KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
- If Amazon say ‘’the single most important thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be the Earths most customer-centric company’’ – you should be focusing on your customer too.
- The first mistake people make when they’re trying to find out who their customer is, is that they try to make assumptions. What they often do, is create an avatar for who they want their customer to be. To avoid this, you need to go back and look at who is buying your products and who your site is attracting. This will give you an idea as to whether you’re on the right track.
- To try and understand who your audience are, you need to ask yourself some questions about your existing customers. You need to think whether or not you like working with your current customers, and do you want to work with them going forward. Not only that, but is your product or service still appropriate to this customer?
- If you want to get a deeper understanding of your audience, you can offer an incentive to interview them and find out what their pain points are and what will help them. You can ask general questions about who they are and what they, to help create your avatar.
- When creating your avatar, you need to think about whether they’re male or female, how old they are, what job they do, how much they earn, whether they’re single or married and every other piece of background information you can think of.
- The next section you need to think about is your avatars behaviours, motivations, and aspirations. This will help you connect with them on a better level.
- After that, you can focus on their pain points. What problem do they have that your product or service solves?
- Finally, once you have discovered their pain points, you can look at how you meet their needs.
- If you offer a variety of different products or services, you can multiple avatars within your business.
- Give your avatar a name. This will give you a better idea of who your customer is and it will improve your communications when you’re talking to them.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…
The more detail you go into when creating your avatar the better. Give them a name, create an image for them and picture them whenever you make a decision that relates your product or service.
HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS
- Mistake #1 Making Assumptions – 09:00
- Understanding Your Existing Audience 10:30
- How To Create Your Avatar – 14:40
- Debugging Common Misconception – 17:50
- Top Tips For Creating Your Avatar and My Avatar Examples – 19:00
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE
Hello, I’m Kirsty and I write the show notes for Teresa! You can find me (and follow my travels) here – Instagram, Twitter and my Blog.
- Five Ideas to Build Your Email List That You May Be Missing
- My Webinar Blueprint
- 10 Things You Must Include On A Sales Page
Transcript below
Hello and welcome to episode 68 of the Marketing That Converts podcast. And as you all hear, I’ve still not yet decided on my into and outro. I promise you, it’s coming. It’s just that because I’m patching so far ahead at the moment on the podcast mainly because one of my team members, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this actually but one of my team members, she writes my show notes. So once I record the podcast I then send it someone to get edited, once it’s edited it comes back and then it goes off to one of my team and she writes the show notes and she’s actually going off on a trip for about three and a half weeks I think because she’s also a travel blogger and she does stuff on Instagram and she’s got her business that she’s running but she also do some work for me which is cool. In fact, as she does my show notes she’ll be listening to this. So I’m going to ask her in the show notes to put links to her stuff as well just so that you can go and take a look at her stuff if you want as well because it is quite interesting she does go to some amazing places so well worth taking a look. Oh, anyway her name’s Kirsty. I didn’t mention that.
So because Kirsty’s going away I’m trying to batch content which means I’m having to record quite far out, which means I’m yet to actually organize getting the intro and outro done. But it is coming and I’m still trying to decide what to do. And I think I’m swaying to the idea of me doing my own intro and outro but we will see. Before I get on with today’s content, I want to let you know about a couple of new things I’ve produced for you to go and download if you would like.
So as I think we’ve talked about before, the fact that the change has happened in the name of the podcast and some of the direction I’m going. My direction is expanding out in sort of the digital marketing space and looking at the kind of things where we take it a bit further than social media. So funnels and sales pages and webinars and all that cool stuff. It’s not to say I’m not going to do the social media, I totally am. It’s just I want to be able to take you on a bit further. I want to help you in that journey past the social media. So because most of my content that’s out there when I ask you for an email address is to do with social media, I wanted to create some new stuff that actually take you a bit further.
So I’ve put together three different things. The first thing is all around list building and it’s five ideas to build your email list that you may be missing. So these are the ones that I see hardly anybody doing but are really really easy to do it. So if you are trying to build your email list, if you’ve dreamed of having an email list or hang on your every word then this is definitely the download for you. Like I said, I go into these five different places where people are reading missing an opportunity to get people to sign up onto their email list and for you to help grow your email list quicker.
The next one is all about my Webinar Blueprint. Now back in March I spoke at Atomicon and I walked people through my webinar process that I use while I’m on a webinar and it covers a very specific number of steps and goes into very specific things. So I’ve put together my webinar blueprint so that you can follow it in terms of if you’re doing a webinar the things that you need to make sure you include. And actually even if you’re not doing a webinar the cool thing about the blueprint is if you’re selling, it’s still going to be helpful because there are certain steps there that even if I was selling a product or service not on a webinar that I would still probably include.
