Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this ideal customer avatar blueprint, we're gonna be going through not only the
seven essential questions for crafting your ideal customer avatar profile, but we're also
gonna be going through practical data-driven ways to answer these questions.
So chances are, you've seen a blog post or a video in the past, that just goes through
a bunch of questions, that you're magically supposed to know the answers to.
And whether you've been running advertising for a while, or you're just getting started
with your business.
Chances are you're watching this video because you're not quite sure who your ideal customer
is.
So not only are we gonna go through these seven essential questions, we're also gonna
go through some data-driven ways, on how to actually answer those questions.
So we're not just taking shots in the dark, make sure you check out the timestamp table
of contents in the description, along with some other helpful videos to take this customer
avatar, build your funnel and build your advertising campaigns.
And now we'll kick things off with these seven questions.
Who are they?
Where do they live?
What do they do for fun?
Basic demographics?
What related content do they already consume?
What results are they after?
And then finally, number seven, what solutions, you know, products or services are they already
using?
And these seven questions are all you need to get started, with crafting your ideal customer
profile or your ideal avatar.
There are a lot of other pieces of information we could gather, right?
There are a lot of other things we could do, but at the end of the day, when we're just
starting out, we're just putting together this kind of puzzle of who the heck, who is
gonna buy our products and services, seven questions is all we need.
Any additional research, any additional data, is just gonna distract from us, really zeroing
in on how we can connect with that customer and that's gonna be really important when
we get to questions, number six and seven.
But for now, we're gonna start with the first four questions.
And believe it or not, Google and Facebook have the answers for you.
So there are two different ways that we can do this.
Well, actually, technically there's three.
The third way is you just make something up, right?
You just answer the questions, what you think they are.
And then you move on to the next step, which is probably what you've seen in the past,
which is what I don't want you to do.
Instead, we're gonna go to Google and Facebook to get our data.
So if you have Google analytics installed on your website, you're gonna want to go the
Google analytics route.
If you don't have Google analytics installed on your website, or it wasn't installed properly,
then we're gonna go through the Facebook audience insights route.
Both of these are gonna be helpful, if you have both, great.
If you only have one or the other, you're gonna--, it's gonna be much better than you're
just writing down a bunch of random things that you think the answers to the questions
are.
So let's go ahead and go through the Google analytics method first, and then we'll go
through the Facebook audience insights first.
And again, this is for the first four questions.
So what you're going to want to do, is go into your analytics account and then click
on audience.
And under audience, you're gonna have a bunch of options on your left hand, I guess, left
for you, left hand side panel.
We're gonna want to look at, is we're gonna look at interests.
We're gonna look at demographics and then we're gonna look at geo.
So under demographics, we're gonna go ahead and take a look at the age and gender of your
current website visitors, right?
This is the best place to figure out who is actually interested in you, your content and
your products, right?
So now we're not just picking things out of thin air.
We're actually looking at our website and saying, these are the people that come to
our website.
If you want that to change, then of course you can tweak your content in the future,
using the Facebook method, we're about to go over.
Next you're gonna wanna go down to geo and locations.
And that's gonna tell you, where people are coming from, where are they physically located,
in the world.
Now that we know kind of who they are, their age, their gender, the demographics, and their
location.
We can go over to interests and click on overview.
And you're gonna look at the affinity audiences.
And these affinity audiences, are groups of people Google has identified, with all of
their data.
They crunch the numbers and they say, that these are major topics that your website visitors
are interested in.
And this really gives you a clear picture of the first four questions, and you'd want
to ignore it in-market audiences for now, just look at affinity and these affinity tell
you why your website visitors are actually interested in.
It's crazy.
It's super cool.
Now if you don't have Google analytics installed on your website, or you went to that section
of Google analytics and you saw that message to enable demographics.
I'm sorry, you're going to have to wait a few months to get this sweet, sweet data.
But don't worry because we can go over to Facebook and get a similar picture of, who
our target customers might be.
So in Facebook, you're gonna go ahead and need to set up a ads account.
You can set one up for free, and once you're in your ads manager, you're gonna click on
your settings and you'll go to audience insights under plan.
And here all you have to do, is type in a major influencer or major competitor.
Someone who's closest to the influencer you wanna be, or closest company to who you are,
in that little interest box.
And then Facebook is going to give you all of the demographic information for that influencer
or for that company's page.
Now it's not gonna be perfect.
It's not gonna be exact, but it's better than us just pulling things out of thin air.
So go ahead and use that data to answer your first four questions.
Now, step number three in our process, is actually gonna be answering question number
five.
So, we've got the first four out of the way.
And number five is what content are they consuming?
And this is gonna be very important, in terms of crafting either your content marketing
plan, when you're doing key research, keyword research, you're doing topic research, or
you're trying to figure out what kind of creative to use for your ads.
This is gonna be very, very helpful, especially when we get into number six.
These all start to build on each other here.
And you're gonna see messaging and targeting in a little bit, but I'm getting ahead of
myself.
So here, what you want to do is, there are two sources you can go, to figure out what
content your ideal customers already consuming.
YouTube and back to Facebook.
So first off with YouTube, before we go back to Facebook audience insights, is just go
to YouTube search box and start typing in how to blank.
So whatever search your ideal customer would be looking for whatever questions they have,
whatever issues or problems they're trying to solve, just do a couple of searches and
find YouTube channels, that are servicing content to your ideal customer.
And what you want to do, is just go ahead and make sure that the channel generally is
talking to the same people.
And go ahead and look at the related channels.
This is the way that you're gonna quickly be able to dive down the YouTube rabbit hole
and find a bunch of channels, that you've never heard of, that serve your ideal customer,
your ideal prospect.
