There’s a new wave of AI-powered tools promising to help coaches “build their Ideal Client Avatar” in minutes. They’re often created by people who have no Ideal Client Avatar (ICA) of their own and no fundamental understanding of what goes into building one. To my dismay, coaches are buying them.
I recently spoke to someone who has monetised an ICA-building CustomGPT. She’s a web designer, not a coach, and she openly admits she doesn’t have a defined audience herself. Her own marketing is vague at best, yet she’s selling a tool designed to help others define theirs.
This isn’t an attack on her or how she gets her clients. She’s a great networker – she builds relationships, and it works for her. But that’s the point. She’s never had to sit down and do the deep, uncomfortable work of defining a niche, developing an Ideal Client Avatar, understanding real client struggles, and articulating value with clarity. She’s not equipped to teach it, let alone build a tool that claims to automate it.
Depth Matters…
Coaches, more than most, should know that depth matters. We’d be utterly scornful if someone suggested you could become a coach by chatting to a CustomGPT for half an hour. Yet many are happy to believe that a generic AI prompt stack can solve the most foundational piece of their marketing strategy.
It can’t.
When coaches use superficial tools to create superficial ICAs, they get superficial results. They waste time and they waste money. Worse still, they start to believe that marketing doesn’t work – but it does. What doesn’t work is trying to shortcut your way past the hard yards – the thinking, the reflection and the developing understanding of who you want to attract as clients.
Building a financially viable coaching business means grappling with the hard questions.
- Who is your audience?
- What do they lie awake worrying about?
- What have they already tried to fix it?
- Why didn’t it work?
- What language do they use to describe their problem?
These aren’t one-line prompts. They are deep, strategic questions that require time, thoughtful consideration, and context to answer appropriately.
Marketing a coaching business is a specialist subject. If your ICA could apply to half the population or is built from a dozen generic AI prompts, you haven’t done the work. And no tool can do it for you.
Be sceptical and question the shortcuts, because if your strategy starts with a superficial tool, the consequences will be very real.