Do you know who your ideal clients or customers are? If you don’t, much of your marketing efforts will be wasted as you will have no idea how to craft the type of messages, ad campaigns, and calls to action that will speak to the right people and encourage them to take action. Even if you have a good idea of your ideal customer, you’re still not ready to take the next steps in creating your ad campaign. To really create effective marketing strategies, you need to know everything about your ideal lead and the best way to do that is to create customer avatars.
Why customer avatars are important
No, an avatar has nothing to do with the blue people living in Pandora in the James Cameron movies. An avatar is instead a representation of someone—in this case, your perfect customer. While it’s impossible to know everything about every single one of your ideal prospects, you can create a representation of a group of them that can help you identify what they most want, need, and expect out of your products or services.
Once you get crystal clear on who you’re selling to, where they’re hanging out, and what their challenges are, you can start tailoring your marketing campaigns directly toward them. This will affect ALL parts of your marketing strategy including (but not limited to):
- Your content. Your avatar will help you decide which blogs to write and which videos to create that will best attract their attention.
- Paid traffic. Knowing where your avatar ‘hangs out’ online will help you decide which platforms to utilize.
- Product and service creation. Once you know what solutions your avatar is looking for, you can craft your offerings to best fit their needs.
- Describe your products/services and create offers that compel your avatar to buy.
- Email marketing. Once you have complete avatars, you’ll know which should receive certain email campaigns.
Creating your avatars
Hopefully, we’ve convinced you that you need to create avatars to take your marketing to the next level. But how do you actually do it? We’ll walk you through the process. Below, you’ll see an example of one of Pixel Fire’s avatars: Home Services Harry.
Home Services Harry represents all those in the landscaping, roofing, contracting, and similar businesses who would be a good fit for our marketing services. Will each ‘Home Service Harry’ be unique and different? Of course. But our job is to narrow down what most of these ideal clients have in common to a representative picture of them.
Goals and values
Let’s start with Harry’s goals and values. Identifying these will help you make sure the products or services you are offering are relevant. In this case, Harry’s goals are to have enough quality staff so he can spend more time with his family and on building his business rather than working 60 hours a week IN the business. He values quality work, integrity, and in-person communication.
How does this help us? Knowing Harry values his time helps us creating messaging like, “Let us take the burden of marketing off your shoulders.” In addition, knowing that Harry likes in-person communication helps us create calls to action that include booking one-on-one discovery sessions instead of asking for an online sign-up.
Sources of information
We want to know where Harry gets his info, who he trusts, and what his go-to educational sources are. You want to get as niche as possible on this portion of the worksheet. While most contractors probably pay attention to national remodeling or building organizations, we want to know who HARRY trusts. This helps us find the best places to advertise to him (which influencers to target on social media, which conferences we should attend or ensure our brand is displayed at.)
Demographics
Demographics help you bring your avatar to life. We really want to see Harry and what his life looks like. This helps us get inside his head and choose targeting platforms. How old is Harry? Is he married? How much money does he make? Did he go to college? Remember, not every single one of your ideal customers will fall into these demographics—the goal is to develop a good representation.
Challenges and pain points
We want to solve Harry’s problems with our products or services. If what we offer doesn’t solve his problems, we either need to go after a different client or we need to change up what we sell. In this case, Harry doesn’t have enough help and he’s afraid of missing time with his family as they grow up. Good news! Taking marketing off his plate (which is what Pixel Fire can do) will definitely solve these problems. Now it’s our job to convey that in our marketing messages to him.
Objections and roles
Of course, Harry might not be easily convinced he needs to hire us. Developing his avatar helps us get ahead of any objections so we can easily overcome them. For example, maybe Harry thinks it will take too much time and effort to get his information to us that we need to develop his campaign. If we know this ahead of time, we can develop (and market to him) an easy system that will address this concern.
We also need to know if Harry is the sole decision maker or if he will need to consult with a business partner, spouse, manager, etc. before saying yes. If we find there are others involved in the decision, we can ensure we market to them as well.
Now that we have a good picture of Harry, we know how to develop a campaign that targets his specific needs, wants, and goals. Once you’ve finished with one avatar, you can move on to the next. The goal is to have an avatar for each of your ideal client/customer groups and market to each of them using the PLATINUM RULE (treat them the way they want to be treated).
Need help developing your customer avatars so you can take them on the Customer Value Journey? Reach out to the experienced team at Pixel Fire Marketing. We’d love to help!
