My DNA Experiment - Blending Mental Toughness And Massive Action Into Life And Business
In Part One of this two part series on the importance of having an imaginary friend, I discussed a few points on why it is important to develop a customer avatar to help guide you in your online (or even offline) efforts.
The information was a fairly decent review, but the post itself did not cover one fundamental aspect:
How do you start?
Once again I feel compelled to make a disclaimer. I am by no means an expert. I am merely giving you my notes as a way to reinforce my learning and maybe in the process, make your life a little bit easier.
Without wasting any time, let’s dive right into something that may or may not be remotely useful.
Discovering the Baseline Demographics
Well first we need to start out with what is already known about your target audience. That means finding out what the baseline demographics are of your intended marketing niche.
Demographics are probably what you think they are—factors such as average age, where a person lives on this big ball floating through space, how much they may earn, gender, etc.
There are websites out there such as compete.com and Quantcast.com that can give you a start on locating some good demographic information.
Quantcast is very popular and highly recommended by everyone, as with Alexa and Compete, but all three can give you different bits of information at times. One of the frustrating things is that at different times the sites will give you different numbers for the same subject, but if you draw the numbers from all three you should be able to discover enough to help develop a baseline for measurement.
On a related note, one of the coolest things you can use these sites for is to look at your competitors to see what they are doing.
From there you can keep track of what they are doing and implement the ideas that appear to have staying power.
This sounds a lot weirder than it really is.
At first, it sounded a little bit unethical to me, so I was hesitant to do it.
Finally I decided that if I could just learn from my competitor’s successes and failures than I would be better off for it.
It will help leverage your efforts and stop wasting your time.
Six Great Websites to Determine Demographic Information
To get you started, here are a Six Great Websites for determining customer demographic information:
1. Compete.com: Compete will show you your target sites unique visitor totals, site rank, and it will give a description of the site. The last time I looked at the site most of the free information it used to give out is now only included in the paid portion. If you can afford the $499/ month, I have read that it is a great deal. I’m not really to that level yet, but I have included it for your awareness.
2. Alexa.com: Alexa is a great tool for finding some great free information. If you were to go to the homepage and search for a known competitor one of the first lists that you will see will be similar websites to the competitor you are looking at. You can inspect these in turn to compile a fairly thorough list of potential competition. Other useful tidbits include how well the website ranks, how many ads pointing to the website are running at any given time, the top search terms pointing to the site, and some very useful demographic information.
3. Quantcast.com: One of the better sites to find out the demographic information on your target audience. The unpaid portion of the site will give you more than enough information to get a great baseline or to further validate what you already have.
4. Google Insights: Great tool for figuring out what additional sites/ topics people are searching for, what is trending hot and what areas in the world your product/ services may be in higher demand.
5. Google Media Planner: If your competitors use Pay-Per-Click Advertising then the Google Media Planner will be one of the best sites you can use to help match your target demographics with related websites. Once you plug in the information you can see which websites are the most popular with your crowd (I plan on writing on this very soon. It is very cool if you have not played around with it before.)
6. Claritas.com: If you are doing some highly targeted marketing in the United States, Claritas is great for finding demographic information by zip code. Once you determine the area you want to target, Claritas has a Segment Explorer that will help you further breakdown the demographics of the target area using the PRIZM system. Once you pair it with Google Insights it can turn into a very useful tool.
Starting to Flesh It All Out
Based off of some of the main demographic websites, you now have enough to start fleshing out the foundation of your avatar.
I would start by just listing out the known factors that you want to start out with. For example, you might find out from your research that your target audience is looking like they are Caucasian males in the 45-54 year old age bracket, have a college education, are married and have some kids. They make between 100-150K per year and have additional interests in conservative politics and sports.
What does this mean?
It means that if you are currently tailoring your marketing messages to appeal to 20 year old Caucasian females that are still in college and have little discretionary income, you might not make very much progress.
Remember though, determining your ideal customer is much more than just demographics.
As Yaro Starak said:
“It’s important whenever you are considering any aspect of your customers that you look to them as people. This is not about raw demographics like age, weight, height or income bracket. This is about understanding that a new mother feels unattractive because she is overweight for the first time in her life, or the dad that is lacking self worth because he can’t afford to feed his family organic food. It’s about understanding the situation and the raw emotional response to the situation.”
