Marketing Communication and Customer Avatar

As you have already learned about the marketing fundamentals in the previous article, here is the continuation where you get to know about marketing communication, targeting your audience, creating a customer avatar.

Marketing is about good conversations

The closing of a sale always starts with good conversations because without communication no sale will happen. After all, marketing is all about building trust with your prospects. In sales, you talk to one customer at a time and build trust with him/her whereas marketing is speaking to many and here you are building trust with many people and hence it is called mass trust. To become a good marketer you need to be good at handling one-to-one conversations because without having a good one-to-one conversation skill you cannot have one-to-many conversations. Imagine you are talking to one of your old friends after a long time where you have an easy chat without anything to hide as you are talking to your friend where you have a good rapport. In this circumstance, if you are promoting your business or product which he/she needs then of course your name comes first in their mind when they need that because of the trust factor. Therefore in marketing, you have to converse in such a way that you are talking to your close ones and make the listeners feel that you are having a one-to-one conversation with them which can build trust.

Be authentic to communicate better

Authenticity means remaining true to yourself. People are tired of fake people with a social persona which is one of the most important mistakes made by most celebrities. They wear a social mask when they attend people and end up with millions of fake social media followers who are good for nothing. Everybody likes to hear from real people. There are a number of authentic celebrities too who stay out of media attention and remain true to themselves and bold to speak what is right. Real people attracted to such kinds of personalities. Authentic communication easily builds trust and it is the pillar stone of success in any business.

Who is a better marketer?

Does a person who holds a degree in marketing a better marketer? No, a better marketer is a person who has more life experiences. Marketing is all about connecting different things, unlike other professions. How can a person achieve more life experiences? Travel to different places. When you travel to different locations you come across a variety of people, culture, food and all these bring new experiences in life. You may learn new languages which are a good thing to have on your list as a marketer. Always try to learn new things whether any technical skill or personal development to be a better marketer. Make reading a habit and get aware of what is happening around you and move up with the trends that are how great marketers are made.

Who is your audience?

Not everybody is your audience if everybody is your audience then nobody is your audience. Let me say an example. If you are in a bus stop and address hey everybody to a large crowd nobody turns to you, in short, you will be ignored. But if you say hey doctors then you may get the attention of doctors if any in the crowd which has a comparatively better response rate than the previous. Again you go further deep and call a specific name may be Peter then you may get a response from anybody named Peter in the crowd. That’s how the targeting works. You have to build a defined customer avatar of the target audience for your business from a group of people using demographics and psychographics. No matter there will be a large number of people remain outside your circle they may gradually become your target.

How to define your target customer?

Like I said in the above-mentioned point your target customer is the one who matches most of your requirements. Using demographics and psychographics you can define your ideal customer who has the 100 percent match which is called customer avatar. Once you build your customer avatar you can plan your content according to the needs of your target audience. And the following points are to be noted before you start your conversation:

• Write to one customer at a time
• Though you have a big audience, everyone is alone with their device. Connect them with 1:1 communication.
• Join a mental conversation before even start actual communication.
• Email or messaging is more powerful than social media as it is easy to begin a mental conversation.
• While writing contents begin with a catchy headline and impressive first sentence which grabs the attention of your target audience and the second sentence should be a continuation of the first and so on.

Focus on the center, not on the border

An archer always aims at the centre spot and it doesn’t guarantee that his shot always hits the centre. But the probability to hit the center of the circle close to the center is very high. What if he targets at the edge? He may end up missing the shot. The same principle is applied here in marketing where you have to go deep and find the most ideal customer for your business. Say an example if you are in the tourism industry then you may find a large number of potential customers of different age groups, gender, profession, hobbies, etc. But to find out your ideal customer you have to conduct a survey to check the demographics which means primary data mainly name, age gender, etc, and psychographics such as hobbies, interests, opinions, etc. Then you will come to know the category of age group, gender, professionals are interested to spend more time with you. After analyzing the result you can create a customer avatar of your ideal customer. As in this example your customer avatar maybe a 25-year-old married working professional guy who earns an annual income of $40k and interested in trekking, kayaking, biking, and a foodie, etc. Now you got your customer avatar which means the centre spot of the archer so you can prepare your contents in such a way that you are communicating to that one person at a time gradually people staying outside of the circle feels that you are relative to them eventually you grow your business.

