Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 21

Creating a Customer Avatar
Because the role of your marketing is to move people through a series of stages from cold
prospects to rabid fans and promoters, you must first attain clarity on the characteristics of
your ideal customers. You want to get clear on their goals, the challenges they face
meeting those goals, and where they spend time consuming information and entertainment.
Creating a customer avatar will give you this clarity. Other terms for customer avatar are
buyer persona, marketing persona, and target audience, but customer avatar is the term we
use throughout this book.
A customer avatar is the fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer.
Realistically, unless your product or service fits within a narrow niche, you will have
multiple customer avatars for each campaign. People are so much more than their age,
gender, ethnicity, religious background, profession, and so on. People don’t fit neatly into
boxes, which is why broad, generic marketing campaigns generally don’t convert well;
they don’t resonate with your audience. It is absolutely crucial that you understand and
make your customer avatar as specific as possible so that you can craft personalized
content, offers, and marketing campaigns that interest members of your audience or solve
their problems. In fact, the exercise of creating a customer avatar impacts virtually every
aspect of your marketing, including:
Content marketing: What blog posts, videos, podcasts, and so on should you create to
attract and convert your avatar?
Search marketing: What solutions is your avatar searching for on search engines like
Google, YouTube (yes, YouTube is a search engine), and Bing?
Social media marketing: What social media sites is your avatar spending time on?
What topics does your avatar like to discuss?
Email marketing: Which avatar should receive a specific email marketing campaign?
Paid traffic: Which ad platforms should you buy traffic from and how will you target
your avatar?
Product creation: What problems is your avatar trying to solve?
Copywriting: How should you describe offers in your email marketing, ads, and sales
letters in a way that compels your avatar to buy?
Any part of the marketing and sales process that touches the customer (which is pretty
much everything) improves when you get clear on your customer avatar. After all, you’re
aiming toward a real person — one who buys your products and services. It pays to get
clear on the characteristics of that person so that you can find and present him or her with a
message that moves this person to action.
What to include in your customer avatar