How to visualize your Ideal Customer
The key point in a successful campaign is to know your ideal customer, or, from another perspective, who do you want your ideal customer to be. After all, the way you present your product (by ad campaigns) is what will cause some to convert and some not.
“You don’t just accept who you find — you choose who to attract.” — Brian Clark
So, to create a practical content marketing strategy, the first step would be to determine your “Who” or, as called by marketers, Avatar.
An Avatar is a fictional depiction of your ideal customer that you are working to convert. Now, to convert this Avatar you need to know his values and offer those values.
Your Core Values
When you are creating a campaign to promote a product, your main goal should be to conduct your values. Your value can be a green environment, saving money, simplicity, and even good ingredients, but remember that it is your values that attract customers.
Take the “Get a Mac” series of commercials for example. Apple was able to well reflect its values — creativity, simplicity, positive difference — in those ad campaigns. These values were that won customers for Apple, not Mac’s technical specifications.
While some products can easily define a set of core values, it doesn’t work for all businesses. For example, an ice cream company can’t have values like the fight against climate change, or a green environment. In fact, it doesn’t need to be all sunshine and rainbows. The ice cream company value can fall in line with a “Greed is good” mentality. It will work for some!
What does your Avatar look like?
Your Avatar (also called persona or character) is a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. Your goal is to win this Avatar with your content, but how?
Your content needs to be powerful enough to position your brand as a guide that helps the Avatar complete the journey of buying your product. You need to understand how your Avatar thinks, feels, sees, and engages with your content.
And don’t forget about impressing your Avatar with your shared core values. These core values let you stand out from a sea of other choices, they work like some magical attraction spells.
“Instead of hiding your world views in the hope of never offending anyone, you now realize the power of being loud and proud — and attracting like-minded people who see you as the only reasonable choice.” — Brian Clark
It is always a good idea to remember or refer back to your core values so that you never lose sight of who you’re talking to, what you should say, and why you should say it.
Now, let’s see how you can contemplate the actual use of your Avatar in your content to get things just right.
You are not your audience
It is a tricky situation. You are searching for those who share the same values as you, and in doing so, you may conclude that your ideal customer is like you. While you may have some common values, it is dangerous to think you are similar to your ideal customer in all ways.
You’re a subject matter expert at what you do, for starters, and they (customers) are not. — Brian Clark
You also need to be cautious about the curse of knowledge (to assume your customers have the background and knowledge you have). Even if you are somehow sure that your customers share many core values with you, again you should not skep things.
Think of your customers as newbies who don’t have any idea about what you are doing. Try to be clear and knowledgeable. Make the process of learning easy and fast. Keep in mind, if you think your customers have the background to understand your product or service the way you do, this alone can disappear all your efforts and cause zero results.
In other words, to create content that can coach your customers all the way through the journey, first you need to walk a mile in their shoes, and see things from their perspective.
The way your marketing can trigger the right motivation at the right time is to first enter a customer’s brain where you will have to convince its logic. Then, by sharing values, you will enter your customer’s heart and that would be it.
This process is called empathy mapping, and your goal is to answer:
“Our ideal customer needs a better way to ____ BECAUSE of ____.”
Now, describe your Avatar in depth
You now know your core values, how does your Avatar looks like, and not to assume your customer has the background you have. So, start describing your Avatar. You can do it in a couple of paragraphs or perhaps a page. You, however, being the smart person that you are, want to take it as far as it goes by writing a whole novel about your Avatar.
The novel you are going to make is a detailed description of your ideal customer which contains everything about him/her like personality, problems, desires, and maybe even geography. It may need a lot of work, but you’ll be happy you did it once you start working on your marketing strategy.
