The single most important thing a business can do on its own to improve their social media effectiveness is to develop a “customer avatar.”
A customer avatar is a fictional character that represents the ideal customer prospect. It helps a business clarify the way real customers think. A customer avatar goes to the heart of the emotional and psychological factors that affect a business relationship, such as discovering a customer’s deepest values, beliefs, fears and desires. Ultimately, these are the factors that influence whether a customer will do business with you—or not.
Detail is Essential
Create your customer avatar with as much detail as possible, like characters in a book. The more vivid you make your avatar, the more valuable they will be for your business. With the right avatar, you can answer at least 80% or more of the day-to-day marketing questions that pop up during the course of business, such as “Where should I advertise?” “Am I reaching the right group of people?” “What do I need my customers to know about me?” “Will this effort be worth my time?”
Start with the Basics
Is your ideal customer male or female? Old or young? What is their name? Where did they grow up? Are they married? Do they have children? If so, how many? Once you get the basics nailed down, you can start to go deeper.
Begin with the problems or pain your ideal customer has that you can help them with. Ask yourself, “what would keep this person awake at night?” “What frustrations might they be running into over and over again?” “What’s the absolute worst, possible thing that could ever happen to them if they don’t get this problem solved?” This last question is one of the most important because it points to the full range of emotional issues that can potentially surround a purchase decision, which is a fundamental element of the marketing process. When you begin doing this exercise you will discover other deep, motivating behaviors that are affecting your customer’s relationship with you, probably without you even realizing it.
Go Deeper
Now think about your customer’s friends, family and colleagues. What might they be saying about your customer if they knew they were having problems? What type of advice would they give? What might your customer be secretly afraid of if their problem isn’t solved, or gets worse? What could be the worst thing that could happen? How would that make your customer feel? Would there be serious financial or social ramifications?
Now imagine the best case scenario. How can your product or service help your customer? What would your customer think the ideal “dream situation” would look like? Would they want personalized support? Some sort of subscription or member service? Free pick-up or delivery? The value and peace-of-mind you provide is often much greater than you think. Consider the hidden social and emotional benefits your product or service could provide. This is called “unwrapping the value.”
Create a Story
The final step is to create a brief story that pulls it all together. Here’s a short example to give you an idea:
Jim, 52, is a successful business owner in Kona. He was born in Honolulu, graduated from Honokaa High School. Jim has bought and sold many businesses over the years and now runs a liquor store in Waimea and retail outlet in Uilani Plaza. Jim also works part-time at the Waimea golf club and likes to go fishing on Sundays. Jim is married and has two children, Joshua, age 25 and Mikela age 19.
Jim knows he could be attracting more businesses with online media, but doesn’t know exactly how. He doesn’t have time to learn new technology, and frankly, he doesn’t have an interest in it. But during Christmas his daughter Mikela showed him how she uses her mobile phone to get reviews on restaurants and recommendations for new places to shop. Mikela suggested Jim “claim” his store on popular travel sites and use a QR code to attract more business to his retail store. Jim had no idea what she was talking about.
Jim needs to be educated about how to use mobile marketing to attract more customers into his retail store without spending a lot of money. Jim’s ideal solution will build off the Web site he already has and won’t take a lot of time to manage. Jim would like to talk to someone about ways he can leverage new technology.
Developing a customer avatar can lead to dramatic transformation in your business. It helps explain why some products sell better than others, and exposes important gaps or conflicting messages that you might otherwise have missed.
You’ll also be able to answer many of the daily marketing questions that pop up with confidence. Questions that all marketers ask themselves, such as, “Does this promotion make sense?” or “Are the right messages getting through to the right people?”
Follow these steps to develop your ideal customer avatar today:
1. Think about your ideal customer. If you sell to businesses, include what industry they are in, how many employees they have, etc. If you sell to consumers, include demographic information such as age, education, household income, profession, ethnic background and where they live.
3. Now, list at least three problems or “pain points” this character is having that would make them an ideal customer for your business.
4. Go Deep: What secret fears is this ideal prospect having? What keeps them up at night? What do they really want? What would their “perfect solution” look like? What would they be willing to pay almost anything for? In what ways can your product or service offering match up with those needs and desires?
Review your customer avatars on a regular basis to make sure that your marketing efforts are directed to their needs and desires.
An effective positioning statement includes four things:
1) Your customers
2) The problem you’re going to solve
3) Why you’re different
4) Your competition
A positioning statement is for internal use only. It is not a “mission statement,” a “tag line,” an “elevator pitch” or anything for selling purposes. Those materials require language intended for external audiences. This is for internal audiences only.
