Targeting Messaging for a More Personal Customer Experience
One of the main purposes of the customer avatar is to determine what your ideal customer looks like so that you can keep that in mind when marketing to your leads, communicating with customers, and creating targeted messages.
Along with helping you connect with your clients on a deeper level, a customer profile—a fictional representation of your best customer—is also part of a lead generation strategy because it helps you identify people who would make ideal clients.
However, when you’re using your avatars to create marketing messages, you have to keep in mind the importance of personalized messaging, which is why you should always talk to a single person within your segments, rather than directing communications to a group at large.
When you talk to individuals instead of groups, your customers and prospects will feel that you truly understand their needs and values, and this will build trust, strong relationships, and long-term customers.
How to Get Ideal Customers? Talk to Them One-on-One
Nobody likes feeling like a number or another face in the crowd, and the most effective marketing messages, therefore, address customers as unique and individual people rather than broad and undefined members of a market.
Although this may seem difficult to do, it’s as simple as writing to a single person when you’re crafting your marketing messages.
When you’re writing emails or ads, write as though you were talking to an individual who’s trying to accomplish a specific goal and who’s sitting right in front of you.
For example, instead of saying “some people like to travel,” you can say “you’re a world-wise person who wants to explore the globe.”
How to Build an Ideal Customer Profile: Get to Know Your Customers Personally
In order to talk to your customers like individuals, it’s necessary to first understand them as such.
This means studying them, learning about them, and trying to put yourself in their shoes, so you know what it’s like to live a day in their lives.
The goal here is to understand your customers and understand what they’re looking for, and it might help if you give each of your avatars a photo, a name, and a backstory that can help you relate to your customers as people rather than profiles.
This can be especially important with B2B businesses because it can be easy to forget that the marketing manager you’re talking to is actually a person who has individual goals, hobbies, and interests outside of work.
Once you understand your customers on this level, you can really start communicating with them effectively.
An important tip about marketing messages:
Your customers are busy people with busy lives that involve work, family, bills, problems, and a whole host of headaches, and your product or service is minute compared to everything else they’re dealing with.
As such, the most effective messages will be humble ones that position your products or services as a simple solution to one of their problems.
Asking Questions to Gather Relevant Information
When two people meet for the first time and go on a date, they get to know each other by asking questions.
Questions are one of the most effective ways humans have of learning about one another, and you can use this to your advantage when you’re getting to know your customers.
The questions you ask should broach a broad range of topics that will help you get a bigger picture of what your customers’ lives are like, and some examples include:
- How would you describe their lifestyle?
- What do they want to accomplish?
- What’s their knowledge of your product or service (are they familiar with it at all, experts, etc.)?
- Are they familiar with competing products or services instead of yours?
- What are their motivations?
- What are their desires?
- What do they value?
- Who do they trust and respect?
- What do they need from you?
Targeting People with Individual Marketing Messages
One of the first things you need to bear in mind when talking to an individual is that his or her needs are unique and singular.
Say, for instance, that two of your customer avatars include a dentist and a pet owner.
These two people will have different wants, likes, needs, priorities, goals, and values, and you must keep these unique characteristics in mind when crafting your messages.
For example, perhaps the dentist buys coffee from your shop because it’s on the way to work, but the pet owner likes your establishment because you allow dogs on the patio.
Whereas your marketing message to the dentist might highlight things like convenience and fast service, your message to the pet owner would be about embracing four-legged family members.
Not only are the people unique, but so too is the value you can provide them.
In the end, the important point to remember is that your customer profile may be fictional, but the people represented by the Avatar are very real individuals with unique needs and problems, and your marketing messages should reflect this individuality.
Rather than communicating with large groups, you’ll find more success if you market to individual people who are represented by your segments.
Not only that, but you also have to continue asking yourself who are you marketing to and are the messages resonating with their lives.
If you can successfully segment your customers based on unique characteristics, strive to understand their individual needs and values, and then craft messages that communicate with them on a personal level, then you will have succeeded in learning not only how to create customer avatars, but also how to use it effectively to generate leads for less.
Download your ideal customer profile worksheet now to get started with avatars for your best customers.
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