Building Customer Avatar

You have been hearing the term customer avatar from the last two points and for a while, you might be thinking what is it? How to build it? There is nothing much to confuse, customer avatar is an imaginary character of your most ideal customer who meets the maxim number of your requirement. The best way to find your ideal customer is by generating a survey. It has to be set in such a way that you get maximum information about a person both demographics and psychographics. You can make surveys either using google forms or paid tools such as survey monkey, mysurvey, etc. Begin your questionnaire with basic details such as name, age, gender, profession, income, etc, and then ask about their interest, hobbies, lifestyle and gain maximum inputs that bother your business. After you prepare the survey you can share it with your friends or a group or in a community to fill up. In the next step, you have to analyze the data from the responses of people and prepare a list of the outcomes equally distributed say the category of age group between 20 to30, an annual income of 2 to 5 lakhs, etc. Now you get the subset of your class target audience and that subset is your customer avatar. To give more clarity about the customer avatar I am giving a live example of my customer avatar created based on my survey results below.

My customer Avatar

Let me give a brief introduction to my business. I am into a business which sells business opportunity to people or I can say that my business is to create entrepreneurs. Anybody who is an Indian citizen and of age above 18 years can start my business but I was not sure who was my actual target audience before but after conducting the survey I got a clear picture. Apart from the basic contact information, I asked 11 questions, and here is the summary of my survey based on the responses I received.

After analysing the response I categorize my customer avatar as per the following.

Gender:  No priority as it is evenly distributed.

Age:  Priority for the age 31 to 40 years.

Education:  Priority for Post graduate.

City:  No priority as it can be any city.

Work status: Priority for working professionals and employees.

Annual income: Between 0 to 2 lakhs.

Interest in entrepreneurship: 100% match means everybody is interested.

Reason to choose entrepreneurship: Can be any so no priority.

Greatest challenge in entrepreneurship: Taking considerations for huge investment and updating trend

Interest to work on a successful business model:  Again 100% match.

In the next step what I have done is I made a deep look into my survey to check which all candidates match my criteria and to my surprise, I got one profile that scored a cent percent match. Now I got my customer avatar who is a lady in her 30s working as an HR Executive has been married with a kid looking for a business opportunity to do along with her job and wants to achieve financial freedom in life. She struggles to cope up with the updating technologies which is her major challenge. So if I can create contents that solve her problem then she easily becomes my customer and that’s how the stuff works. Just have a look at my customer avatar in the figure down.

Awkwardness is an indicator of learning

When you come out of your comfort zone you may end up doing things you were not used to where you feel a bit discomfort at the beginning which leads to some awkward situations and curse the life saying I should have stayed where I was instead of jumping all these hurdles but in the end, you have a happy climax that gives the benefit of your struggle. No matter whatever awkward moments you go through that’s all are part of learning. Just have a look at your childhood experience of learning cycling which may put up a smile on your face right now. Remember those days you fell from the cycle in front of people while learning where you had felt embarrassed you might have cried and might have decided to quit learning but somehow you managed to get up learn finally you received the fruit of your hard work. As you grow up you learn new things but you have to go through all those awkwardness to learn in fact that is a part of learning. Dare to do something that challenges you daily and create a new neural network. The choices you take in life are the ones that destine your future so always chose the path which is unique and come out of your comfort zone then only you taste the sweetness of success.

Finally, I conclude this article about targeting your ideal customer and build an effective relationship and gain their trust. In the following article, you will learn about the basics of copywriting and creating a landing page.

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