A positioning statement is used to provide guidance during a marketing campaign. Every company and every product will have its own positioning statement. It ensures everyone is working from the same page and toward the same goals.
A positioning statement must be credible. It is not hopeful thinking; it is grounded in truth.
Define Your Customer
Your ideal customer is the person who you can help best, and in return, will receive maximum benefit from your products or services. Who are you trying to serve with your business?
Define What Your Customer Wants or Needs
People will pay a fortune to solve an immediate problem, but will hardly invest a dollar to prevent a problem from happening. What is the urgent desire or pain point that your ideal customer is experiencing right now that you can make better immediately. What is the compelling reason that customers buy from you?
Define Your Product Category
Be clear about who you are—and who you are not. If you don’t, your customers will decide for you, and it may work against you!
Remember, the human mind will categorize things. Your customers will label you in their minds, and they can only remember one thing about you at a time.
Tell your customers how you want to be remembered. Make it something familiar and easy to remember. Otherwise they will reject your label and come up with their own substitution. Be strategic and simple.
Define Your Key Benefit
Make sure your key benefit addresses the true needs and desires of your target customer. Look beyond the obvious. What secret hopes, dreams, fears or frustrations are your customers really dealing with?
Define Your Competition
Who do your customers think of when they think about your product or service category? Who do you lose the most sales to? This might be a single entity, or an industry. If you’re a local provider, you might need to distinguish yourself from larger, more well-known brands. Be specific.
What Makes You Different?
Tell your customers what sets you apart, and make sure that reason resonates with the reasons they need or want your product or service.
Now, tie it all together. Finalize your positioning statement. Sit on it for a couple of days, then look at it again. Are you being clear about who your customers really are? Are you able to succinctly define your key benefit? Does the value you provide align to the needs and desires of your customers? Are you able to explain what makes you different from the competition.
Download my Product Positioning worksheet to help you through this process. Or, leave a comment below with your questions or suggestions.
If you found this article useful, please click on the buttons below to share it with others.
Depending on your business, your customers probably aren’t hearing from you as often as they need to.
That’s because for most people, “out of sight is out of mind.” So remind customers about the value you bring to their lives on a regular basis.
You wouldn’t go more than two weeks without talking to your good friend, so why go several weeks without talking to your best customers?
Here are some more tips for what’s working best in e-mail marketing right now:
Frequency:
Send some type of communication every 10 to 14 days, as long as it makes sense for your business. If you sell mattresses, furniture or cars, monthly or quarterly communication will make more sense.
Remember, it’s not just your customers that you’re communicating to, but also their family and friends. So even if someone just bought a car from you it still makes sense to stay in touch, because soon that person will be talking about their purchase with their friends and colleagues.
Most businesses send their newsletters out monthly, but research shows you’ll get better results if your prospects hear from you more often. But be realistic about what you can sustain over time. You can brainstorm a list of topics to write about based on the content needs of your customers. Just remember, shorter is better. If you are feeling overwhelmed with information, then your customers are too!
Content:
The ideal mix is a blend of educational and branding content mixed in with a promotion to support sales (coupons, giveaways, sweepstakes, etc.). Your educational and branding information should outweigh promotional content by a ratio of 8:2 or 9:1.
Remember to include information about your upcoming events. Your ultimate goal is to inform and entertain (and in most cases people want to be entertained more than they want to be informed!) You can also include surveys or encourage customers to submit questions that you’ll answer in a future newsletter.
If you’re struggling for ideas about what to write about, keep a list of questions that many customers ask you about on a regular basis. Ask your staff about the most common topics customers ask about, or keep a manila folder nearby to drop ideas into when they come up during the day. If they have an interesting conversation, that could be a topic for the newsletter. Listen to your customers for ideas. You can also look in online forums and online discussion rooms about topics relating to your industry. LinkedIn Answers is a great resource for finding industry topics that people are talking about.
Tone:
It’s okay to write your newsletter like a personal e-mail. Remember, value is not just useful content. People get value from being able to connect to other people on a personal and meaningful level. Especially in this technology age. People enjoy stories. Real value comes from learning who you and your company are as people. The personal connection becomes the most important element of “value”.
E-mail is a personal, one-to-one communications channel. Most newsletters focus too much on providing “value” but forget to add in the personal aspect. Make the personal aspect part of your unique brand.
Format:
The trend these days is away from long newsletters and toward shorter, more frequent blog posts. Are you suffering from information overload? Well, your customers are too! Instead of sending out monthly or quarterly newsletters with 1,500 words or more, consider if you could chunk your content down into shorter, more frequent e-mails instead. Or better yet, consider if your “newsletter” could be a short personal update with link to your latest blog article.
