marketing: Which avatar should receive a specific email marketing campaign?
Paid traffic: Which ad platforms should you buy traffic from and how will you target your avatar?
Product creation: What problems is your avatar trying to solve?
Copywriting: How should you describe offers in your email marketing, ads, and sales letters in a way that compels your avatar to buy?
Any part of the marketing and sales process that touches the customer (which is pretty much everything) improves when you get clear on your customer avatar. After all, you’re aiming toward a real person — one who buys your products and services. It pays to get clear on the characteristics of that person so that you can find and present him or her with a message that moves this person to action.
What to include in your customer avatar
The customer avatar possesses five major components:
Goals and values: Determine what the avatar is trying to achieve. What values does he or she hold dear?
Sources of information: Figure out what books, magazines, blogs, news stations, and other resources the avatar references for information.
Demographics: Establish the age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, employment status, nationality, and political preference of the avatar.
Challenges and pain points: What is holding the avatar back from achieving his or her goals?
Objections: Why would the avatar choose not to buy your product or service?
In some cases, you need to survey or have conversations with existing customers to accurately flesh out your customer avatar. In other cases, you may already be intimately familiar with the characteristics of your ideal customer. In any case, move forward. Don’t wait for surveys or interviews to be conducted to create your first draft of an avatar. Instead, go ahead and make assumptions despite having no data or feedback, and put completing your research on your short list of to-do’s. In the meantime, you can begin benefiting from the avatar you’ve created.
Using the five elements described in this section, we created a worksheet that we complete each time we create a new customer avatar. The worksheet helps you hone in on the ideal customer and pair him or her with the right message. In the following sections, we go into more detail about this worksheet so that you can use it in your own business.
Introducing Agency Eric: A customer avatar example
In April 2015, DigitalMarketer introduced a new offer. We began selling a new type of digital marketing training product: Certification Classes. These new trainings include exams, certificates, and badges, and they appeal to a new ideal customer. Of course, having a new ideal customer means that a new customer avatar must be built.
As a result, we defined four distinct buyer personas who would be interested in certifications and training from our company:
The marketing freelancer: Wants to distinguish herself from the other freelancers she is competing with in the marketplace.
The marketing agency owner: Wants to add to the services he can offer his clients and to sharpen the marketing skills of his employees.
The employee: Wants to distinguish himself at his place of employment or to secure a new job or promotion within his existing job.
The business owner: Wants to sharpen her own marketing skills and the skills of her internal marketing team members.
From the buyer personas, four new customer avatars were born. We call one of these new avatars, pictured in Figure 1-1, Agency Eric.
FIGURE 1-1: Agency Eric is a customer avatar who purchases the certification product from DigitalMarketer.
The next section describes the approach to filling out each section of the customer avatar worksheet so that you can define your customer avatars.
Getting clear on goals and values
The customer avatar creation process begins with identifying the goals and values of one of your ideal customers. Make note of the goals and values that are relevant to the products and services you offer.
Being aware of your customer avatar’s goals and values drives decisions that you make about
Product creation: What products or services can you develop to assist the avatar in meeting his or her goals?
Advertising: How can you describe these offers in your ads and sales copy?
Content marketing: What blog posts, podcasts, newsletters, and other content vehicles might your avatar respond to?
Email marketing: How can you tailor your email subject lines and body copy to be consistent with the avatar’s goals?
At DigitalMarketer, our Agency Eric avatar owns a digital marketing agency and manages a team of marketers providing services to clients. One of Agency Eric’s goals (shown in Figure 1-2) is to increase the capabilities of his team. Agency Eric knows that a more capable team will result in satisfied customers.
FIGURE 1-2: Understanding the goals and values of your avatar is important.
Because Agency Eric has this goal, he is likely to open and respond to an email that promotes our company’s Content Marketing Certification with the following subject line:
Need Content Marketing Training?
Finding sources of information and entertainment
This section of the customer avatar worksheet is critical to determining where your customer avatar is spending his time on and offline. What books does he read? What celebrities does he follow? What blogs does he read? This is vital information when considering where you will advertise and how you will target those advertisements. We cover digital advertising and ad targeting in Chapter 10 of this book.
