where your customer is getting information and entertainment is in identifying niche sources. Identifying these niches is fairly simple using the “But No One Else Would” Trick. To use this trick, you simply complete sentences like:
My ideal customer would read [book], but no one else would.
My ideal customer would subscribe to [magazine], but no one else would.
My ideal customer would attend [conference], but no one else would.
The idea is to find the niche books, magazines, blogs, conferences, celebrities, and other interests that your ideal customer would be attracted to — but no one else would. For example, if you sell golf products, you wouldn’t assign Tiger Woods as a celebrity. Tiger Woods is a celebrity your customer avatar would follow, but a large percentage of people interested in Tiger Woods are not golfers and aren’t likely to buy your golf products.
Instead, choosing a more niche golfer like Rory McIlroy allows you to hone in on your ideal customer and exclude people who wouldn’t find value in your product. If you find these niches when buying traffic from ad platforms like Facebook (covered in Chapter 10), you can often laser-target your audience by focusing on prospects who have these niche interests, while excluding less-than-ideal prospects.
Honing in on demographics
Applying demographic information brings your customer avatar to life. In this section, you add information to your avatar such as age, gender, marital status, and location.
FIGURE 1-3: Demographics bring the customer avatar to life.
Demographic information for your customer avatar is also useful for choosing targeting options in ad platforms like Facebook. Bring your avatar to “life” as much as possible, even by visualizing the person if you can, because when you’re writing content, email, or sales copy, it can be beneficial to write as though your avatar were sitting across the table from you. Demographic information like age, gender, and location gives your persona a look and feel.
Adding challenges and pain points
This section of the worksheet can help drive new product or service development. It can also help inspire the copy and ad creative you will use to compel your ideal customer to action. Copy is any written word that makes up your ad, email, web page, social media post, or blog post. Ad creative is an object that communicates information in visual form, such as an image, a GIF (graphics interchange format), a video, an infographic, a meme, or another form of artwork that you use to convey your message. You use copy and ad creatives to call out to your audience, capture people’s attention, and address how your product or service adds value to their lives by solving a pain point or a challenge they face.
When selling certifications to Agency Eric, for example, our company would do well to build solutions to his challenges and pain points and use language that addresses them in our marketing messages. For example, this avatar would respond to sales copy like the following:
Are you tired of losing proposals simply because you don’t offer content marketing services to your clients? Certify your team with DigitalMarketer’s Content Marketing Mastery Course and Certification.
Copy like this receives a response from Agency Eric because it is specific to one of his pain points, which is the fear of losing business to competitors (see Figure 1-4).
FIGURE 1-4: Understanding the challenges and pain points of your customer informs your marketing efforts.
Preparing for objections
In the final section of the customer avatar worksheet, answer why your customer avatar might choose to decline the offer to buy your product or service. The reasons your avatar doesn’t buy are called objections, and you must address them in your marketing. For example, if we know that Agency Eric is concerned with the amount of time his team members will be out of the office or unable to work while getting trained, we can send an email that overcomes that objection with a subject line like this:
Get Content Marketing Certified (in One Business Day).
https://www.digitalmarketer.com/lp/dmfd/customer-avatar/.
Getting Clear on the Value You Provide
An important part of planning for digital marketing success is understanding the value your organization brings to the marketplace. The value your company provides is far greater than the products or services it sells. In fact, people don’t buy products or services at all; instead, they buy outcomes.
Imagine a group of people who are discontent for one reason or another. This group of people are in what we call the “Before” state (see Figure 1-5). No matter what you’re selling, you’re trying to reach a group of prospective customers who are in this Before state. To gain some insight, write the adjectives that describe your prospective customer before she has experienced your product or service. Is she sad? Out of shape? Bored?
Source: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/customer-value-optimization/
FIGURE 1-5: Businesses provide value by moving prospects from a “Before” state to an “After” state.
Now, leap forward into the future, to the point after your prospective customer has experienced
