S1E2 - Why You Need to Build a Customer Avatar Before You Begin Marketing

What is a Customer Avatar? Why do you need one and how can it help you grow your business?

If your marketing needs some direction, today’s episode is for you. Stacey Kehoe, host of The Vault Podcast, dives into the topic of creating a customer avatar. She discusses how you can create your own avatar and why it is important? With 72% of brands targeting the wrong audience, she shares valuable tips to help you engage your social media audience so that you can build a community that loves your brand.

Two reasons why Customer Avatar is important
1. It can help to drive your content marketing strategy
2. To run an effective advertising campaign
Basic Information you need to create a Customer Avatar
1. Name
2. Gender
3. Age
4. Hobbies
5. Marital Status
6. Occupation/Job Title
7. Education Level
8. How do they like to learn (Read books/Attend conferences/Follow mentors)
9. Big challenges and pain points

Resources

Customer Avatar Sheet

Key Takeaways:

1. What motivates people most when they're purchasing a product or service? It's the challenge. If you can solve a problem for your prospect - hiring you is a no-brainer!
2. Customer Avatars helps us think of our customers as real people not a faceless demographic.
3. The more that you can understand the challenges your customers face, the more you are able to convert them into a customer.

The Vault Contact Information

The Vault Website

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The Vault Twitter

The Vault Pinterest

Transcript

Intro: 0:12

Welcome to the vault, tune in every week to unlock the marketing secrets, some of the fastest growing businesses you will hear practical tips, strategies and case studies which will help you build incredible marketing campaigns for your business. And now here's your host, Stacy Kehoe.

Stacey: 0:33

Hello and welcome to today's show. I'll be speaking to you about how to develop a customer Avatar or customer profile for your business. The reason I wanted to cover this subject today was I've been receiving a lot of questions from business owners around lack of engagement levels across their social media and just really lacking traffic to their websites, and I read a really interesting article which said that 72 percent of brands are actually targeting the wrong audience. So I want to walk through customer avatars because I feel that they're really, really important. If you're going to put the work into creating a marketing campaign, creating all that content, managing social media, creating downloads and free gifts for people to opt into, newsletters and email lists and all that kind of thing. Then you want to make sure you're actually getting out in front of the right people.

Speaker 2: 1:25

So tune in and have a listen and I'd love to hear your feedback on your customer Avatar and whether this helps your business.

: 1:33

So what does the customer Avatar? Well essentially it's just a profile, a profile for your ideal customer, and the reason that it's really, really important to build one of these out for your business before you start any kind of marketing campaign is so that you can really laser focus your marketing efforts on the type of people that are actually going to be interested in your product and the type of people that you want to be your customers. So I think the first thing to remember with an Avatar is there's a lot of information that needs to go into it and there's two key reasons that I think that they're really important. The first is by understanding as much as possible about your customer, it can help to drive your content marketing strategy. So once you've uncovered all of the problems and challenges that your ideal prospect is facing, it means that you can build all of your blog content and all of your content you're producing; your lead magnets, your social media posts, absolutely anything to address those problems and those challenges. And of course what motivates people most when they're purchasing a product or a service It's a challenge. It's a problem. Although sometimes we are making those impulse decisions and buying a product or service without doing too much research just because we're excited about it at the time; for any big ticket items or significant purchases, we're always going to want to make sure that the biggest motivator for us really is going to be overcoming a challenge or a problem. Let me give you an example of that... So obviously for my business, it's a digital marketing agency, So the biggest challenges that businesses will face in that area is not really understanding digital marketing fully. So it might be that they think of themselves as sort of not very tech savvy and perhaps want some support to help implement a campaign. They don't really feel that they have enough time in their schedule's to either manage their own social media or even to produce their own content. So if I can dig into some of those common challenges and issues that they have within their businesses, whether it's resources, time, money, whatever it is, if I can provide a marketing solution to them that helps to overcome those issues, then it becomes a no brainer for them to purchase from my business. It's really, really important to understand that can really help to drive your content, which obviously attracts more people into your business.

