Discovering Your Ideal Client’s Pain Points and Values
How to get ideal customers and generate leads for less is all about knowing the right people to target, and that’s where customer Avatars can guide the way.
An Avatar—also called a customer profile—is a representation of your ideal customer, which means it includes information about demographics, psychographics, location, likes and dislikes, needs and wants, hopes and fears, profession, marital status, income level, and more.
With a strong client profile, you can create highly targeted marketing messages that will resonate with your best customers, and this will build relationships, trust, and loyalty, turning your clients into long-term buyers.
Pain points and values are important elements to focus on when creating your profiles because this information will be useful when you’re crafting marketing messages that posit you as a solution to a problem or a way for customers to achieve their goals.
Addressing Pain Points: How to Create a Customer Avatar that Fully Explains Your Best Clients
The first step in addressing the problems your customers are facing is identifying their pain points.
In other words, what problem needs to be solved and who is trying to solve it?
From there, you can look at the job that your products or services can perform, compare that to your customers’ pain points, and evaluate if what you have to offer can, in fact, be the solution they need.
Although pain points will vary depending on your particular business, some common goals that consumers are often trying to achieve include finding products and services that help them save money, ones that save them time, and ones that make a certain task or life in general easier.
Identifying Goals and Values
Something that’s a related idea to pain points that you should also understand about your customers is their goals and values, especially as they relate to your products or services.
For instance, if your customers are often trying to achieve a certain status or trying to fulfill themselves in a particular way—wanting to get healthier, for example—then you have to focus on how your specific offering can help them get there.
Learning About the Participants Involved
The next step when building your customer avatars is identifying the people who are involved in the decision-making process when it comes time to find a solution and purchase a product or service.
Another way to think about this is locating the person that you have to convince to buy what you have to offer.
Furthermore, it’s important to address whether that person is the sole decision maker, or whether the decision will be a joint one, as might be the case with a husband and wife team, or in a business situation where the person has to convince other people and other departments to move forward with a purchase.
Evaluating the Competition
When trying to craft marketing messages that will appeal to and convince your ideal customers, it’s important to think outside the box to identify other possible solutions they might also be considering.
And by outside the box, it means to brainstorm not just competing brands, but also alternative solutions that might be outside your industry entirely.
For example, if you ran a public transit company, your competition could include taxis, Uber, walking, and cycling.
Having an understanding of what the competition entails is the only way you can properly convince customers that your product or service is the ideal solution, above and beyond what competing brands or solutions could provide.
Assessing the Role and Importance of the Goal
Understanding why your customers want to achieve their goals and how important they are is a crucial part of creating avatars because this can help you be more specific with your marketing messages.
In terms of role, start by asking yourself if your customers are trying to achieve something functional, social, or emotional.
Going back to the public transit example, here’s what these could look like:
- Functional: completing a task, like getting from A to B
- Social: gaining a certain status, like owning their own car
- Emotional: trying to feel better, like taking a relaxing Sunday drive
The next thing you need to evaluate is the importance of the job they’re trying to get done because this will determine how they prioritize your products and services.
For example, for a parent who’s trying to visit a sick child in the hospital, the importance of the goal is high, which means the job you can perform is very important.
On the other hand, for somebody who has to get one mile from A to B sometime in the next four hours, the importance of the goal may be low, so you’d have to find a different way of communicating how you can solve their pain.
If you want to know how to build the ideal customer profile, the answer lies in figuring out what kind of value you can offer to your clients.
Whether you’re solving a problem for them, alleviating a pain point, helping them overcome a challenge, or helping them achieve a certain goal, it’s all about figuring out why your product or service can be of value and crafting marketing messages based on that.
If your clients value their time, for instance, then you have to explain how you can save them time.
When creating your Avatars, focus on what your ideal clients value, what they need, and what solution you can offer, and then create messages that speak to those ideas.
This is one of the most effective ways to generate leads with minimal resources, and the best way to bring new long-term customers into the fold.
Want to get started on your own client profiles right away? Download your ideal customer profile worksheet now to get going.
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