It is not enough to know the basic demographics, wants and needs of your ideal customer—you have to dig down a couple of layers to find out how they choose to live their life, who they choose to hang out with, what their world view is and what are the one or two things that truly motivate them to take action.
Are they motivated by achievement and gaining pleasure of some sort?
Or are they motivated to not experience pain?
You must take into account the emotional makeup of the target avatar and tailor your messages around its deepest, darkest emotional needs.
To aid you in the search, I have gathered nine very useful questions from around the web or my book shelf. Most of these questions should not be a surprise if you have looked into this topic before. (A few of the questions are from Dan Kennedy’s awesome book, The Ultimate Marketing Plan. If you do not already own it, I highly suggest it. Most of the questions are pulled from around the internet. I am writing these from notes, so I apologize for not giving full attribution.)
Nine Useful Questions for Determining Emotional Needs
- What are the biggest frustrations experienced by your ideal customer?
- What is the biggest problem your ideal customer that you can solve?
- What makes him/ her most angry about the subject?
- What do they secretly fantasize about?
- What are the common language patterns, stories and rationalizations (excuses) that the customer uses to explain his/ her problem?
- What fears keep them up at night?
- Are the fears real or imagined fantasies?
- Why would they seek out a solution to their problem?
- What ideal result(s) would they want should their problem be solved?
Where to Find the Answers
There are some great free resources out there for you to look for the answers to these questions.
First, look into the niche specific forums for the normal problems that people are experiencing. You are guaranteed to find more answers than you can handle.
If you have a mailing list, send out a survey to your present customers asking them what issues they are facing. Make sure you include some sort of ethical bribe to get them to take action.
A great place to look is the Amazon best seller list. Find all the best sellers in your chosen niche and take note of all the issues people may or may not have had in the product reviews.
Sometimes you will hit the jack pot and notice multiple objections to buying a product, quickly followed by an answer to those specific objections.
The answers are out there if you just take the time to look.
As you start collecting your research, start trying to put a storyline to your imaginary friend using the information you have discovered.
As an example, let’s take another look at our 45-54 year old Caucasian male. Let’s say from our research into the forums, the Amazon.com best seller reviews and from talking to our customer base that the average prospect is a former athlete that is currently between 25-35 pounds overweight. He does not have the energy of his younger days and has constant lower back pain.
He is frustrated because every time he plays a sport, from golf to basketball with his teenage children, he gets tired too quickly. Although he publicly states that he does not care what people might think, he privately is ashamed to take off his shirt in public. To make matters worse, his last medical checkup stated that unless he changes his eating habits he will have a high chance of heart disease. He secretly fantasizes about getting back into awesome shape so he can kick his friends butts in golf.
His ideal solution would be to find an easy to understand workout program and eating plan that he can work into his busy schedule without sacrificing too much of his lifestyle. He absolutely hates the word “diet”.
Keep in mind when you are building your avatar is that they will have specific problems. Your job is to clearly define the problem and then eventually try to offer the ideal prospect a great, hard to ignore solution.
For every problem you discover, you should try to offer a great benefit that addresses the problem.
It might be a good time to note though that it probably is not a good idea to offer solutions to problems that you can’t immediately validate with some sort of proof. If you back it up with some proof, then you should be good.
That is something we will have to discuss in a future post.
One idea that you might want to pursue is having multiple customer avatars. Even in a tight niche you can further segment your target audience by dividing them up into their own individual sections.
Each one can be developed with its own set of questions, issues and language that you can be on the look-out for.
For example:
You can create an avatar to describe in detail the type of person you do not want to sell to. Knowing this might help you set needed boundaries that you should not cross when developing your marketing messages.
You can create a customer avatar to describe what step the customer is in a particular buying cycle. For instance, one description might have a person who is just “Kicking tires” while another one might describe a person ready to sign up today.
Once you finish with your first draft of the customer avatar, even if you are not really happy with it, don’t worry too much.
You can look to other sources to continue to refine your avatar.
Remember, if your imaginary friend sucks you can kill it and build a new and improved friend. You now have the technology.
Once you get started, you will soon see just how valuable the process is.
You will begin to leverage your time and become more effective in your approach.
Tell me what you think…
Getting In Touch With Your Imaginary Friend: The Importance Of A Customer Avatar, Part Two is a post from: My DNA Experiment