Here’s a little not-so-secret piece of advice for anyone trying to sell anything… online or offline… You could have the best product in the world, but if you’re trying to sell it to the wrong person, your business is going to fail. You must understand who your ideal customer, or customer avatar, is before you can even begin to create your marketing message.
Today, let’s talk about one of the biggest and most important actions of any business. It is the absolute first step everyone should be taking before they start doing any marketing or building a business.
I’m going to cover “What is a customer avatar?”. Some people also refer to this as a buyer persona, or the ideal customer.
Today’s post is going to save you a lot of headache, time, and money.
Now, this is one of the most important aspects of business, especially online business when we’re doing marketing and spending money on advertising. Our content must be tailored to the right audience or else we’re wasting our money.
One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made in the past, and I know a lot of people are making, is not knowing who we’re actually talking to. Who is really going to buy the products we’re trying to sell and who are we delivering content to?
At the end of the day, is our message resonating with these people?
A lot of people make the mistake of delivering the right message to the wrong person, or the wrong message to the right person. The point here is that we need to understand who we are actually talking to and we need to connect with that person in every single message.
We can have multiple different customer avatars or ideal customers for one single product, but we should really start with just one.
We need to define who our perfect customer is, and there are steps involved. There are specific things we need to define. I’m going to show you how this is done. I’m going to give you an actual worksheet that you can use to help build a customer avatar for whatever product you’re trying to sell online.
I truly believe this is the first step we need to take when we’re starting any business or starting to think about selling something online. I even say do this before you buy your domain name, before you choose your brand, before you actually start developing content. You should already have done this.
Once we know who we’re talking to, then we know what kind of messages we can create when we’re doing our email marketing campaigns or we know what kind of videos to create if we’re using YouTube.
When we create our messaging, it’s a lot easier to resonate with them, especially when we start building landing pages. We want to use headlines and images that are important to them.
We want all of the messaging throughout the calls to action to be relatable to how this person is going to respond.
So we want to know their goals or aspirations, and their pain points. That is the big one. What is keeping them from reaching their goals or not finding the solution to what they need?
Table of Contents
Customer Avatar Worksheet
Let’s look at the worksheet I use. If you want a copy of this worksheet, simply go to PowerhouseAffiliate.com and join for free. You will receive a welcome email once you join and get instant access to this worksheet as well as all the other great, free training.
Remember, this is the first step any business should be doing before anything else. Define who your customer avatar is. There are six sections that you need to consider about your perfect customer. I’ll go over the broad categories here, but for more detail, please download the free worksheet from PowerhouseAffiliate.com.
Demographics
This is the basic information that is easiest to determine. You’re looking at their age, gender, income, etc.
Personal Background
Here you’re interested in aspects like their family, education and employment.
Traits and Attributes
This section covers their internal markers, such as personality, values and lifestyle.
Goals and Pain Points
You’re interested in their financial, lifestyle and health goals… and what’s stopping them from reaching those goals.
Objections and Buying Behaviour
This section deals with how a user approaches the buying decision. What importance does price play? How do they research the product? Are there any technical barriers stopping them from purchasing?
Where/How do They Consume Information
Many factors go into how you deliver information to your customer avatar. Do they prefer mobile vs desktop? Will they sign up for an email newsletter? Would they attend a live event?
Those are the things that we need to know, but how do we actually find that information? Luckily there are tools out there that we can use to help fill in the blanks! The best part? It won’t cost you a penny!
Want to follow along with me while I show you exactly step by step how I use each of these tools? Click on the video below to watch me dive into my computer and show you exactly how to use these to create your customer avatar.
Facebook Audience Insights (6:19)
The first tool I recommend you start with is Facebook Audience Insights. A great tool. It basically tells you everything about everyone because most of the world is on Facebook right now. Use this tool while Facebook is still hot!
Go into your Facebook Audience Insights and the first thing it will ask is whether you want to search everyone on Facebook or people connected to your own page.
We’re going to choose everyone on Facebook.
From here you can filter by interests. So if you have a product to treat anxiety and stress you would type anxiety into the interest section.
We can immediately see that 88% of Facebook users identifying with anxiety and depression are women. This gives us a good idea that our demographic is going to be heavily weighted to targeting women. So for creating a Website, we need to consider that we’re talking mostly to women.
It doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk to men as well. But when we’re creating our messaging, it’s probably going to be more effective if we use language that resonates better with women.
Coming down, you can see other metrics that are part of the worksheet, such as relationship status, education level, and different types of jobs that are most likely to be associated with high stress.
Now, when you’re starting to create your ads and your messaging, you might want to target people in these jobs because they actually have high stress. Your marketing messaging will probably work better, and you’ll probably get a better return on investment when you start targeting these interests.
If you look down a little further, you will see page likes. This is another important thing to check because now you can see what they like and what they’re viewing as content. This is helpful to fill in the part of the worksheet detailing the kind of content they’re consuming.
Once you find the pages they like, you’ll start to find your competitors. These are businesses that have already targeted these people. Now you can look at these competitors and see what kind of messaging they’re using.
Facebook Audience Insights is a great tool packed with tons of information. You can find their locations, their activity, and pretty much most of the information you need to complete the Customer Avatar worksheet.
AlsoAsked.com (10:18)
Here’s another tool that’s really useful for filling in some of the missing pieces that Facebook Audience Insights might have missed. If you go to AlsoAsked.com you can use this tool to show you what people are also searching for when they have an issue or a problem.
You want to find questions related to your niche and make sure you’re hitting those pain points.
If you search for “reduce stress” you’re going to get a bunch of questions related to that. How can I relax my brain? Can stress kill me?
This is what’s keeping that person up at night. You need to understand that this person has a high amount of stress. It’s keeping them up at night. They’re worried. Are they going to die from stress? This is important to have in your customer avatar, because all of these things are pain points.
This is what they need a solution for. You need to provide that solution.
SimilarWeb.com (12:06)
Another great tool is SimilarWeb. You can search in Google for a site related to your niche, and then enter it into SimilarWeb to get a lot of information about the site. Make sure that you pick a competitor site that isn’t a huge broad resource.
In our example we would skip over major health sites like WebMD and focus on something like VeryWellMinded.com. If you enter that domain into SimilarWeb.com it’s going to show you some more great information. You can see the number of monthly visitors, the average time on site, and the bounce rate.
There’s a lot of information you can get from this simple free tool. You can see that they’re getting a lot of the traffic from search, which means they’re getting a lot of SEO traffic. They are also getting a lot of referral traffic from websites like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter.
You can use all of this information to see patterns in how your competitors are targeting their customers and use it to give you a clearer picture of who your ideal customer is.
Hopefully this article has helped you understand the value of knowing who you’re talking to. When you start creating all of the messages for your marketing campaigns in the future, that is what separates the people making zero dollars from the people making millions of dollars. This is how people have success creating marketing messages online, creating landing pages, creating ads, and e-mail messaging.
Don’t forget, if you like this article and you want to create your customer avatar using my simple worksheet, sign up to PowerhouseAffiliate.com. It’s free to join, and you get access to a ton of really great resources to help your business succeed in any niche.
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