Speaker 2: 3:56

The other reason that I think it's important to build out a customer Avatar is so that you can run really effective advertising campaigns. What I mean by that is whether it's facebook advertising, Linkedin, twitter, instagram, or even Google ad words. The more you can understand about the demographic that you're trying to attract to your business, the more niche you can get with your targeting and your key words. And that is just going to make your whole campaign a lot more effective. So I want us to kind of talk through some of the basics that you need to include in an Avatar. It seems like quite an elaborate exercise, but does pay off. Obviously, it helps us to think about customers as real people, so not a faceless demographic. They're actually real people that we can market to and it helps us to narrow down our target audience so that we're not going to broach that we can really nation to the type of target market that we want to focus on. We can narrow down on the pin points as I've just mentioned. So the more that you can understand about the challenges that they face, the more likely you are to be able to convert them into a customer and you also have the tools to identify when you're at risk of jeopardizing one avatar in favor of another. So that can just really help to focus your marketing efforts. So let's get stuck in and I'll walk you through the main things that I think you need to include in a customer Avatar and i'll try to give you some examples at the end.

: 5:19

So the first thing is this person should have a name and I actually do recommend that you try to base this on an existing customer that you have. If you don't have any customers yet, no problem. You can make a fictitious one, but if you do already have customers or clients in your business, I do really, really recommend that you make this a real person because the reality is if you try to make it all up, you're making the perfect person, which is, let's be honest, there's not many of them out there in terms of the types of clients we want to work with.

Speaker 2: 5:48

So try to choose your favourite customer, your favourite clients, and focus in and get all the detail around that person because at least you know they're already interested in buying that product from you. And it's much easier to duplicate that person. So, you want to give them a name. You want to understand a lot about them. So what gender are they? Male or female? What age are they? What's the marital status? Are they married, single, divorced? Do they have any children? That's really, really important no matter what industry you're in, and I'm going to run through at the end as to why. Where are they located? What sort of occupation do they have, and what is the job title? How much money do they earn? What's their annual income? What sort of level of education do they have? Do they have any hobbies? Think about hobbies that they could be involved with or things that they enjoy doing. We also want to understand what their goals and their values are so that could be within their business, but also on a personal level as well. Don't forget to think about them on a personal level outside of just being a customer of yours or being a business owner, et Cetera, et cetera. We also want to identify some of the sources of information they go to to educate themselves. So what I mean by that is books. What books do they read? Are there any magazines that they read? Are there any blogs or websites that they would visit frequently? Do they attend events or conferences or networking events and which ones specifically? Are there any gurus that they might be following? Any kind of information about where they may be sourcing information to help solve their problems is really important to identify. The other area that we want to focus on within the Avatar is identifying the challenges and the pain points, which we've talked briefly about. I'm going to give you a couple more examples of that and then finally we want to think about the objections to the sale and then also their role in the purchase decision making process. So are they actually the lead decision maker, sole decision maker or are there other parties involved that need to help them make that purchase decision? So it's really important to work all this information out. I'm going to run through and talk you through an Avatar that I have. So I've got a client who i'm going to rename to Tom Avery because we don't want to be disclosing too much personal information about a specific client of mine. He may not appreciate it, but this is based on a real person. So it just helps me to identify the types of clients that I like to work with. So as some people may be familiar with, I do offer marketing services to a couple of different industries, but the property sector is a really prominent one for me. So Tom is a property investor and he's 43 years old, who's obviusly a male. He is married and he has a couple of children. The reason that that kind of thing is important is when I run my facebook ads, I know that that's the type of person that I like to work with. Not because they're married because they have kids, but just because tom is a great client of mine and I want to try to replicate Tom. So if there are more Tom's out there in the world, I want to try to find them. So that's important information for me to know about him. I know that he's a business owner and investor and I know that he roughly earns between 100 and 150,000 pounds a year. He has a degree and he enjoys playing golf and works out a lot, so goes to the gym and things like that. So again, the reason that's important for me to understand for my business is you may not use this information, but if, for example, I had a couple of clients who were all very similar to that and perhaps all played golf. Then I might decide that I wanted to run an ad in a golf magazine because that's something that they're all reading. So it might be that they are looking for marketing services. Obviously you don't think, what's the relationship between that and between golf. However, if I know that there's a bunch of people that are of the same demographic that all seemed to have golf as a hobby, then that might be a source of information or an area that I want to run some advertising in. And so all this information that I gather about my Avatar, it means that I can mold and shape the type of marketing strategy that I want to put into place. So with Tom's goal, he's looking to grow his business to 5 million pounds in turnover and then he's looking to sell. So I know this information cause I've actually asked him and that's something I really recommend that you do with your customers to actually have that conversation with them. You can say, hey listen, you're a great customer, a great client. I really enjoy working with you. I wish I had more people just like you. Do you mind if I use you as my avatar and I can kind of build out some of this information. You can say to them that they don't have to answer really personal details or questions that they aren't comfortable with. Some people aren't that comfortable disclosing either their marital status or maybe their income and things like that, but you can try to get as much information out around their goals and values and things like that. I also know that Tom likes to read investment books. There's a couple of different books that he reads and he's given me the titles of them. There are some specifically property investment magazines that he subscribes to, so we've got YPN in there and property investor network. There are lots of blogs and websites that he visits that are property related, so lamb sourcing websites and things like that that I've got a whole list of. I also know some of the conferences, events and trade shows that he visited last year. So again, really good information that if I'm thinking, hmm, where should I do some of my marketing or advertising, I want more clients just like Tom that I could potentially go to one of those trade shows and exhibit there. Or I could go to the same networking events and try to meet more people just like Tom or I could run an ad in that magazine because I know that people like Tom are subscribing to it and reading it. So that information can really help me to drive the type of marketing campaign and actually get in front of the right type of audience.