Graphics:
It’s good to have at least one picture to capture and draw interest in your content, just make sure your logo doesn’t dominate the entire e-mail preview pane window. Make sure your text at the top of your newsletter includes the name of your business and the first few lines of your content so that recipients can see your most valuable information first.
Text-only format works extremely well, too, and has been found to be the most compatible across all e-mail platforms.
“From” and “Subject” Line Fields:
The first two questions people ask themselves when they get any e-mail is: 1) Do I know this person? and 2) Do I care? Make sure your “from” and subject line fields answer both questions convincingly.
Use your real name and company name in your from line, as in, “Dr. Charles Kaempen, KUSA Industries.” Then, grab attention and tell your customers what the value will be in opening your message. “How to save 40% or more on your next installation.”
For more information about successful newsletter design, check out these resources:
In this two-minute video I quickly go over your Facebook privacy settings.
Your privacy settings on Facebook are becoming increasingly important because Google now indexes all Facebook pages. If your privacy settings aren’t set to the way that you want them, you may be sharing information about yourself on the Web without realizing it.
Access your privacy settings from the top menu bar to the right of your name. Review the settings and make sure they are set up the way you want them to be.
You have the power to decide who receives your contact and other personally identifiable information. Depending on your settings, your information may only be visible to your frinds–or if you choose–your information may be shared with “friends of friends” or even to everyone doing a Web search.
If you’re representing an online business, you may want to have your contact information display in a Google search. But if you want to keep your information private, be sure to opt-out of sharing your information. And be selective about who you accept as a Friend into your Facebook network.
Remember, “Friends-of-Friends” includes people you don’t directly know.
The bottom line is that you have the power to control how third-party applications work with your Facebook content. You have the power to decide who has access to your information and how they are allowed to use it. If you are not comfortable having your information go outside of Facebook, then deny access to all third-party applications. Or better yet, delete your Facebook account! :)
From a marketing perspective, the personal information is what makes Facebook so powerful. By using personally identifiable information, marketers are tailoring and customizing content to their customers in ways no other marketing platform can. The ability to match a specific message to members of a particular page, residents of a targeted area, or participants in a particular group is such an incredibly powerful tool that most marketers haven’t even begun to use its full power.
Examples of information you may be revealing to advertisers includes your birthday, political views, religious affiliations, photos and videos that have you featured in them, places you may have visited and so forth. I show you how to customize these settings in the privacy center. You can choose to share some of this information or none of it at all. And remember, you can always delete your Facebook account if all of this makes you uncomfortable.
Take the time to review your privacy settings to make sure that you understand what information is being shared about you and how. It’ll be worth your time in gold.
If you have any questions, or need additional help, leave a comment below and I will try to assist you.
Consider the number of people who are in your target demographic.
Look at the stores and brands and rank how relevant those brands are to yours. Do a large number of your customers shop at those stores? Small fraction? If your sign had an exceptionally compelling offer on it, how many of those 20,000 would “buy”? Is your business located nearby, and therefore convenient?
The value is a combination of how effective your sign is and the overall lifetime value of any customers that you may get as a part of a direct outcome of that sign.
Signage works best as part of an overall branding campaign
Will you be running any complimentary advertising while the sign is up? Direct mail to any of the customers that may see the sign? Do any customers of that center subscribe to your newsletter? A sign is most effective when part of an overall campaign, so that the sign become a reminder that they also saw your TV ad, or heard your radio spot, or just got an e-mail from you, and they’ve been meaningn to call you (or vote for you), but haven’t yet, and now they can because your number is on the sign (or they remembered its voting day).
Let’s Do an Example
Let’s presume you just want to estimate the value of one sign in a busy shopping center. So in that case, let’s also presume it’s going to be a great sign with a specific call to action on it. Like a phone number with instructions to call.
Budget about 1-2% “conversion” rate or more, depending on your unique area, market and industry.
For a shopping center with 20,000 people a day, assume that 200-400 people will be interested in your sign, and will want to take the next step.
Then consider how much a customer is worth. If 200 people are going into your sales funnel, and a small fraction of them end up buying a $20,000 product, that’s great value! But if your product sells for $10, then you’ll need more exposure to break even.
Finally, consider the cost of your sign.
Divide the cost of the sign by 200 (conservative) or 400 (optimistic) and see if the numbers make sense. How much are you willing to pay for each shopping center lead? $2? $14? $50?
Compare the cost of the sign, to what a lead from the shopping center is worth, and compare the effectiveness to other branding and marketing choices you may have.
Marketers have more choices than ever. You may find alternatives, such as inbound marketing, or spending one day at the shopping center talking to people and handing out coupons, may have a better value for your business.
