Customer Avatar Exercise

It is natural to run out of ideas for content for your social media, blogging and email content strategies. But, even after many many years of working with clients – my answer to your creative block is to relook at your customer avatar(s).

How well do you know who you are trying to reach by telling your business story?

This is a structured way to really flesh out and get to know your target audiences (customer avatar) as well as possible. This is what we use when working with clients and honestly, it’s the magic wand you have been looking for.

Old school marketing people will remember the concept of ‘personas’. Gartner provides a definition of a Persona as:

…a fictional character created as a proxy for a target audience. These audience archetypes commonly include illustrative pictures and fictional names that make them tangible to digital designers and marketers. Personas identify similar patterns of behaviour that result in commonly held goals.

Wow, that’s a posh explanation! For me, it’s more personal than that. I teach my clients to think of these target audiences in terms that are little more real and practical.

For small businesses, in general, they have a much closer relationship to their customers than larger corporations do. This puts them ahead of the game in doing this exercise. By being able to almost visualise the avatar down to personality traits and wants/needs – this helps create the kind of content that will attract exactly the right customer.

Dump the generalisms, embrace personality

Does this sound familiar: “My customers are people between 18 and 50, who have money to spend.” (Or something of that ilk). In other words…EVERYONE wants what I have to sell.

Once you actually sit down and focus on that ideal customer – it becomes very interesting and you start to notice the nuances between the DIFFERENT ideal customers you have. AND…you start to realise why your ‘spray and pray’ philosophy to date – has not worked with your digital communications strategy.

The more you can hone your message towards specific ideal customers…the better interaction and therefore longer term conversion (and retention) rates you will achieve.

Check your idea of ideal…over time

Once you have done your customer avatar exercises – do not sit on your laurels. You need to review these each year and double check that they are up to date. Buying behaviours and touch points change over time. You need to stay on top of this to stay competitive and also to make sure you are ‘hanging out’ (marketing and comms wise) where your customers expect you to be – for them.

I suggest reviewing avatars once a year – when you do your annual review of your strategic digital (web, social, comms) objectives.

Avatar Exercise Steps

In my process there are two parts to the full exercise. In some cases I think business owners or marketing managers stop at Part 1 – but it’s Part 2 that gives the real rewards for crafting endless content.

When you do an exercise you just focus on one ideal customer at a time. I normally say to clients – choose a customer you know, right now, who is one of your ideal customers (and who you would like more of).

Part 1

In this part you work through a series of questions that relate to the target customer’s work and personal life. Hopefully you are able to answer at least 75% of these questions. If you can’t, you don’t know enough about them and you need to do a bit more homework. If you are a small business, potentially you should fare better with these questions that bigger businesses will.

Examples of the types of questions covered:

How old is your Avatar?
What is their home life like?
What car do they drive and where do they live?
How much do they earn?
What traits do they have – that are interesting to note?
What hobbies do they have?
What does their typical day look like?
Who do they hang out with?
Where do they hang out? (Virtual and physical places)
What media do they digest (and how do they digest it)?

Once you have answered as much as you can on this part, you give your avatar a name. By naming the target customer, you are personalising them, and you immediate start to relate to him or her. Also – when you look to create content, it’s good to be able to say: “Right, who am I creating this piece today for?” (then have your 2 or 3 avatars up on a wall with their names on them).

For the purposes of continuing the explanation below – I’m going to call my avatar Sam.

Part 2

This is the part that I think that many do not spend enough time on. It’s where you start to colour in the avatar more for yourself (and your team) and content ideas start to fizzle to the surface.

I really love this part – it gets my brain fizzing and all kinds of ideas end up on the table. In this part you focus on a closer look at the avatar’s likes, wants, desires and needs. You cover things like:

Does Sam have any daily / weekly / annual challenges in her role?
What knowledge is Sam lacking to get a certain task or job done?
What is Sam really good at in her role?
How does Sam make decisions about selecting who she works with?
Who influences her in the workplace?
What or who influences her outside of the workplace (that you know of)?
What is the one thing she really desires? (In her role, responsibilities, etc)
What is her burning need (which may be linked to her challenges or weaknesses)?
What gets her up in the morning?
What keeps her up at night?

If, while you are answering these questions, anything else comes to mind – note these down, because you never know when it will become useful.

My biggest tip is to keep going until you have absolutely everything down that you know about Sam.

Plot your content themes

From your very detailed notes of Part 1 and 2, you will begin to see top level themes of content – which can be broken down.

The themes should give you around 12 months of content (just for the one avatar). But they also give you a handy go-to guide for the future of what that avatar would like.

Having this information is going to be a goldmine for you and your team (if you have one). It will make creating content for the future so much easier and you won’t ever feel like you have to start from the beginning for each campaign.

Flesh out the top level themes

From your list themes – you will be able to break these down into talking points. Each point will become content in all shapes and forms. You may also recognise a pattern – so you can create a series of content (which stands well on its own…but is part of bunch of content that works well together).

Need an example? For my avatar Sam – let’s say she is an HR specialist and my business provides Virtual Assistant services to consultants like Sam. We have worked out her top level themes, one of which is the ‘challenges of her role’.

I’m going to pick one talking point under this theme and that is: ‘Sam is time pressed and struggles to stay on top of her report writing and admin processes.’

I could then create the following piece of content to help and support Sam with this challenge:-

Write a blog post that:

Narrows down the top 5 tips for HR specialists on the tools they could use to slimline their admin processes. (And…therefore make it easy to delegate to a virtual assistant)
Provides a blueprint process workflow chart that maps easy-to-follow changes Sam could make to her day-to-day processes (a download)
Include some practical changes Sam can implement today
Be sure to incorporate how I’ve helped a similar client overcome this challenge
Close the piece with some compassionate advice and an offer to converse a bit more with me (either privately or in comments to the post)

Re-purpose the content

If you take that one blog post that I’ve suggested (from only one of the top level themes) – it can then split the piece up and think about:

Drafting batches of tweets driving attention to the blog post
Create a mini-video series (1min) for each of the tips I discuss in the post – and use these to either hook on to a series of Facebook posts, Tweets or Linked updates.
Decide if the content warrants a Live session on Facebook for the Sams of the world to ask questions about the tips and how to possibly delegate their workload in a trustworthy way (you can then go back and embed the Live into the Blog post)
Host a tweet chat on the topic – or find tweet chats that Sams attend…and make sure I find a way to share my valuable blog post in a good way that will be received well
Host a podcast /audio interview on the topic
Create a batch of images around the tips, tools and advice given in the post and use these for Instagram (if relevant for audience)

You could decide to put some money on the content through paid campaigns across the different social media platforms. I would do this anyhow to test the audience a bit to see if it’s juicy for them. If it turns out it is – it could be a great way to generate leads in the future.

Now…it’s up to you

While at the beginning of this post you may have frowned on the subject of doing this exercise – I’m hoping I’ve pricked your attention enough to do something now?

Do the work and the rewards will come. We live in a highly digital world where your customers (no matter what business you are in) are searching for what you can do for them.

They will digest their information in a variety of ways and on different platforms and mediums. Make sure you have enough out there for them to find – then direct their attention explicitly to where you want them to focus.

Good luck! And do share your #H32avatarjourney with us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. We would love to hear how it goes for you. We like to gather the stories and then share them with our clients and audiences who are just like you.

If you would like my exercise to do yourself – just drop me an email and let me know, and I’ll send a copy over to you.

Customer Avatar Exercise

Know them, write for them