You may be like me, in that the first time you heard the word avatar, all you could think of was James Cameron’s film of the same name with lots of blue CGI figures. It made no sense to me at all that the speaker had suddenly switched to Hollywood.
Well how wrong could I be?
Understanding your avatar, is a critical step towards you developing a good side income. One that you need to be completely comfortable with.
In Short
Your avatar is your perfect customer.
“Blimey” you say. You already know your perfect customer. It’s anybody who buys your product or service. In fact, you say, why let yourself be typecast when there is the whole world out there. You intend selling to a loads of different people, be they young or old, men or women and certainly you don’t want to be constrained to tight geographical areas.
Hopefully you will sell to everybody, but everybody is not your avatar, and until you identify them you will risk wasting any marketing money you spend.
Even if you are selling to the whole world, there will be some who are more likely to buy. A number of those may take very little persuasion to become a customer. These are your low hanging fruit and it is towards them that you should first direct your marketing. From a financial point of view, they will require the smallest spend to attract and will be the biggest bang for your buck.
So, your avatar is the person who has the closest fit to your product, the person who is most likely to buy it. When you understand and can define them then you can target your marketing precisley towards them.
So how do I do it?
When you are able to unlock your avatar you will be able to:
- Tailor the language used;
- Use images and phrases which resonate with them;
- Market in the places they will see your message;
- Market only when they are likely to see your advert.
So, STEP 1, sit yourself down with a pen and paper and define your avatar.
They are a person and will be:
- Male or female;
- A certain age;
- Be married, in a relationship or single;
- Have some/no dependents;
- Live in a town, a city, or the countryside;
- Have a certain type of job;
- Have a level of earnings;
- Be interested in certain things;
- Drive a certain car, use a bike or public transport;
- Take a certain number of holidays a year.
Write all of this down on a piece of paper. Bring them to life and give your avatar a name. You could even type some of those parameters into Google and choose one of the images it suggest. Save that image and stick it your paper to remind you of who they are.
Why all this effort?
Committing yourself to write down your avatar in such detail is important.
It may be like me, you think you know exactly who you’re directing your services towards. You might believe that the detail is already seared into your brain, but the evidence is that it never is. That means that when you come to market you will lack the discipline to build the message which hits home.
This same discipline is now used by political parties when they push their messages out to you. They may have a small handful of key messages but they are delivered in many different ways so that they hit home. You are in fact someone else’s avatar.
Step 2
Target your marketing towards your avatar. Measure the results, refine the message, and make sales.
Hint: Having a clear avatar enables you to identify who else is targeting your market. That means you can look at their advertising. How have they built their message? What colours, designs, images, platforms and words work? It’s now all there for you to model.
Step 3
Repeat the whole process for other low hanging fruit. Remember each piece of fruit is a different avatar.
You may, therefore, end up with a number of different avatars which is great. That means that when you build any marketing you will always be focussing it towards the messages, images and colours which will be most effective. You will be minimising any potential waste on marketing spending and see real bang for what you have committed.
