Video Transcript: Customer Avatars

So in one of our previous modules, we talked about how you define, how you  segment your market for where your ideal customers are located. In this  particular module, we're going to talk about creating something that we call a  customer avatar. And so if we go into that particular segment of your market,  that particular market segment that you're targeting, and you create, and you  look at your ideal customer, what sort of characteristics do they all share, what  sort of characteristics do they have that make them part of that group in that  particular market segment. We're going to talk about that. So why bother making a customer avatar? That's a pretty good question. It helps you to get your  marketing campaigns on target, so much like going after a specific market  segment of 20 to 30 year olds or women, as opposed to men, or adults as  opposed to children. It helps you to zero in on exactly a group of customers that  would want to have your services or your product. If you don't have a clear  picture of what who your ideal customer is, you're not even going to know how  best to reach them, or what kinds of things you're going to want to talk to them  about, to say to them, it's a lot more difficult to precisely communicate the  benefits of your products or your services, what problems they solve and where  to put your message to even reach those people. So fortunately, if you know the  right elements to look at creating a useful customer avatar is a very quick and  painless process. So how do you analyze your customers? How do you get this  data? The core elements of a customer avatar is personal information, such as  name, age, marital status and so on. What sort of goals and values do they  have where? Where do they hang out? Do they go out to eat? Do they have  specific places that they like to go out and eat, sources of information that they  might have online, where their pain points? What kind of challenges, obstacles  are they dealing with in their life, and potential objections. And one of the  reasons that this just right at this point, I'm going to stop and point out that one  of the reasons that this information is really critical is because, if you have an  ideal list of customers, let's say you have 100 customers that you look at and  say, Boy, these are just really, I'd like to take a cookie cutter and just make a  whole bunch of these people just show up at my doorstep, for example. If you  can identify those 100 customers by name, by city, you can put that list into  Facebook, for example, and they will send you a list of every or they'll put your  message in front of every single similar client within a target ZIP code. So think  about that for a minute. Let's say that you do a lot of work in a suburb of  Chicago, Illinois, and more more tightly. Let's say you get into a very specific  suburb of Chicago, Illinois, and you want to expand, let's just say, out of your  neighborhood, for example, into a larger region of the metro area of Chicago.  You can take 100 of your clients names and put them into your Facebook ad  account, and it will come back and start pinging your message out to identical  people who share those identical characteristics on Facebook, who is your ideal  customer? Part one, what's their name, their age and again, this is kind of a 

diagram of something we talked about just a minute ago. Are they married? Do  they have any kids? How many kids they got? They have grandkids. They have  great grandkids. Where do they live? Do they have a house? Do they own a  home? Do they rent an apartment? Whatever part part two of this is another  diagram. What's your level of education? Do they have any degrees? Do they  have a high school diploma? Grad school, college degree or whatever. Where  do they work? What kind of job do they have? What you know, all that kind of  information, hobby. And then it even breaks down into specific hobbies and  interests. Does your ideal customer have? Learning new things, improving  themselves, working out fitness. Do they do marathons, meditations, all that kind of stuff. They play an instrument. And then further, you want to really kind of  understand what are their in this particular age bracket, age group or. Gender,  what are their goals? What what are they trying to achieve? What kind of things  do they value? What do they place high importance on? Do they like fairness,  integrity, honesty? Do they value their results at any cost? Do they value hard  work. Or do they value a stress free life they can put a lot of others before  themselves? Or do they just make look out for number one value? Do they value saving money? Is that more important, but getting good deals? Do they value  quality with little regard to the cost of the product. What kind of challenges do  they face? Do they have issues with money? Do they have any kind of  relationship problems, hard time finding free time? What pain points does your  ideal customer have? I mean, we're continuing on this. Do they worry about their business? Are they afraid of health problems? Do they lose sleep over financial  issues? Where do they hang out online? Do they prefer Facebook versus  Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn? This stuff literally just change the social media stuff  changes monthly. Are there forms or blogs or that they like to read, that they like  to hang out on, that they like to participate in? And again, this stuff is all  important, because once you start figuring this stuff out, you get a real good idea of where you need to advertise. So where do they get the information from,  news sources, Fox News, or do they go to ABC News, on television news, or  CNN, or wherever they go? What types of books and magazines do they read?  Do they subscribe to? Are there any specific like titles that they work with? I  mean, is it like interest based books or magazines that they subscribe to? Do  they subscribe to any kind of a video channel or a podcast like YouTube or  iTunes or whatever? What objections to buying your product or service, might  they have, and this is where you start to kind of slowly zero in on stuff that  becomes even more directly relevant to you. Do they? Do they think your  product or your service is a little bit too expensive, not expensive enough. Do  they have the time for it? Do they worry that it takes them too long to deliver  results, all things that you need to be very tuned into those kinds of answers. So then you take all of that and you put it together, and you should have a really  clear picture of the exact individual, the characteristics of the exact ideal 

individual that you want to be talking to, you want to be delivering your message to. And with all the information that we just went through, you can really start  doing a very good job of coming up with ads that are talking the lingo, that are  kind of pushing their little hot buttons, you can create landing pages and specific offers in a way that resonates with people, that resonates with these ideal  customers, uses their goals, their values, their feelings and their emotional  attachments or challenges to really kind of draw them in to read your offer. It  overcomes all of their potential objections right away, immediately before they  even come up. It paints a picture that shows them how your product or your  service is really going to help them achieve some of their get rid of some of their pain points, or helps them to achieve some of their goals. So this is the reason  why you want to pay so much attention to who your ideal characteristics of your  ideal customer, some of them are advertising channels that you want to be very  careful about choosing them to reach your ideal customer. Again, I've said in  different places throughout this course that you got to be very sensitive to the  age group you dealing with, because in today's world, there are so many  different choices that they can have for getting the information that they want.  And different groups, different age groups, will just continually migrate around  them online, especially from Facebook to Instagram to Pinterest to all over the  place, Twitter. So you want to be really careful. You want to know which  channels you want to deal with to get to your ideal client. And one thing that I'll  tell you right here is that you want to be really careful not to rule out offline  methods of communicating to people. You know, if you listen to all the stuff that's on the internet, you would think that was the only way that you could  communicate to the person sitting next to you. Unfortunately, you have that. Or  fortunately, I guess I should say that's not true. You have so many things like  cable television that is incredibly you know, if you want to do video type stuff you could use regular broadcast television, or if you want to select specific  neighborhoods, cable television has the ability to deliver your message down to  specific streets within a neighborhood. People on one side of the street might  see your ad, the other people on the other side of the street might not so there's  all kinds of you know, opportunities offline, besides direct mail, postcards or  direct mail that you can use to get your message out to the right ideal Client.  Pay attention to how these characteristics of your ideal client might change over  a period of time. You're going to want to interact with them constantly and really,  you know, for the sake of being transparent, take a genuine interest in them.  What makes them tick? I mean, you really got to be passionate about this. Why  do they want to use your services? Why is it that they want to buy your products, use this data and get to know them, to collect this data, improve it, refine it to  your existing all of your existing avatars, assuming you have more than one,  create new avatars to talk to different types of people, entice customers to take  a survey. That's going to give you very granular data that you can use. A few 

people don't really, you know, not very many people enjoy taking surveys, so  make sure you give them a little bit of a bribe or a thank you gift of some sort,  some avatar type marketing is going to outperform others, so always be testing,  always be improving, always be asking questions about the validity, validity of  the information that you have