Why Founders Fall into the ‘Everyone Trap’

This is such a common problem that I’d say 80% of the B2B founders I speak with are casting their nets too wide, 10% are casting their nets too narrowly, and 10% are not even sure what they’re selling.

Why is this so common? It’s good old-fashioned FOMO, my friend! As a business owner, there’s a certain level of desperation where you don’t want to turn away any business, so you market to everyone. Problem is, “When you say yes to everyone, you’re actually saying no to focus, clarity, and results.”

Most of the time, when this happens, you’ll end up with small-ticket clients across various industries, doing a significant amount of work to keep up, but not making a substantial amount of money. Additionally, you’re losing referrals, and your marketing is unclear, so it never effectively reaches the people you want. But you’ve got followers, so… SO NOTHING!

You can’t build a fanbase if your brand sounds like a mix of Tony Robbins, a law firm, and a coffee shop menu.

The Real Cost of Vague Marketing

Marketing to the wrong crowd is kind of like going to a Taylor Swift concert and having The Beastie Boys replace her.
 

Let’s break this down into numbers:

1. The measure of a good social media post is engagement. How many people liked it, commented on it, shared it, and – holy grail of all engagement – how many people clicked on it? If your social media is not engaging, it’s probably because your posts aren’t relevant to the people who are seeing them.

 

“B2B brands that personalise their web experiences see, on average, an 80% increase in conversion rate.” (Amra & Elma, 2025)

 

2. Even if you are not spending money on advertising, you are still wasting money on campaigns that don’t convert. The most important thing any business owner has is their time. You are spending time posting to social media, writing blogs, sending emails, working with Google, or maybe advertising.

The recommended amount of time to spend on marketing is 20%-30%. If you’re billing $150/ hour and not closing deals, you’re essentially losing $2,400 every week.

The Fix: Get Crystal Clear on Your Ideal Client Avatar

Your ideal client avatar (ICA) is a made-up person that represents your ideal client. This is something that we, at Abask, have spent countless hours on, both for our own marketing and our clients’. To define your ICA, you need to take the time to define everything you know about them:

• Who they are (title, role, industry, location).
• What they’re struggling with.
• What motivates them (pain points and desires).
• How they make buying decisions.
• Words and terms they use frequently.
• What’s their age range? Are they a specific gender, race, or nationality? (This can help you to define where they spend time, and therefore where you should be spending your marketing energy)

As I mentioned, we have spent countless hours on this until 2025, when we discovered the formula to have ChatGPT do the work for us. Now, our handy dandy worksheet helps us to feed the info into ChatGPT (or any other LLM), and it defines and even names the ideal client avatar. (We find naming it makes it more likely to remember)

Your ICA is your North Star; it keeps every piece of content, every campaign, and every conversation aligned and on track.

Speak Their Language — Literally

It’s important to know your ICA so well that it’s freaky. For example, if your ICA is scrolling LinkedIn at 7 a.m., but you’re posting at 8 p.m., you’re talking to yourself. We have one client with a transient audience. They move seasonally from Monaco to the Caribbean. We have posts scheduled at various times to accommodate the audience’s time zones.

Watch Where You Comment

When our hospitality staffing client in Chicago first signed on with us, we conducted a social media analysis and found that their Instagram algorithm was displaying a high number of shoe companies. They were hoping to reach catering companies and hotels in Chicago, but they’d been looking at shoes so much that Instagram believed they were also in that industry. By cutting the irrelevant accounts they were following and consistently commenting on accounts that matched the ICA, their follower numbers began to change (we lost irrelevant followers and gained relevant ones), and their engagement rate increased dramatically.

What Happens When You Get It Right

In 2024, Abask Marketing helped a hospitality staffing firm increase sales by first guiding their leadership and recruiting teams through a focused Ideal Client Avatar (ICA) workshop. Before working with Abask, the firm’s marketing and sales efforts targeted “everyone,” resulting in vague messaging, inconsistent outreach, and wasted ad spend. Once the ICA was in place, we tailored all marketing efforts, from email marketing and social media to recruiter scripts for each audience segment, aligning content tone and timing to match client behavior and eliminate off-target campaigns.

Within three months, the firm reported a 27% increase in qualified leads and a 32% improvement in close rate, crediting the clarity and confidence the ICA brought to every marketing and sales conversation. The increase is expected to grow as more referrals from the right target audience trickle into the company.

The Easy Fix

If your content sounds like it could be talking to anyone, it’s probably connecting with no one. The fix isn’t more marketing, it’s clarity.

Stop guessing who your audience is and start speaking directly to the people who are actually ready to buy. Download our free Ideal Client Avatar Builder and define exactly who you’re talking to, what they care about, and how to reach them.

🎯 It takes less than 10 minutes, it’s free, it’s the same guide we use every time we work with a new client, and it might be the most valuable 10 minutes you spend on your marketing this month.

👉 Download your free Ideal Client Avatar Builder now