: 11:24

So for challenges and pain points: I know the big challenge and Thomas Business, his stuff, he has a big challenge with finding the right type of sale stuff for his business and he has had quite a high turnover, so it is something that I'm aware of and although that might not necessarily drive the type of marketing campaign that I'm running right now, in the future it made do. It's really important information for me to know. Some of his pain points are around just not having enough time in the day.

Speaker 2: 11:51

He runs a couple of different businesses. It's not just this one property investment company, so not having enough time in his day just means that he needs support and he needs help. So for example, I can put together a full service marketing campaign for him and I'm going to take care of the whole pipeline. He doesn't even have to think about it. That's really appealing to him. One of the other pain points is that he just doesn't think he's very tech savvy, so he doesn't really understand social media. He knows that he needs to be on them, but he doesn't really know how to do it, so he didn't feel comfortable hiring someone internal, um, if he didn't know how to do it himself. So essentially he's decided to outsource that to the experts. So that's where I come in. So understanding some of those pain points about Tom has helped me to win that business. Some of the objections to the sale: Initially some of the objections with things like his lack of understanding. So he was concerned, for example, that if he just handed it all over to our agency that he wouldn't really have any control or that he wouldn't really understand what was happening and so we might be issuing him all of these reports that he just didn't understand. So obviously I did a lot of work in the beginning to talk him through our processes to help them understand the way we go about things. And then the way that I positioned the business is that we help people that are not tech savvy to try to understand marketing. That's something that we do. We take something that seems very complex for a lot of traditional offline businesses and we make it simple. Once I understood that about Tom, it meant that I could work that into how I'm positioning and pitching my business so that was more attractive to him and he is the sole decision maker in that process. So as you can see there, we've got a pretty well rounded customer Avatar and it just means that I can drive my mark and I can make it much more targeted and niche to attract the same type of people. And as I mentioned, if you do not have a customer or client already, it can be difficult to do this process because you are guessing a lot of it. But if you can at least try to think of a real person, put a name to them, put a face. You should try to also have a picture of the person right in the middle of the Avatar just so that you can see exactly who the person is so that as we're building out campaigns, as I'm trying to come up with blog content and podcast topics and lead magnets that are going to have on my website that are available to download. I'm thinking about Tom and about what would help him and people like him. That drives a lot of the content that I create and then same thing when we hand over to Alpha now advertising team, they're always looking at the demographics, working out different customer profiles that will be able to target via our social media advertising so we wouldn't be able to do that. We would be going in blind if we didn't have a customer Avatar, so I just wanted to share some of this information with you because they think it's a really helpful tool, especially if you're in the early stages of launching a marketing campaign that I really advocate getting your customer avatar sorted. I've got to download sheet, which I'm going to link in the show notes, so hopefully give that a go, download it, fill it all in, and let me know how you get on with building out your customer Avatar.

Speaker 3: 14:54

You've just been listening to the vote podcast is stacy kio. If you've enjoyed the show, she'd really appreciate you leaving a review on itunes and don't forget to head over to www dot the bolt up playbook, the free content that will help you build an effective marketing strategy.