Even if you're not gonna be doing anything on YouTube, it's great to have this library
because YouTube is the second largest search engine.
So when your ideal customers are trying to figure something out related to your industry
or niche, chances are they're either gonna Google or they're gonna YouTube.
So having a list of the channels they're most likely engaged with, is gonna be very helpful
in figuring out how to better relate to your ideal customer in the future.
Now, the second place we can go is, back over to Facebook, go back into the audience insights
tool.
And again, what we're gonna want to do is, we're going to in that interest box, type
in a couple of influencers, that we know in the niche or industry, or a couple of big
companies that we know, in the niche or industry.
This time, instead of looking at the demographics, we're actually gonna go over to page likes,
and we're gonna look at the categories and we're gonna look at the pages and you're going
to want to make a nice laundry list, of all of the pages that come up, that your ideal
customer or prospect might be following, engaging with, or at least posting content, that your
ideal prospect might be following or engaging with.
So this is definitely a part of the process where you're gonna have to roll up your sleeves.
And if it takes you a few hours, that means you're doing it right.
This isn't not something that should be done in 15 minutes.
Now that does it for number three.
Number four, we're actually gonna start to try and tackle question number six.
And I say, try, because question number six, is what you're gonna be testing for as long
as you're driving traffic.
And this is something that trips a lot of people up.
So in the beginning, we talked about how we didn't want to pull answers out of thin air.
This is the only question where you're going to have to really make an educated guess.
Question number seven, once you've gone through your swipe file, which we'll get to in a little
bit here, can kind of help you with question number six.
But the reason this one is first, is we want to think about what are the results, that
your ideal customer is looking for.
And an easy way to figure this out is, what results or benefit does your product or service
provide?
So this is someone's coming to your channel.
They're coming to your website, they're coming to your Facebook page.
They're reading your sales messages.
They're opening your emails because they want something.
So what do they want?
What is the result, that they want?
And then actually part two to this question is, what is the perceived roadblock to achieving
that result?
And the reason we do part one and two is because typically in most, especially with services-based
businesses or information products, the result or want, and if you're doing e-commerce, it's
pretty clear.
That part can be pretty clear, pretty obvious.
For example, if we were making an information product around, how to be successful on YouTube,
well, typically it would be grow your channel, make money, quit your day job, some crazy
big result like that.
But that's not enough for our marketing messages.
We want to take it a step further and really get it inside our ideal customer's head, by
asking part two of number six.
And that is what is their perceived roadblock.
You see with our YouTube example, with being successful, growing a channel, making money,
quitting your nine to five, the ideal person for that, they could think that they're not
getting enough views.
They could think they don't have enough subs.
They could think that they need to rank better.
They could think that their video quality needs to be improved.
And all of those things, would contribute to the end result of having a bigger channel
and making more money.
However, when you're able to take it a step further and identify the specific roadblocks,
that your ideal customer thinks are in the way of that result, because everyone in your
niche is talking about the results.
The results aren't secret.
What our secret is, what your ideal customer or prospect isn't sharing, that their internal
psyche saying, “You can't do this because of XYZ.”
And so those XYZ things are really what we want to focus on, once we figured out what
the big results are.
And this is where your messaging is going to come in, because when you're running advertising,
or even if you're doing just content marketing, organic content, you're constantly testing
your targeting and you're testing your messaging.
So numbers one through five, were all about the targeting, figuring out how are we gonna
go find these people?
Where are these people hanging out?
And now with six and seven, we're saying, “Okay, what message is gonna connect to
our ideal customer prospect?”
We know where there are.
So how do we draw them away from, whatever they're doing now to whatever we have.
And so that's what question number six is really, really about.
Definitely takes some time.
And this is something that you're always going to be testing, as you go through building
your sales funnels and growing your business.
Now finally, question number seven, home stretch here, that is what product or service are
they already using?
What product or service are they going to or looking at to solve their problem, or to
get the big result or get through those roadblocks, that we just identified in number six.
Now it doesn't matter if you're a product, a service, brick and mortar, e-commerce.
You want to do services and products on your list.
Because in your customer's mind, they care about getting the result they want.
They don't really care if it's a product, that's gonna get them to where they want to
go, or a service that's gonna get them to where they want to go.
So sometimes this is something we see a lot of with clients, where if they’re services-based
in a business, they only look at services.
Or they’re products, they only look at products, where that puts you into a silo.
And there might be some information over here or solution over here, that you really should
be paying attention to.
Even though you don't see it as a direct competitor, your ideal customer may see them as two viable
options.
They might not care that one's a service and one's a product.
And so this is where you're gonna want at least five to six different influencers or
companies, products, or services, that you're aware of, that your ideal customer might be
currently going after.
And this is gonna help you in the future when you're building your swipe file and you're
testing your messaging, you can actually go through the marketing messages of those other
companies, of those other influencers.
And see, if they're speaking to any of the roadblocks you came up with in step number
six, while it doesn't necessarily help you validate number six, it does tell you if you're
on the right track or not.
So thank you so much for watching.
If you're still watching, you made it this far, go and hit that like button and subscribe.
Comment below, if you have any questions on crafting your ideal customer avatar, this
is something that is gonna take a lifetime to perfect, right?
This is only laying the foundation.
We're just looking at the basics.
And then we're just gonna test and test and test and test and test.
And it's a constant test between your targeting, which was the questions one through five,
figuring out, really dialing those in.
And then of course testing your messaging questions, six and seven.
So, go ahead and hit that like button and subscribe for more digital marketing tactics
and strategies, just like the ones covered in this video.
Comment below if you have any questions and as always, keep building the business you
love.