5
•Introduction
•What is an avatar?
•Defining your avatar
•Content tailoring
Businesses use the concept of buyer personas to define their products and establish marketing and sales guidelines. The process of defining a buyer persona is taking the time to identify a specific grouping or demographic of potential buyers and see a product or service through their eyes. After buyer personas are identified, targeted ads can be developed to meet the specific needs of each group. A buyer persona might be “college students” or “women, ages 18-25”. The key is to identify a grouping of individuals who have similar buying patterns and would identify to similar messaging. This process not only helps you gauge who might be interested in your product, but also how to best market it.
Take for instance a company like Cadillac, who was once seen as a vehicle for an older demographic. Their larger vehicles boasted top-end features and trimmings and eventually became the benchmark for quality and luxury — so much so, that the name “Cadillac” became a household adjective to describe other top-end consumer goods, such as the “Cadillac of blenders” or the “Cadillac of beds”. The buyer persona they were focusing on was that of a middle-aged, male executive that had officially “made it” in the corporate world. If you weren’t that, a Cadillac just might make you feel that way and it would certainly help you look the part. Just take a look at this ad from 1946, whose copy reads: “the world’s most desirable motor car... Cadillac is never built to meet a price — or to harmonize with any particular economic situation. It is built to provide the finest personal transportation.”
As the brand and reputation grew older however, so did its target customers and the products became more and more irrelevant to the wider audience. Cadillac saw that they needed to redefine, or at least expand their customer base in order to maintain their cultural relevance. In fact, current ads even boast the tagline, “Redefining Luxury," suggesting that they may have lost their edge in the space. To make that happen, they needed to reexamine their brand as well as their target customers. As time went on, Cadillac implemented newer buyer personas to expand their value proposition to newer market segments in order to reach more customers. From 1999 onward, we’ve seen Cadillac implement additions such as the Escalade — a high-end sport utility vehicle that targets everything from soccer moms to an entire hip-hop generation.
The CTS — a luxury coupe and sport sedan that targets speed enthusiasts and young executives alike.
And the ELR - an electric hybrid coupe that has the environmentally conscious consumers in mind as well as the hard-working man living the “American Dream”.
For each one of these vehicles, Cadillac wanted to identify certain personas that might be likely to purchase so that they could develop targeted advertising specific to each audience. Once they identified the target audience, they were able to create ads based on emotion and psychological needs that each persona could identify with. When a customer can relate to the ads, they are much more inclined to purchase the advertised product. As you can imagine, a soccer mom might identify with an ad differently than someone looking for an exciting ride, as his or her needs are entirely different. This makes segmenting different buyer personas that much more important. To compound the importance, segmenting the different personas allows you to place ads in highly targeted places, which drastically reduces your costs. A perfect example of this might be a print ad for the ELR in National Geographic, boasting about all of the environmentally sound features, while the same car is featured as a high-end car for high-end executives in Inc. Magazine. While the cars are the same, the message and the audience are entirely different.
So how does this all relate to you and your business? Well, when it comes to monetizing your business, you are going to need to implement a similar strategy. We’re not suggesting that you have to tug at the heartstrings of your target customer, but you will need to find a way to identify with them. Remember that you are not selling a product; you are selling a solution to a perceived problem. Your goal is to educate that potential customer on how you provide the solution to their problem. Looking at the problem through their eyes help achieve this.
Take for instance an eBook on how to master the process of buying a home. Perhaps you understood the frustrations of home buying first-hand and took the time to learn everything you could about the topic by doing Internet searches, reading books, and attending workshops. You then decided that it might be advantageous to provide others a shortcut through an eBook in exchange for a small fee. Now you could either market the book as another real estate book to a wide audience, or you could market it as a solution to a very specific problem that a target audience could relate to and might be looking for. What does a typical person have to deal with when it comes to buying a home? Who is the typical person buying a home? How does the process make them feel? Who should they consult with? How long should they expect the process to take? What hurdles will they likely encounter? These are all questions that will help you to identify with a potential customer and create a buyer persona or multiple buyer personas. These buyer personas should be the foundation for every email, sales pitch, Webpage, or other piece of material that you create. It should be the basis of every conversation related to your business and drive every decision.
Oftentimes, businesses will have multiple micro personas instead of one larger macro persona that enlists a wider audience. [how do I reach Timmy better? (referring to a specific micro persona)]. These micro personas are much more specific and are sometimes referred to as an avatar or ideal target customer.
Effectively, an avatar is the same as a buyer persona; however, it’s a much more refined and narrowed view of the target customer. An avatar is considerably more descriptive and paints a clearer picture of the specific customers you are selling to. Instead of a broad market as with buyer personas, avatars focus on individuals with a specific problem. I like to define avatars as “your one perfect customer”. Forget about your target market being “1,000,000 athletes” or “every American between the ages of 15 and 35.” Pick ONE perfect customer and tailor all of your messaging to that person. Your pitch will be much more effective if you do and your business will be much more successful.
