best Clients, User Personas, and Ideal Customer Avatars

Myth of the Ideal Customer Avatar

Ask any “marketing person” what you need to know before you start marketing your product or service and they’ll tell you some version of:

  • ideal customer avatar
  • buyer persona or user persona
  • voice of customer research (this one’s a favorite of copywriters!)

But do you know what’s wrong with all of that? It’s jargon. And jargon-y language has no business in the real world. It’s great if you’re at a conference, learning your craft among people with similar education and experience. But all jargon does when you’re talking to your audience, to a potential client, is set up a wall between them and you.

When you go to a good doctor they say to you, “Wow, that’s a nasty bruise.” Their notes in your medical chart will say something more along the lines of, “Patient presents with a significant hematoma.” They reserve their jargon for THEIR notes, not their interaction with you, the patient.

best client persona

When marketers throw around terms like the “ideal customer avatar” it sets up a barrier between them and you. It’s a way of shortcutting, it reeks of expert status run amok, and in the end, it doesn’t serve either party.

Are you working with customers or clients?

Service providers working 1:1 or in small group programs should be getting to know their clients. Do they need to best friends? No. But they likely desire more personality exchange than you might find from your local Target checkout employee (not to be confused with your target audience, of course!).

Also–most course creators genuinely care about their students learning from their courses. They’re embarrassed to hear most courses have only a 5-15% completion rate, depending on the stat source. Treating your audience as potential clients, rather than potential customers, is something course creators can learn from the service business mentality.

I prefer working in as little a transactional way as possible, whether it’s a client choosing my $37 course helping them organize their content planning or a client choosing to hire me for a full content measurement dashboard, working together for several months. Thus, I call them my best clients.

What is a Best Client?

A best client, simply put, is the person you can most easily (and happily) help with a problem they most urgently want to solve.

To channel Liam Neeson a bit, you’ve got a particular set of skills. They probably come easy to you or perhaps you’ve developed them with care over time. And those skills are really good at fixing a particular kind of problem.

Your best client may share some identifying characteristics with others–those pieces of demographic information you often hear bandied about when people talk about avatars. Perhaps all your clients are middle-aged women–or maybe instead of that being what identifies them, it’s people who happen to have a particular fitness problem and people with that problem tend to be middle-aged women. Demographics can be an important component of understanding your customer avatar and can help you tailor your marketing strategies to target the right audience, but they are not the only thing that matters–especially to a solo-ish service business owner online!

One of the characteristics is physical, and another is psychological. Knowing both helps you define your best client. They are both valuable information data sets to consider.

If you need help putting together the best client profile that helps you create better content and marketing, the Best Client Builder is an easy download and quick way to focus on what matters and skip the things that don’t.

Targeted Content About Your Best Client:

  • Moving from ‘Nice to Have’ to ‘Must Have’ #247

    Moving from ‘Nice to Have’ to ‘Must Have’ #247

    2023 isn’t showing up with a “business as usual” vibe. A handful of years after the work remote world began, a season after quiet quitting, and the world of doing business online has exploded. With it, many changes in how people hire services and skills online abound. With more and more industries being served by…


  • The Difference Between Good and Great Content #244

    The Difference Between Good and Great Content #244

    Every business out there needs content. Whether for your website, blog, or social media, content marketing is how you attract potential customers and keep existing ones engaged. The process is how you move strangers into true believers–those 1000 true fans every business strives for. The question is, what separates good content from great content? In…


  • Strategic Content Planning For Multi-Six Figure Online Businesses #232

    Strategic Content Planning For Multi-Six Figure Online Businesses #232

    Crafting the Perfect Content Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide Content strategy is often misunderstood as a plan for writing content. Yes, content creation is one of its many jobs. Its primary job, however, is designing how content will be created and why it exists in the first place. As the great Sun Tzu famously said, “Tactics…


  • Moving Beyond Virality To Long-Term Content Marketing Success #231

    Moving Beyond Virality To Long-Term Content Marketing Success #231

    Moving Beyond Virality + Short-Term Success: You Have To Show Up Viral content seems to be the holy grail if you follow the Instagram or TikTok crowd. It gives you a whole lotta good feels, right! People like you! But this type of content rarely leads to business success–some of my most-viral content not only…


  • Discovering Your Specialized Niche with Natalie Eckdahl #230

    Discovering Your Specialized Niche with Natalie Eckdahl #230

    Be the expert in your specialized niche and become a thought leader with Natalie’s tried-and-true business models. “When you specialize your niche and narrow down, we need to be repelling a whole lot of people. When you start attracting your ideal client, everything becomes easier, and it makes you extremely referable because you are the…


  • 3 Steps to a Content Marketing Strategy For Online Businesses

    3 Steps to a Content Marketing Strategy For Online Businesses

    Content planning for an established online business (a business that offers services, signature courses, cohort-based programs, or transformational programs) isn’t complicated. Still, it also isn’t easy to implement in a day. You’ll find it’s much like creating your program content in the first place! You need a roadmap; it provides direction, guidance, and navigation to…


  • Guide to Converting with Client-Focused Content

    Guide to Converting with Client-Focused Content

    Hey, friends, how are you guys this week? I hope everyone is leaning into spring. We’ve had the weirdest weather here in Portland for the last month and a half. But I think it might be on the upswing, I don’t know. Yes, knocking on my fake wood desk there, you know, just making sure…


  • Validating Your Offers with Melissa Harstine #191

    Validating Your Offers with Melissa Harstine #191

    This week on the podcast, we are talking with Melissa Harstine, a Customer Research Specialist. As a researcher, copywriter, and trained journalist, she explains the best ways to get to know your ideal customer to improve your sales and marketing. If you are in the stage of business where you need a consultant to take…


  • All about best clients

    All about best clients


  • Supporting Courses & Their Creators

    Supporting Courses & Their Creators


  • The Importance of Inclusive Marketing

    The Importance of Inclusive Marketing

    This article is about inclusive marketing and shoulder clients, and I’m gonna call myself out here, if either of those terms are scaring the bejesus out of you, don’t worry, we’re gonna define them in a minute. I want to kind of frame this in talking about inclusive marketing. And some of the concepts I’m…


  • Inclusive Marketing & Shoulder Clients #166

    Inclusive Marketing & Shoulder Clients #166

    Today we are talking about inclusive marketing and shoulder clients. Some of the concepts I’m going to be talking about are very specific, and maybe even feel exclusionary — they’re not. This is actually a way for you to draw people in. Topics discussed in this episode: Why inclusive market and allowing people to self-select…