The concept of Customer Avatar
I welcome you back if you read my first post in this Digital Marketing Internship series!
If you haven’t don’t worry. Read it here.
Now let’s get going.
A little bit of soul searching…
We had the second session of the course; Deepak shared the concept of customer avatar. Immediately, a wave flew through my brain. I owned a restaurant. One of the major challenges I faced with my marketing was defining the right audience. If only I had met a buyer persona expert at the time!
Anyway, enough sulking. I think this is program is working!
I am getting all the answers I needed. I may not even have known the questions to the answers I know now. How about that?
Gathering some thoughts…
Let’s revisit the importance of good communication in marketing.
In my last post, I discussed that Marketing is about good conversations. And that the marketer needs to be able to communicate to the audience in the best possible manner.
Now, do you think that the rules of conversing 1:1 and 1:many are different?
Do you think one is easier than the other?
Or do you feel it depends on who you are conversing with or who you are addressing?
Well, we shall discuss all that here today.
Excited? Great!
Here goes…
Getting to the point…
First of all, it’s always a better conversation when you are directly talking to someone and the recipient is able to relate to it because they feel the same way – that they are being addressed directly.
The real skill, however, is being able to do that even while addressing a group. That’s what we are discussing today. It needs practice, but it can be done. How?
To understand this concept better, let’s think only about written communication for now. You can apply the principle across all other types of communication then.
There are several aspects to having a proper conversation:
- The content
- How you are communicating
- Who are you communicating with – Who is your audience?
But like we now know:
“If everyone is your audience, then no one is your audience.”
Hence you first need to find your target audience. Your Right Customer!
So, how to define your target customer?
How to know the Demographics (Age, location, etc.) and
Psycho-graphics (Interest Levels, what they like, fear/don’t like, etc.)?
Here’s the process:
- Define your niche.
- Talk to the people directly in that niche and get to know your audience through interactions, calls, surveys. Try to know the challenges these people are having
- Figure out the exact persona/audience you have;
- Crystallize it to a customer avatar; Boil it down to a single person, who you will speak/write to.
The next question is obvious. How to do this?
Let’s do an exercise together…
Here’s a survey to help you understand this. Take this survey now and then read on further!
The survey you filled was an example of my attempt to getting to know the right audience to target for a marketing campaign related to investments and personal finance planning.
Now, revisiting the process above:
– The niche is “investments and personal finance planning”
– Other than this post, I ran the survey on facebook, twitter, whatsapp groups. Also, I requested people already working in the industry to run it for me and so on to know the audience better
– Here’s how some of the psycho-graphic results look:
– Hence, the customer avatar for me to focus on for this marketing campaign would be like:
“A Male, 25-34 yrs old, who is Married and has 1 child but No Pets. He is a graduate working & living in the Chandigarh Area and does not Smoke. He uses an Android phone and communicates mostly by WhatsApp.
He owns a Car, loves to Travel and goes on a vacation atleast Once a year with family. He has a credit card but no major debt and does Not own his house, is careful with money & is capable of saving 1-2 lakhs p.a.
He earns around 6-10 lakhs p.a. and has a fixed expenses of around 35k per month and wants to retire comfortably when he is 55-60 years of age.
He is a beginner as an investor and is open to getting financial advice. He is equally inclined towards Fixed Deposits and Mutual Funds & is willing to take 5-10% risk of losing investment value to get good returns in the end.”
-How would this help?
It will help me:
– To write to a single customer at a time.
– Understand the customer better and write content which would speak directly to the target customer.
– Think how to serve the target customer better.
– How to provide more value?
– How to create/provide a product for them by knowing them better.
The entire purpose of marketing is to understand your customer so well that the product/service you create exactly fits the customer.
Refine it further…
FOCUS ON THE CENTER, NOT ON THE BORDER
From the results above, you would notice that while we are focusing on the majority here, there were a lot of people who we are missing on.
So, as you move away from the center, it will dilute and it’s ok.
Write for your direct customer avatar since the largest audience is going to be closer to the center.
What’s the center?
Once you have the results of this questionnaire. You can formulate another survey based on these results to find profiles which match your target audience.
This way you, would be able to define a LIVE person who can be your customer avatar. You will then be able to focus on that Live profile to write your content and focus your communication to the right kind of target audience.
Everyone who is similar to this person will feel as if you are talking directly to them.
Now, initially the accuracy of the customer avatar would not be perfect, but you can improve the accuracy as you go along. However, you always need to start with a customer avatar.
This would make the marketing process very easy and will make the conversation very fluent.
Since we are talking about direct conversation with a large audience, let’s also understand that an Email/Message/Blog Post like this one, is more private more personalized than Social Media posts. You just don’t scroll through these, like feed on your social media page.
- Right now, when you are reading this, you are alone with your device. Its still a 1:1 communication.
- People already have a conversation going on in their minds, through their own personal thoughts, ambitions and inhibitions. Join that conversation rather than starting a new one.
Example: You are reading this article because you also wanted to know more about this exercise of targeting the right customers.
That’s it!
Go on and try this for yourself. And let me know what you think of this article in the comments below. Remember to follow me to learn further as I do 😊
You can download the sample questionnaire I used above here and the one Deepak used during the session here.
And now some philosophy shared by Deepak during the session, if you are interested…
- Distraction is more harmful to the brain than drugs.
Humans are not really built for multitasking. - Awkwardness if an indicator of learning
Learning only happens outside of your comfort zone. - Mistakes are future benefits…the value of which is yet to be realized
- Golden Triangle Principle:
Learn > Do > Teach
Because when you teach, you understand things in a better way.
You approach the same concept from multiple angles in an effort to explain it to beneficiary properly. - Be Authentic to communicate better
Social pressure nowadays has forced people to adopt several fake personas. We see people posting their best moments on social media and everybody is now getting tired of it.
People now are staring to like those who are more authentic, who are not afraid of sharing their real moments and not just the best ones.
Being real will have its price. Some people won’t like the way you are and they will leave but others will stay. And that is ok. - Each part of what you write is like a chain of events. Every sentence should lead on to the next and make sense. The job of each sentence is to get the reader to read the next sentence.
- Better marketers are people with more life experiences. The more people you meet and talk to, the more ideas will occur to you from the conversations you have with them. While you travel more and explore other cultures, you will see new angles. Learning New languages will help you express better even in your own language. Basically, try to do new things all the time and you will be able to share those experiences and use that knowledge and experience to be a better marketer.
Suggested Reads in this session:
Digital Marketing Internship Course 