And then the next thing that I’ve created which all of these kind of follow on from each other which is intentional is focused around your sales pages and it’s covering the 10 things that you must include on a sales page that are going to ensure that you can maximize your results and obviously increase your conversions. So again I go into example and give you pro tips as you go along in terms of all the different things that you should include on that page which you can then take to your own page and see what are you missing, what have you got.
So if you want any of these things, I am going to link to them in the show notes. But basically if you go to teresaheathwareing.com forward slash and then by any one of these three words after you’re going to find them. So if you put forward slash blueprint you’ll get the webinar blueprint. If you put forward slash sales page, you’ll get the 10 things that you must do on a sales page. And if you put forward slash list building, you’re going to get those ideas that most people miss when building their email list. So if these are of interest then please head along to there and check them out.
Anyway today I wanted to talk about something that I mention all the time and as I was scanning back through my podcast episodes trying to decide what I was going to talk about in this episode, I noticed that I haven’t actually ever done an episode on it. So today’s episode is gonna be all around understanding your audience and creating your perfect avatar. Now I can promise you if I’ve got a pound for every time I’ve ever talked about how you must know your audience and understand who they are and I don’t just mean are they male or female? What age? What location? I mean really understand them. Honestly I would be a millionaire by now because I say all the time and the reason I say it all the time is because it’s so important and it’s something that so many people miss. And you might even be sat there in your car or getting ready in the morning, doing the dinner, whatever it is you do however you listen to the podcast. You might be sat there thinking, ‘Oh, Teresa we know all this and I know who my customer is’. But honestly I promise you bear with me, go through this episode with me, listen to what I have to say and then do the exercise because it really is so important. I honestly have seen campaigns be made or broken by how well they got to know their audience.
I want to give you a couple of little examples I’ve got. So when I talk about really going deep and understanding your audience, I’m talking about well we’ll get to see that in more detail later on but basically I’m saying that you need to understand; you know what they do at the weekend, how they spend their time, what type of people they are. And I did an advertising campaign once for a government authority who were trying to target women over 50 who were looking for a promotion at work. Now that is a really difficult thing to try and target. How on earth could I possibly know as a marketer when someone is ready to try and get a promotion at work? It was impossible so we tried various different things on Facebook ads trying to target them and then we started to really profile the audience and there was some real commonalities between them and ones that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with what we were trying to achieve.
But one of the things that was quite common with most of the women we were trying to target was that they had actually downloaded and played on Candy Crush which seems like such a ridiculous thing to target people on. But we’ve done our research and we knew who the customer was and we’d find that stuff like this. So we changed the ad, we looked to our targeting, we include things like they have Candy Crush and the advert was like doubly effective as it was previously. Just because we added in this one seemingly crazy element. It seems to suddenly make a really big difference. So that’s why I want you to understand that actually not only does it enable you to target them better but also when we write to those audience and I don’t mean right as in we’ll send them a letter. I mean when we do emails and sales pages and websites when you present on stage or you speak to them in person, when you know who you’re speaking to your targeting and your connection with them is gonna be so much better. So you’re going to be able to speak to them in the language they use and understand and you’re going to be able to relate with them really really well.
So it really is crucial for you to understand who your customer is. Now when I was preparing the information on this because actually this is part of my course online that’s about content creation. So I have a Content Creation Made Simple course and in it as various modules in the first module is around knowing your customer Avatar and your audience. And when I was putting that together I was researching and looking and doing various things and I came across a quote by Jeff Bezos. Is it Bezos? I think it’s Bezos.
Anyway, he is the founder of Amazon. And his quote says, “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be the Earth’s most customer centric company” which in my mind if a company as big as Amazon are realizing that they need to understand and get under the skin of their customer then really the rest of us have no choice but to follow because if they realize that they’ve got to know who they’re speaking to and they’ve got to know who they’re serving then we have to do that too. And you know what? There’s no excuse, there’s no… It’s not like you need to pay a big research company or look at big expensive research about customer groups. This is so easy. The stuff I’m going to help you with is literally stuff that you can do tomorrow that doesn’t cost anything but some time and I promise you will make a world of difference.
So the first mistake that most people make when they are trying to find out who their customer is they basically make assumptions and they assuming they know exactly who that customer is or who the customer they want in their head is. Now what they’re not doing is they’re not looking at who necessarily they’re serving at that point, who has already bought their product or service so they are not going back and looking at those people and also they’re not looking at who they’re marketing or their current language or their website is currently attracting because if you’re getting the wrong type of customer come to you then you’re not putting the right stuff out there to attract the right people.
