Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this customer avatar guide, you are going to learn a simple five step data-driven
process for creating your ideal customer profile.
Timestamps below, along with some other helpful videos, to get you up and running with your
marketing, once you know who you should be targeting with your marketing.
So to kick things off, the very first thing we need to do, is do the five word exercise,
and this is going to help us create a frame, for who our ideal customer is.
So all we want to do here, is describe our ideal avatar in five words or less, this can
be a job profession, job title, a place in life, or a social group name, essentially
anything you would use to identify who your ideal customer avatar is.
Then we're going to create a short descriptor and identify what their big obstacle is, or
what's the big result of your product or service is going to solve for them.
So let's go through the first part of the five words exercise.
So it could be something as simple as your ideal customer saying, “I am a small business
owner”, “Up and coming artist”, “I'm a runner, a swimmer, mom working from home,
a homesteader, and I want to spend less time in my business, make more money from my art,
train for a triathlon, make a full time income”, or “be completely off the grid”, right?
And while this may seem really simple, this is as complex as we need to be.
We're going to get a lot more complex later, on down the road.
But essentially what we want to do here, is make sure that we have a general descriptor
and general understanding of who our ideal customer is.
So we don't start with too broad of an avatar.
Because as we create our avatar, it's going to get narrower and narrower and narrower.
And we just want to start at the top level.
So as an example here, we're going to be creating a customer avatar, to sell a YouTube growth
course for.
So our five word exercise would look something like this.
Entrepreneur video creator, I have my own products and services to sell, and I want
to be a big YouTube influencer.
That's how they've kind of described, what they're trying to achieve.
It's important you do this in first person.
It will be very helpful when you're doing your copywriting later on.
And then the big problem, I don't know how to make my channel grow faster.
And that's as complex as this needs to be.
So step number two, we're actually going to dive directly into some data.
Now that we have general understanding of who we are looking for, in an ideal customer
avatar and answer the question who is your ideal customer.
And we're going to use two sources to do this, Google analytics on your site and Facebook
audience insights.
Now the good news is, both of these are free.
And one of them you can use, even if you don't have a website.
So if you have a website and you have Google analytics on it, you can go through this next
part.
If you don't, you can go ahead and skip to this timestamp (00:04:07) where we start talking
about the Facebook audience insights tool.
So with Google analytics, there are a ton of reports in there, and it would be an entire
your video to go through all of them.
But really there are only two that you care about, when it comes to creating your customer
avatar, where your avatar is potentially located and what is their demographics, gender and
age.
And so to do that, you only need to look at two reports.
The first report you're going to look at, is going to be under audience demographics,
and you can click overview and you can clearly see the general age range and gender of the
people who have visited your site.
It's also very important though, if you look at the top right corner in small gray text,
it's going to tell you the percentage of website visitors captured.
So it's not going to represent a hundred percent of the people who visited your site.
Google is doing their tracking thing, but they don't see everything.
Just most of it, right?
So the second thing you want to do is go over to geo and location and then start to click
through and look at the different locations that your ideal customers might be coming
from.
And you can actually get really specific, especially if you're a local business owner
or you're doing business in a targeted geographical area.
You can actually start clicking down all the way into cities and neighborhoods.
Now, as creepy as this might be, don't worry other people won't be able to figure out who
exactly you are, right?
Just like you can't figure out who exactly is visiting your site, but you can get a tremendous
amount, a very granular data, if that is important to you.
Now, when it comes to the Facebook audience insights tool, nothing happens is to be installed
on your site.
You do just need to create a Facebook ads account.
You can enter your credit card information and you don't actually have to run ads to
use this.
So all you have to do is, go up to the top left corner in the Facebook ads manager and
click, okay on audience insights.
And you're going to have all the information you need about your ideal customer.
And so if you don't already have a website, what you can do, is type in some big brands
or influencers or competitor names here.
And you're going to be able to start getting demographic information, for the types of
people that follow those types of pages.
And so that's where you can get your information.
And you can also, if you already have a website, you can compare what your website visitors
look like, compared to what Facebook audience insights looks like, for competitors and similar
companies.
And you will get all the basic demographic information that you need.
And that's as complex as this step of the process needs to be.
So the next thing we'll want to do is, actually continue using the Facebook audience insights
tool.
But now we're going to answer the question, what are they doing instead?
So what's you're going to want to do, is not only look for current influencers and competitors
that you're aware of, but look for new ones.
And so all you need to do with this search, is think of three to five big influencers,
competitors, or popular books, that your ideal avatar would specifically read and ones that
probably nobody else outside of your niche or industry would understand or read, right?
So you want to make sure that you're not choosing really general books.
And as an example of this, if we were creating some sort of investing product, well, we would
probably type in books, that are specific to people who are trying to learn to invest
and trade.
We wouldn't just type in popular books like “The millionaire next door” or “Rich
dad, poor dad”, because tons of people have read those books versus typing in something
like “What works on wall street” or “The intelligent investor.”
Only people who are really trying to invest, would have read those two books versus “Millionaire
next door” And Robert Kiyosaki's “Thinking or not thinking grow rich.”
Oh my gosh, “Rich dad, poor dad.”
You know, those, I'm sure millions of copies and you're going to get a lot of people who
have nothing to do with investing, right?
So you just want to think of those companies, influencers, and books, or even magazines,
that only pertain to your niche or industry, that your ideal avatar would be reading.
And then what you can do, is you can go over to the page like section, once you've typed
those in, and you can actually start discovering other books, pages, companies, and influencers,
that your ideal customer avatar might already be interested in.