If you’ve ever read about business model design, you’ve learned the idea of focusing on a narrow target market and to avoid selling to the broader masses. There is a great book by Alex Osterwalder that covers this in great detail, called Business Model Generation. This same idea holds true with avatars and embodies it at a micro level. The tighter focus allows you to pinpoint your messaging while having the added advantage of being less expensive, more efficient marketing. Imagine trying to sell a new yoga clothing line to every athlete in the United States. Would your efforts be worthwhile? Or would it be more efficient to narrow your focus down to a group of people who are more likely to buy yoga apparel? And how much less would you have to spend trying to reach the specific group of people who enjoy yoga? A lot less. And as you may know, not all yoga-goers wear yoga-specific clothing. Some are just novelists trying a new activity, while others may not be comfortable in tighter fitting clothes. With that, maybe you narrow down your focus even further, specifically targeting yoga enthusiasts. You are now much more likely to be successful than had you reached for a broader audience. Realistically, you could target every person in the world with yoga apparel and still make sales that might have otherwise been missed. I’m sure there are a lot of women out there who buy yoga apparel specifically to look like they practice yoga when in reality they don’t. But by choosing to broaden your reach, you are wasting a lot of money that could have been directed toward people much more likely to buy your product. It’s far more effective to spend your time and money focusing on smaller audiences. The more narrow your focus, the easier it will be to sell your product and the cheaper it will be.
To illustrate the point, if I were to tell you that in order to make your first million dollars, you needed to sell 100,000 products, and that you only have $10,000 to spend to reach that goal. Would you dump that money into a large pool going after the masses? Or would you make every dollar stretch as far as it would go by focusing on people you know are more likely to buy your product? You would probably want to make that money last as long as you could and not waste it on people you know aren’t likely to make a purchase.
And what if I were to tell you that in order to sell those 100,000 products, you first needed to sell one product — and that once you sold your first product, the second sale, third sale, and so on would get easier as time went on? Who would you make that first sale to? Who do you know would get the ball rolling on sales? That person is your avatar.
By now you may be wondering, “Why do I need to be so specific? Can’t I just pick a small range of target customers instead of a specific person?” In short, the answer is yes. A small grouping of target customers will be more effective than going after the masses. The caveat: it will cost more money and take more time, so I recommend sticking with that one perfect customer. In addition to saving costs on marketing, focusing on a specific customer also prevents you from trying to please too many people. You will never be able to please everyone, and it’s far more effective to please a specific type of person than a group or an entire demographic. As with any situation, the larger the group, the harder it is to make everyone happy.
Having a clear message also engages your target audience and helps them identify with what you are saying. No one wants to be pooled into a large group of people; they want to feel unique and special. By knowing who your avatar is, you are effectively able to tailor your messaging, thereby making your audience feel as if you are speaking directly to them.
To illustrate our point on why it’s beneficial to create an avatar, let’s pretend for a moment that you’ve invented the perfect nutritional supplement and are starting a company around its launch. In order to create an ad campaign and all of the marketing materials, you have been told you have to come up with your ideal customer. You’ve done all of the necessary market research and decided that females are your best market fit. Now let’s look at both a buyer persona and an avatar, and see which one seems more effective in coming up with material that will help sell your product:
Female, ages 30-42. She likes the idea of being healthy, but doesn’t have a lot of time to practice a healthy lifestyle. She is a woman on-the-go, looking for a nutritional supplement that is both healthy and convenient.
Good, right? While it is definitely better than going after every female, we can do better…
Becky is 33 years old. She is a single mother of two children, ages 4 and 6. She struggles to maintain a balanced nutrition due to her professional and familial obligations. Before work, she rushes to get the children fed and off to daycare and school, often neglecting her own nutritional needs. During her allocated lunch hour at work, she often grabs a quick snack from the vending machine and rushes off to the nearby gym. She knows that she won’t get an opportunity to workout once she picks the kids up after work. Dinnertime is Becky’s favorite time of the day, because she feels like she can actually get a meal in, while also spending time with her children. Unfortunately, she often resorts to eating children’s finger foods because it’s far easier to cook one meal than two. After the kids are off to bed and the kitchen is cleaned up, Becky finds herself indulging in her nutritional “guilty pleasures," such as ice cream and cookies, while she wraps up the unfinished work that she brought home. She wishes she had a supplement that would not only provide her the necessary nutrients she was lacking, but was also convenient and delicious.
The second example is much more effective at illustrating the problem, thereby making it easy to provide the solution. While tailoring your content for the woman on-the-go might be slightly effective, it doesn’t help you differentiate amongst other quick snacks that she could choose from. If she can see your ad or other medium and truly identify with the problem, she is much more likely to pay attention and remember your product. She feels like you are talking directly to her.
This is the process of storyboarding and storyboarding is the method by which your Avatar comes alive. If you’ve ever watch the AMC series Mad Men, you’ve seen the creatives come up with these detailed stories as the foundation for their entire ad campaigns. They do this because you can’t effectively sell a product if you don’t know your customer. The neat part about storyboarding is that you know your customer inside and out, because you are the one who created them. The trick to this is figuring out how to match your product with that perfect customer in a way that you are providing a solution to their problem. For this reason, wise businesses will identify a problem and customer base before even coming up with a solution or product to satisfy that problem. Age-old methods of creating a product before finding a market are long gone and the need to identify a problem before the solution is stronger every day. Create your avatar and identify their problem, then tailor your solution to fit their needs.