So like I said this is a time where we don’t presume we know things. We go right back to basics and I do this too and we start asking the most obvious questions. Now one of the first places you can look in terms of trying to understand who that customer is, is like is that your existing customer base but you want to ask yourself a couple of questions while you’re doing that. The first question you want to ask yourself is, Do I like working with these people? Are these people the people I want to get more of? Or are they ideally not the people I want to work with going forward? Also the product or service that you’re offering in the future or going forward, is that still appropriate to that audience?
So I have a perfect example in my own business when I first started the business I started an agency where we would physically do things for businesses so we would take on their social media, we’d send e-mails for them and that agency obviously got a load of customers. And when I looked at my new part of the business going forward i.e. more of the speaking more of the online marketing as in, I want people to buy products and services from me online so that I can reach bigger audiences and I can help more people. They weren’t the right people. My current customer base were not the customers that I was trying to attract going forward.
So like I said it’s really helpful to look at who you’ve got as a customer. But I want you to bear these things in mind. Now ideally you’re going to pick someone that you’re already working with that is going to be perfect. You must have them customers that you think I’m sure if I had 10 of these my life would be a dream. So if that is the case then great.
Also the other thing I do at this point I know I’ve talked about this on the podcast folks, is it ringing a bell? Is that when I decided that I wanted to work with a different type of audience I thought I’d got in my head the type of audience I wanted to work with but because it was a fairly newer one I wanted to be sure that they were right.
So I actually went and approached a number of people who won either previous customers or but I felt they still fit with the new style stuff that I wanted to do or they were people that I’d never worked with. But I felt that they were probably my avatar that I was looking for. So I contacted these people in person and I said to them, “Would you please come on a Zoom call with me? And can I interview you and record that Zoom call and ask you some questions about your business? And about how you feel about your business and that sort of thing.” Now I offered them an incentive I think that’s really important if you’re going to take someone’s time. Some people were just lovely and would have wanted to do it anyway. But if you really want to make this work then you might want to offer an incentive. And I get them on a call with me and I ask them questions and I have questions ready. And there were questions around things like, ‘How did they feel about their business? If I could wave a magic wand for them, how would their business look? What’s the one thing they hate doing? What’s the thing they love doing? What do they struggle with the most? All those kind of questions. Because mine was obviously around how they’re marketing their business and I wanted to understand more. And the reason I recorded the call was because when you take notes. Now this might just be me and might not be you so you know if it’s not don’t worry. But when I take notes or one, I can’t read my notes half the time I’m a nightmare. But two, I either do half sentences or I write the words that I’m thinking not necessarily the words they’re saying.
So for instance they might have said I’m so overwhelmed by the amount of time social media takes up and I might have abbreviated it too and too much time on social media. However the word that they used that was so important was overwhelm and if I once connected them going forward that’s probably the word I need to use.
So that’s why recording the calls is great. The other thing that’s great is if you’re working with a copywriter on any of your sales pages, landing pages, websites whatever is that again it can be really useful for them to hear actually what your audience is saying rather than what you’re surmising. So anyway those are the types of things I did. And also I asked them other questions just kind of general questions about who they were and what they did in that sort of thing.
So once I had done this interview I was able to then start to create my avatar. Now when you think about your avatar there are a couple of things I want you to think about. The first thing is the kind of basic stuff. So I do want you to think about.. Are they male or female? How old are they? Are they married? Do they have children? If it’s important, is there an education level that they might have got to? Where do they live? What job do they do? Maybe what salary they’re on? And I want you to think about kind of those things so obviously that’s going to be your main kind of background slash demographic stuff. Okay. So that’s the first section. Oh and by the way probably should’ve since the beginning. I have got a download that you can get which obviously I’m going to put in the show notes so teresaheathwareing.com/68. If you go there you’ll be able to get a download of this worksheet that you can then fill out for yourself and it has all the headings on the right to go through so you don’t need to worry about writing them down if you’re busy.
So like that first section background and demographic those where you put your basic stuff that I’ve just talked through. The next section I want you to think about is behaviors, motivations and aspirations. Okay now this might sound a little bit deep and a little bit kind of like why do I need to know these things but I promise you it’s really important because if you can start to understand those things you can start to really kind of deep dive in on that person and know how to connect with them.