And this is going to be really helpful, because it's going to help you with your advertising.
And it's also going to help you with your conversions because you're going to understand
what type of messaging people already respond to.
Because you can use something like the Facebook ads library, to see what ads these pages are
running.
Although I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, so we'll save that for a future step.
So that does it for this step.
The final one in our process here, is going to be answering the question, what do they
care about?
And we can actually break this down into two specific questions and we'll go through an
example of someone who's trying to grow a YouTube channel.
So the first question we want to ask is, what results are they specifically after?
And now that we've done all this research, right?
And then what do they think is getting in the way, what are the roadblocks?
What are their objections, their struggles, their pains, right?
Because now that we have the basic demographic information, we've gone through what they,
it might be a paying attention to instead.
Now we can really start crafting an image, that we can actually begin to relate and talk
to.
And so, as an example here, someone who wants to grow YouTube channel, well, they probably
want to be full time.
They want to make more money, leave their current job, grow faster, right?
All those types of things to have a successful channel.
Well, what do they think is getting in the way, of those results?
We'll probably something along the lines of the channels aren't growing fast enough.
I don't want to wait another five years, to get to a hundred thousand subscribers, right?
Or maybe they think, they need to rank better for important key words where they think they
can't rank because they're a small channel.
Maybe they think their video quality is holding them back.
They're just not getting enough views, in general.
All those things could be problems, that we could talk to them about and say, “Hey,
we can solve this for you.
And you're gonna be able to go full time”, or “You're gonna be able to make more money
with your YouTube channel.”
And so this is going to be one of the harder parts of the process.
And actually as you're going through this, there is a little trick you can use.
You can actually go to sites like Quora, or you can go to YouTube videos and scroll down
and see how people, what questions people are asking and how they've responded to certain
different types of content.
This is something that I like to do a lot, when we're creating new customer avatars,
especially cause I like YouTube, is I'll go to YouTube and I'll search how to, you know,
fill in the blank.
Let's say invest right.
How to invest in dividend stocks per se.
And then I'm going to click on all of the top ranking videos, because those presumably
are the ones that my ideal avatar and interested in.
And then I'm going to read the comments.
I'm going to start reading what they're actually struggling with, what they don't understand,
what they're trying to achieve.
Now, is this going to be some sort of Holy grail where you're going to get the perfect
combination, right?
No, definitely not.
But it's going to point you in the right direction.
And it's a lot better than not doing any research at all.
And just coming up with things off the top of your head, you'll be surprised how valuable
it is, to read actual comments and actual insights.
It's from real people who could potentially be your customer in the future.
And if you're interested, why this is so important, you can go ahead and take a look at this diagram
here, where we're actually taking these results and benefits, and then plugging them into
a simple headline formula.
As you can see here, we have the second one how to grow a channel, even if you think your
video quality stinks.
And just like that, we have a headline for our landing page.
So that's why it's so important, to go through this step and actually go through the process
of reading comments and going through forums online, figuring out what people are actually
complaining about and struggling with.
And these are going to play a major role across your entire funnel.
Whether you're doing a landing page, you're putting together a lead magnet, you're doing
a full-blown webinar, your sales pages, your emails, the whole nine yards.
It's really, really going to be instrumental, in making sure your sales copy connects with
your ideal avatar.
Now our final, final step here is, once we've gone through these three core steps of collecting
that data, we're going to take all that data.
And we're going to take that five keyword exercise and turn it into an actual avatar.
And so something that's, I know this is going to sound weird, but you need to give your
avatar a name.
because you want to make sure, that when you go to write your email, you write your headlines,
you write your sales pages.
You're speaking to a specific person, as opposed to just speaking to avoid of whoever you think
is, is going to find value, right?
So in this particular example, we have Chris Smith, who is a entrepreneur video creator.
He doesn't know how to make his channel grow faster.
And of course, we already went through the big results that he wants, and what he thinks
is getting in the way.
Then we went through audience insights and Google analytics to figure out what States
he probably lives in, maybe his age, his income.
And then we specifically talk about where he is in his journey.
He's still a solopreneur and he probably has less than 10,000 subscribers.
And this next part, is going to be the hardest part.
And that is the story, which is the little excerpt I have here, so I'll read it really
quick.
And then I'll go through, how you probably want to have a story, that's at least two
to three times as long.
So here we have a quick story, it should be in first person.
“I've been struggling to grow my channel for a year now.
Even though I purchased multiple courses and books, nothing seems to work in my niche.
I still don't know what kind of videos I should make or what I'm doing wrong here.
I keep doing everything I see everyone else doing, but it doesn't seem to work.
It's frustrating watching so many new channels pass me when I'm doing more than they are.”
And so where did all of this come from?
Right?
Cause it could kind of seem like, I'm just pulling this out of thin air, given our process.
Most of this actually came directly from going through Quora and going through YouTube comments
and then going through forms.
So when you are figuring out who your ideal customer avatar is, this is the last and hardest
part, is actually crafting a story and then figuring out what maybe they've tried in the
past and what they're currently trying now.
We could have just as easily gone after someone who's never purchased a course or never purchased
any book, right?
Or someone who has less than 5,000 subscribers or someone who is trying to get to their first
hundred, the sky's the limit.
But what's important is you're very specific with who you are targeting as your ideal customer.
So thank you so much for watching.
I sincerely hope you got some value out of this video.
And most importantly, you have a much clearer picture on how to craft your own ideal customer
avatar.
Go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe for more deep dive marketing videos and tutorials,
just like this one.
And until the next, keep building the business you love.