Customer Avatar Exercise: How To Speak To Your Target Market

“If you try to sell to everyone, you’ll end up selling to no one.” So how do you create that perfect persona that represents your target audience? Keep reading ‘cause I’m going to show you how…

Hey guys, it’s Alex, back at ya with another tutorial to help you drive more connection and conversions with your copy. If you’re new to the crew, click subscribe to my YouTube Channel to get a new video from me every single week! And remember to hit that little bell icon to be notified as soon as my video goes live!

To everyone else, welcome back! As you know, in my post last week I shared the 5 stages of market sophistication. If you haven’t read that post yet, no worries you can do that right here. And today we’re continuing onto the second part of this mini-series on How To Speak To Your Target Audience.

Obviously an important step in speaking to your target audience is actually knowing WHO in the heck they are. Which is why defining and profiling your customer avatar is such a powerful exercise. 

Your Customer Avatar is a fictitious character who represents your ideal CUSTOMER. Note that I said CUSTOMER. Your Customer Avatar is not a general audience or target market, it is an individual. One person with a clear set of desires, fears, pains and dreams. You want to give your Customer Avatar a name, age, family, and story. The clearer and more specific you can be about WHO this person is, the more effective your marketing and messaging will be. 

Now whether you’re doing this for the first time, or revisiting your messaging as your audience evolves, this process will help you better understand what your customers want from your brand, what motivates them to buy, how they compare or choose products, and what kind of offer would they find the most compelling. 

So for this tutorial, I’m taking you through my super simple 3-step Customer Avatar Exercise, and at the end, I’ll tell you where you can get my Customer Avatar Worksheet that you download and refer to any time you need to go through this exercise for your clients or businesses.

Alright, let’s begin…

Step 1. Create Your Customer Avatar Profile

The easiest way to narrow down your target audience and gauge their specific goals and motivations, is to start with their demographic traits.

This is where you identify essential information to locate the “bigger pool” that your avatar belongs to. If you’re copywriting for an existing brand, you want to think about how to make your messaging appeal to the current target audience …

And you should already have access to this demographic information through your audience analytics. If you’re writing for a brand new audience, you’ll want to spend some time thinking about how to make your messaging attract the ideal target audience.

So, let’s start with the basics. For your Customer Avatar, you’ll want to identify…

Customer Avatar Demographics

• Age or age range. If it helps, you can also go by generation. I mean, your Baby Z slang is definitely not gonna hit home with a Baby Boomer!
• Sex
• Location
• Age
• Education Level
• Relationship Status
• Occupation. You can choose to pick a generic role, level, or classification that you believe sums up the kind of career your avatar has.  
• Also, Income. 
• AND Household Size. This is important if your product or service targets a customer who is providing for their family or their spouse.

OK, now that you got the demographics down, we can move on to their Psychographic traits. 

Psychographic Traits in a Customer Avatar

These are traits that help you dig deeper into understanding what drives your customer’s buying behaviour based on the following questions:

• What are their interests? Is it entrepreneurship? Are they a foodie? Do they love films, and if so — what kind of films?
• What is their lifestyle like? Do they only eat organic? Do they have a high-stress job? Do they work out three times a week?
  What are their core values? Do they care about integrity? Transparency? Diversity? By defining their values, you’re also defining yours.
• What are their personal goals? Is it to be at their healthiest? To generate more wealth? To look good naked? These can be big end-type goals or even short term ones.  
• What causes matter to them? What movements do they support? This is a key consideration to understand what kind of brand messaging would appeal to your avatar.
• Lastly, what brands do they use? These brands don’t necessarily have to include your competitors, although it would be beneficial to know. Identifying the kinds of brands that your avatar would likely use is a great reference point to guide your marketing.
• And of course, you can always expand this step further with more questions and elements based on your product or service.

Okay, next up…

Step 2. Illustrate Their Pain Points

Before you know how to help your Customer Avatar, you need to know what they’re struggling with. 

So your next step in this exercise is to create a list of 4-5 relatable and believable challenges that your avatar is likely experiencing… Based on the profile you just created. 

The goal of this step is to help you understand how to tap into your Avatar’s greatest pain points so you can communicate with empathy and create emotional resonance in your copy…

You can complete this step in the form of a story, common statistics or facts, or actual feedback from previous customers

For example: A Customer Avatar for a business like HelloFresh, the meal-kit delivery service, might have a challenge like this: 

“I feel guilty when I don’t have time to cook healthy meals for my family. I often order takeout instead because I’m always exhausted after work.”

Another example would be Glossier, a skincare and cosmetics brand that embraces natural beauty and minimal makeup. Their Avatar may feel like this…

“I have a difficult time finding beautiful makeup that takes under 10 minutes to put on. I head straight to work from spin class and don’t have an hour to spend in the bathroom”

You get the idea…

Now that you have your Avatar’s pain points and challenges listed down, it’s time to move on to step 3…

Step 3. Flip The Script To Juicy Benefits

This final part of the exercise will help you clearly identify the goals or results your Avatar would likely want to receive from your product or service so you can communicate your unique sales proposition in a highly value-driven way.

To do this, imagine the ideal scenario or outcome that is the complete opposite of each of the challenges you’ve just illustrated. What would they want to experience instead of those pain points, and how do they want to feel? 

Let’s use the same brand examples from earlier. 

For HelloFresh, you could flip the script from “I feel guilty and exhausted” to:

”I now have regular quality time with my family over dinner without having to stress about what to cook and what to buy.” 

For Glossier, the script could go from “I have a difficult time finding quick, beautiful makeup” to:

“I only need 10 minutes to look fabulous after hitting the gym…”

And there you have it! You now have your customer avatar profile complete with their pain points and personal goals. 

Ok, now it’s time for my favorite part! It’s time to give your little baby Customer Avatar a name! Who did you guys come up with? Share your Customer Avatar names below just for fun!

And, you can even take it one step further and give your avatar a face! Since it’s for internal use, there’s no harm in finding a random photo of someone who best represents your avatar. Or maybe even it’s someone you know! 

This exercise is a great starting point to set you off on your marketing campaign with clarity and direction. 

And, to get your Customer Avatar Worksheet that walks you through this exercise, step by step, click here! And I’ll send it to you right away.

K guys leave me a comment below if you found this post helpful!

And don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel. I’ll see you next time! Until then, have a great week and thanks for reading! Ciao for now!

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