Then the next section and I’m gonna give you an example of this and what I’ve written up. The next section that I want to look at is there pain points and what I mean by pain points is, What’s the problem that they’ve got that your product or service solve? So what’s the issue that they’re having? And I don’t mean.. so for instance when someone asked me to do some training on social media or wants one to one consultancy, they don’t ask me because they want to be a genius on Facebook ads. They ask because they want more sales. Now if I told him they had to go out in the street and wear a sandwich board and that would get them all the sales and the results they wanted then they’d probably do that. So their pain point isn’t necessarily the pain isn’t they want training or they want consultancy. The pain is they want more sales or the wants of build their email list or their funnel isn’t working or whatever it is.
And then the last section we’re gonna be going through is how I meet their needs. So once you’ve discovered their pain points you’re going to then look at the product or service that you’re offering and how that fixes those things that they’ve got a problem with. Okay. So those are the things that I want to think about and I’m going to give you an example of what I’ve come up with to show you the kind of detail I’d go into.
But before I do that I just want to cover two points. Firstly you can have more than one avatar in a business so you can have more than one customer profile. So obviously I offer varying different products. And one of my products is one to one consultancy which obviously is my most expensive thing that I offer. And then I have a content creation course which is probably one of the cheapest ways that you can work with me it’s sort of 97 pounds.
So for me there are various offers in between or will be and various different things that we do in between and then obviously we have the agency. So I don’t just have one Avatar. I have multiple avatars but I know which ones offer which products. The second thing I want say is that once you’ve created your avatar there are always going to be exceptions to the rule. So for instance let’s say I tell you that my ideal customer is 40-50s. You might say well you’ve got customers 55. Yeah. Okay that’s cool. However what is the most likely customer? What is the person that is most likely to be the person that’s going to use my service?
There are always going to be people that are exceptions to the rule like said so you’re going to have people that don’t exactly meet your criteria that you’ve come up with your avatar. However when you’re thinking of your avatar you really need to try and pinpoint as ideally as possible. So I don’t want you thinking wow my customer base can actually be 18-65 I’d really want you to go but who’s more likely to buy that product or service? So that’s the way I want to think about this going forward.
So the first thing I do is I give them a name. This really helps when I’m writing emails. This really helps on in writing copy for sales pages or websites because I literally imagine talking to this person. I even have a picture of what this person might look like. Just googled on the Internet you know what might this person that like and actually if you have got the ideal customer then feel free to use them as their name and their picture. So I imagine that this person is called Nikki.
Okay. So Nikki in my background and demographics I have noted that Nikki is a female and she’s based either in the UK Australia or America. She’s aged between 35 and 55. She’s married and has older children or no children. Financially, she’s stable via probably a partner but they’re not super wealthy but they’re doing fine. And she’s had her own business between 1 and 3 years.
So that’s the kind of demographic information I’ve put together about Nikki. So let’s move on to her behaviors and motivations and aspirations. So after talking to Nikki and this is a person I’ve spoken to. She has a passion that she wants to turn into a business so for her this tended to be something that she just loved doing and thought you know what I want to do a business where I get to do this every day. Or she was encouraged by friends and family who said to her you know you’re brilliant at this why don’t you go into business about it. So she really does want to do something for herself. And although the business is okay, she really doesn’t know how to grow it. She follows and supports other local businesses and she does network but she gets really nervous when meeting new people and overall she lacks confidence in her business skills. So she knows she’s good at the things she does but she’s really doubts herself when it comes to the business and her own self-belief.
So hopefully that gives you an idea of the sort of thing that I understood by having conversations with these people that that was an area of or those were the areas that actually they were struggling with. So it really gave me a really good idea about them and the people they are and what they’re trying to do.
So the next point is the pain points. So this is where you need to identify the issues they’ve got in the business that you’re going to then be able to help with. So for this avatar that I’ve created as an example Nikki really lacks self-doubt. She doesn’t think she’s good enough. She’s worried her business will fail and she’s not making enough money or she doesn’t have enough people in her pipeline as in new customers coming through and she gets overwhelmed with everything she should be doing in her business. So those are the pains that she’s got right now.
And of course another pain is that she’ll have to give up the business altogether and go and get a job. Now they might be really extreme and you might be sat there thinking really you know is that their pain? But actually that’s what it leads to so I’m not trying to dramatize it or overplay it but in all honesty those are the kind of thoughts that were going through people’s heads when I spoke to them.
So once you’ve understood their pain points the things that they got really frustrated about, they’re struggling with and note none of these things were to do with social media. None of these things were to do with coming up with content. None of these things were to do with how do I use Facebook? It was all much bigger than that. So in terms of how I meet their needs or how a service I could offer could meet their needs. In the next section I included things like I could develop their skills and provide them with tools to help them grow their business. I could help them increase their followers and their tribe and their prospects which will help them convert more sales and therefore see fill up that pipeline that they’re missing. I can teach them how to manage their time on social media so then never overwhelmed again. And I can prove to them and everyone else that they are an expert in their field and they have some things of value on offer to the world. So again I’m not sat there go in, I’ve got a course creation course you can do. I can offer one to one consultancy we can just do social media if you wanted in the agency. I’m not mentioning any of those things at all but I’m looking at the services that I offer and I’m flipping them around and go what would that mean to them and what difference would that make to them?