In order to define your avatar, I suggest brainstorming multiple customer segments that you might want to reach. You undoubtedly have a skill and/or passion in something that you are thinking of starting a business with and probably have a product or products in mind. Who is this product for?
In a lot of cases, people create businesses to provide a solution for a problem they once encountered themselves and found the solution to. They create a way to make money by helping others solve the same problem without having to go through all of the headaches, time, money, and lessons that they once did. Take the book, The Personal MBA for instance, where author Josh Kaufman helps people master the art of business without having to go through business school. He speaks from experience in how he managed to get ahead in business without getting a graduate business degree himself.
Josh Kaufman’s avatar is a recent male graduate of college in an entry-level job. They want to climb the corporate ladder and become middle-to-upper management. After getting some experience, maybe they would like to start their own business. Unfortunately, everyone else around them in those higher positions has MBA’s and all of the business knowledge that came with the degree. To his dismay, the MBA’s also had several years of debt due to their advanced schooling. Was this the only answer? Couldn’t there be a better way? There had to be a way to learn this information without having to go to graduate business school. After all, business schools couldn’t be the only places with this information.
Josh’s avatar was himself.
You see, Josh did go through this experience. And since there wasn’t a book written on the subject, he had to go out and find the information on his own. He read every business book he could get his hands on and over the next several years, gained business acumen worthy of an advanced degree. This knowledge allowed him to get where he wanted to in business without having to go to school or pay the hefty tuition. Knowing that others were probably thinking the same way about business school, he decided that he would write a book about it, making it easier for others to get to the same point in life. A $20 book to save 10’s of 1,000’s of dollars made a lot of sense.
Another example of how people create businesses is through observing a problem rather than experiencing it for themselves. Take for instance a mechanic who sees the shop owner charging an arm and a leg for routine services that he knows people would do themselves if they only knew how. He feels sorry for them and wishes that he could just teach them the simple basics. Perhaps he could start a video series that would show people how to save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by doing the work on their own. Their avatar might be a single father or a college student struggling to make ends meet. Obviously there would be more to this avatar’s story, but the important part to take away is that there needs to be a customer in mind that would benefit from this solution and could identify with the mechanic’s value proposition. They also need to be willing to follow through with the solution, so an elderly person may not be the best avatar for this particular case.
The key to finding your avatar is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and see the problem through their eyes. Ask the questions that they might ask. What does their day look like? Take a minute and actually “walk through” a typical day for them and see what types of problems they encounter. What emotions are they experiencing? How does your solution fix their problem? If there is a person in mind that stands out above the rest as your perfect customer, that person is your avatar. Focus on meeting that person’s needs and no one else’s. If you do, your value proposition will be clear, identifiable, and relatable, and you will have the foundation for a successful business.
Now that you have an idea of how to identify unique sets of potential buyers, it’s important to make sure that your messaging is consistent throughout the entire purchasing process. From your first email to the final purchase, each customer should go through a uniform experience. Any irregularities might confuse your audience and cause reluctance in making a purchase. As humans, we are hardwired to pick up on even the subtlest nuances in language, so inconsistencies will alert us that something may be wrong. In addition, we are more likely to require further convincing when we don’t have body language to aid us in decision-making. For that reason, online businesses have a bigger challenge in breaking that trust barrier with their audience. Consistency in your messaging will help balance that out by building trust through regularity and uniformity.
This is another reason why choosing one perfect customer is beneficial, because you won’t have to juggle multiple messages or try to broaden one enough to satisfy multiple audiences. There may be cases in which several segmented audiences can identify with one central theme, but it takes a seasoned expert to be able to create content that can deliver the appropriate message to all audiences while making sure each one feels as if they are the “only one in the room”. Remember that each person should feel as if you are speaking directly to him or her, not pooling him or her with a large group of people.
For each one of the following areas (and any others that your customers may come across), go back to your avatar and write all of your content specifically for them. After you are done developing the content, go through and digest it as if you were your avatar and try to determine if the messaging is direct enough for that specific person. If not, it needs to be edited to meet their needs and help them identify with your value proposition.
•Website pages
•Sales pages
•Lead pages
•Emails
•Social media
•Podcasts
•Blog posts
•Advertisements
•Product descriptions
•eBooks
•Audio/video scripts
6
•Introduction
•Value extraction
•Value creation
•Value maximization
This chapter will be short and to the point; however, don’t take its briefness lightly. Maximizing value is one of the most important elements you can attain in business. Let’s quickly look at a couple of definitions of the word value:
1.the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.
This might mean, “Your business is of great value to me, because it allows me to get my shipping out on time.” In this example the value might be innate to the timesaving or convenience.
Another example using this definition might be, “She is of great value to the company, because of her ability to cut costs.” In this instance, value may be more intrinsic to profitability.
Another definition of value takes a different approach: