Creating Your Perfect Customer Avatar
Let’s Build the Ideal Customer Together
One of my favorite movies of all time is Weird Science.
Basically, two geeks find all the best attributes of a female and feed them into their computer. Out pops a supermodel.
Building your ideal customer isn’t much different. While I can’t promise a supermodel, I can promise an increase in your profits if you build your customer avatar properly.
Proper marketing can be summed up in three key components:
- Choosing the customers you want to do business with.
- Figuring out what THEY want to achieve (desired outcome)
- Researching so deep that you uncover their PAIN and then learning what emotional need they need to satisfy. What is their WHY?
Only once you know all of the above can you deliver the value and product they seek. You are looking for a tight fit that solves their pain.
One such way to improving your marketing is by improving your knowledge of what pain points your ideal target has… and then figuring out WHY they are trying to solve this emotional pain.
We can do this by creating a fake person known as an customer avatar.
So…
What is a Customer Avatar?
A customer avatar helps us discover points 1, 2, and 3. on the above list.
I’ve created a real life example of an avatar later in this module. Essentially, an avatar is…
The avatar isn’t actually a real person.
No, the avatar is more like a “bucket” of all the attributes your most likely buyer will consist of.
(real) thoughts, concerns, intentions, mindset, NEEDS, and fears of your target audience (as a whole).
The avatar averages all of the above into an easy to understand person.
There is NO WAY you can effectively connect with your target audience without first understanding and identifying exactly what they are going through as a person.
What is the story your prospective customer is telling themselves?
The aim of this article is to help you figure out what drives your prospects. Once we know, we can then begin to design our hosting plans, website wording, and ads to speak to them.
This should be done using REAL research, not just guesswork. While you may have been in the business for 15 years, you need to force yourself to step back and follow this step.
This step can make or break your hosting business.
This step is where many marketers fail.
Your business may actually consist of more than one ‘perfect customer.
Many hosts have multiple lines of services such as VPS, Dedicated, and Shared.. and today Cloud.
Some hosters make the mistake that all of these services fill the same pain points for all of their clients.
I would develop an avatar for every product line you offer.
Why Use Avatars?
Your ads, your website copy, EVERYTHING gets crafted to speak to each avatar one on one.. personally.
I’ve created an avatar below, you will quickly realize how much easier it is to communicate with our prospect once we understand them.
Thats why it is so important to really dig deep and find out the true emotion thoughts and feelings people have.
Problem: The Interwebz are impersonal and cold.
We’ve all misunderstood a text message or an instant message. It’s difficult to feel the tone from a cold text message. I think that’s why people use Emoticons in text messages nowadays.
This is where your research can fall apart.
When researching for your avatar, you will find it difficult to measure tone and find out peoples true emotions. Forum posts only give you what people type. You can’t FEEL the emotions they are experiencing.
Contrast text messaging and forum posts to actually meeting someone
in person.
You can see their face and feel their emotions.
Crafting ads and website copy would be pretty easy by meeting your ideal customer in person. It’s much more difficult over the web.
This is why we use avatars. Avatars allow us to know our ideal customer in the same way we know our real flesh and blood customers.
I don’t remember where I read this, but research had revealed that 93% of all communication between human beings happens in a non-verbal way. Body language.
7% are words – those words better damn well count.
The Goal of the Avatar?
The goal of an avatar is to create something real and touchable from something virtual.
Kind of like the movie Weird Science… except we aren’t building Super Models here.
Let’s Build a Super Model.
Now we need to gather data on our ideal customer.
We need research.
We need some data…
Ready for the next step? Check out this Done-for-You Survey you can use to get the data you need to build your customer avatar.