So to really help you with this I want to give you another example so I’m going to give you an example as if it was someone for the agency I know lots of you are social media people. I have lots of virtual assistants and that’s sort of thing. So I’m going to give an example from a kind of agency point of view we’re bringing on a business that way. Now listen I don’t have this example of that in front of me so we are flying by the seat of our pants. So I’m literally doing this off the top of my head.
Let’s see how we go. Okay so background and demographic information. So for me for the agency if I think about this the Avatar is going to be predominantly male. They tend to be 45 plus. They do have older children and a family but they don’t talk about it a whole lot. It’s not really that important in our conversations often just to kind of nod to the fact of how the family. They have a good business that they’ve grown over time and they also now have a team and their business is probably five plus years old. They’re not on social media themselves or if they are they probably just dabble in a little bit of it but they feel a little bit left behind.
So from a behaviors and motivation and aspiration point of view they want to grow their business but they really at this point are not looking for loads of stress or hustle or whatever they’re trying to grow their business in a nice way without loads of stress. They know that they have to social media even if they don’t want to. And in some cases they really don’t want to but they do understand that it’s an important part of business and they need to do it. They don’t like the fact that they don’t understand it and they really don’t want to be treated like an idiot. So even though they’re not interested in the ins and outs of it, they want you to be able to treat them and give them the respect that they are an intelligent business person and therefore tell them what they need to know but don’t go into too much detail. They are comfortable with the marketing that they’ve done to date but they do know they’ve got to move forward. And if they do put themselves on social media or if their business does focus on this they want to look really good and they want to make sure it’s a good presence.
So their pain points are pretty clear. They are struggling with the fact that they know they need to be on social media but because they don’t know enough they don’t want to give it to one of their team members or someone in the business because they can’t effectively manage them because they don’t know what it is they’re meant to be doing. They also have no time as well as the fact they have no interest actually learn it but they have no time to go and try and understand this. There are the pain point is they’re feeling like they’re a little bit now past now that sounds dreadful. But they’re feeling like they’ve almost missed the boat on it like this is a new thing it’s not for them to have to think back and therefore they really want to be able to trust someone else to do it and they don’t know what constitutes as a good result. So even if they did get someone inside to do it and one of the team members manage their social media they have no idea whether actually that’s a good result or not. And like I said their time wise they really are not that interested in trying to learn. They want to know they’ve got someone they can trust to do this social media for them and be able to report back knowing that the results are worth the effort. So in terms of then how I would meet their needs with a product it would be things like I would take all that stress and worry off them and all the time constraints off them and we would manage it fully in house. Being an expert, they don’t need to worry that we don’t know what we’re doing. And also that we’re going to be able to report back and tell them how successful this is for them. They won’t need to worry that their business isn’t being well represented because of the quality of the service we put out. And when we work with them we give them just as much information as they need so that they understand it without overwhelming them with the details.
So I’m really hoping those two examples of giving you a really clear idea on when you’re looking at your avatar and how you break that vision and how you come up with those points. So for instance if I was going to be marketing to my agency the example that I just gave you, I would be talking about the facts of trusted, saving time, don’t need to worry about it going wrong, we give reports. I’d be including all those things that answered those pain points.
So like I said it really is important to understand that customer and don’t forget your customer can be more than one avatar. So for instance if you are selling holidays it might be that you have holidays that are appropriate for couples who don’t want children around and like luxury and that you have family holidays that you’re offering to families and therefore they’re more interested in is there stuff for the kids to do? And is it safe? So our priorities even when we’re buying the same product.. Our priorities are very different and that’s what we’re trying to get to the bottom of when we’re doing this exercise.
So I really hope that you’ve understood what I’ve said. I really hope that you’re able to take this on as your own and think about these examples for you and your customers because I promise you this is going to make a big difference in terms of going forward and how you market and speak to those customers. So I hope that’s been helpful this week. Again there’s no outro. So I could tell you to go and check out my website. I think that’s what used to be on the other one teresaheathwareing.com. You can find everything there. And also don’t forget to come and find me on social media. I’m often on Instagram and I love receiving your Instagram Stories of you listening to the podcast so don’t forget to take me in them so I can share them on my profile as well. So until next week. Have a wonderful week!
