Who Else Wants to Pay Less for Leads? Generating More Leads with Customer Avatars
Customer avatars or profiles are fictional representations of your ideal clients, and they’re essential marketing tools for anybody who wants to generate leads for less.
Beyond that, avatars can also help you identify people who are just like your ideal customers, generate better-qualified leads, build stronger relationships, and transform regular clients into long-term customers with high lifetime values.
The process of creating an avatar starts with collecting a great deal of data, asking the right questions to gain insights about your ideal customers, identifying pain points and important values, understanding who your ideal customers aren’t, and then dividing your customer base into segments to further target your marketing messages.
From there, you can paint a comprehensive picture of who your best customers are, including where they live, what they do, what’s important to them, where you can reach them, and how you can help them, and that is the key to connecting with your clients on a more meaningful level, and expanding your audience to people who fit the profile of your best customer.
Creating Comprehensive and Enlightening Customer Avatars
The first step in how to build an ideal customer profile is to learn everything you can about your best clients.
This includes demographics, profession, location, marital status, child status, hobbies, and interests, wants and needs, what technology they use, what channels they use to find information, what brands they support, who they trust, and more.
This information will give you a solid foundation for creating your Avatar.
Another important thing to consider at this stage, however, is what sets your ideal customers apart from other people who are similar, because you don’t want to waste time marketing to the wrong people who happen to look like the right people.
To accomplish this, make sure you answer the statement
“My ideal customer would do (fill in the blank) but nobody else would.”
That blank could be anything at all—such as attend an event, wear a certain brand, or eat a certain food—as long as it sets your ideal customers apart from everyone else.
Gather Insights by Asking the Right Questions
How to get ideal customers starts with understanding who your best clients are, and that process starts with questions.
The more questions you ask, the more answers you’ll receive and the more information you’ll gather, but some of the most important questions to ask include things like:
- What brands and people do your customers support?
- What status are they trying to achieve?
- What are their interests?
- What do they do in their spare time?
- What and how do they share information (such as Facebook versus email)?
- What do they want from you?
- What and who do they believe in?
- What are their fears?
- Who and what do they love?
- Who are their friends?
Identifying and Addressing Pain Points
Understanding the problems and challenges your customers face is key to understanding the value you can offer them.
Whether your customers are trying to solve problems or achieve goals, you must recognize how you can help them, and then be able to communicate that value to them.
This includes learning who the key decision makers are, determining what other solutions you’re competing against, and assessing the importance of the goal or problem they’re trying to address.
Once you understand all this, you can create tailored marketing messages that will show your customers how you can be the solution they need.
Creating an Antivar to Learn Who Your Best Customer Isn’t
Customer profiles are crucial in helping you to better understand your best customers and identify prospects who are just like them, but equally important is learning who your customers aren’t.
This is where an antivar (an anti-avatar or negative avatar) can help because it’s a fictional representation of the person who isn’t your best customer.
To create an antivar, you want to collect all the same data about people who don’t buy your products or services and who you don’t want as a customer (perhaps, for instance, they don’t pay their bills), and fill in the blank in the statement “my best customer doesn’t do (blank).”
Information to focus on includes demographics, things your antivar dislikes, technology they don’t use, brands they’re not aware of, and other things that make your antivar an non-ideal customer.
From there, you can save time and money by eliminating people who fit your antivar profile from your targeting.
Dividing Your Clients into Targetable Segments
Segmenting is the process of identifying patterns that connect your best customers and then dividing your overall customer base into smaller groups who share a similar characteristic.
Examples of segments include people who live in the same region, have the same profession or income level, are married or have kids, have the same hobby or interest, or have a specific need that you can meet.
There are many ways you can segment your customers, and the important things are that you focus on the largest segments that can offer the highest return on investment, that you create customized messages for each of your segments, and that you have a specific value proposition to address the unique characteristic of each group.
Targeting Your Messages to Address Individuals Rather than Groups
Although your customer profile represents large segments of people, it’s still crucial to craft marketing messages that target the individuals within that group.
Nobody likes being lumped into a faceless crowd, and if your messages don’t carefully address specific people rather than broad markets, then your marketing will miss the mark, and your potential customers will find a competitor who values them as individuals.
To successfully speak to individual customers, you must start by understanding what it’s like to be them and what it’s like to walk in their shoes.
That way, you’ll have a better comprehension of their pain points, challenges, needs, and goals, and will be better equipped to provide answers about how your product or service can be the solution they need.
People are often asking how to create customer avatars and whether the endeavor is worthwhile, but without a doubt, the answer to that latter question is a resounding yes.
Avatars represent your customers, and the insights they can provide about your best customers will equip you with everything you need to know to build relationships and locate leads who are just like your ideal clients, all while conserving money and resources.
This may sound too good to be true, but just download your ideal customer profile worksheet to see how easy it can be.
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