Many people start a business or start to work for a company and are really excited to sell their product or service, in fact they know the product or service inside out but they don't know who it's for! It doesn't matter what you are selling if you aren't selling to the right person or people then you aren't going to sell much at all!
I see this a lot when people say: well if I like it or if I do this or my kid likes this then of course other people like me will like it to (if that tongue twister made any sense at all). But of course, you aren't your customer and the best way to find out who your customer is is to ask them and then create a customer profile or avatar to really get to know who they are.
By now, if you've been following the guides in this blog you may have your goals mapped out and are ready to start creating content for your social media in 2020 but before you do that you need to know who you are creating content for.
Fundamentally you'll need to ask yourself the following questions:
Who is my ideal customer?
Where do they spend time online?
What challenges do they face?
Answer these questions to start bringing you closer to your customer or person who you are looking to connect with.
Then we build out the customer persona for our products or services.
So for example:
I am selling a Social Media Planner, my ideal customer is:
A business owner who is looking to get organised and clearer with social media marketing and content production.
A social media marking freelancer looking for something they can use offline to put their ideas into.
Brand Marketer looking for something they can use in meetings to capture ideas for the social media plan.
Agency Marketer wanting to have a physical planner to help them jot down ideas and plan content with clients before it goes in the digital plan.
To get to know my customers, I will then do a deep dive into them and who they are, I also talk with existing customers to get an idea of who they are so I can create lookalike profiles.
Creating your customer avatars impacts every part of your marketing not just social media but email marketing, events you attend and just about everything you do to communicate with these people.
Create a sheet for each Avatar which includes: (We have included one already in your planner and can provide more downloads too)
- Goals and Values - What does your customer want to achieve and what is important to your customer?
- Sources of Information- Where does your customer get their information from? this can include social media, newspapers, experts, magazines, friends, journals and more.
- Demographic Information - Age, gender, job title, martial status, children, location.
- Challenges and Pain Points - what challenges does your customer face such as: 'Keeping up to date with social media changes' and what are they worried about what pain points do they have such as falling behind on social media and not being consistent enough or having to retrain and start again.
- Objections and Roles - What are the reasons they won't or may not buy? and what is their role in the purchase decision?
The more we know and understand about our customer the easier it will be talk to them and share the most relevant content with them.
Ensure you create multiple customer profiles for each type of customer you want to talk to.
I hope this quick guide was helpful and you will now be able to create your customer profiles with confidence. Have you set your 2020 goals yet? Check out the latest post about how to set goals here.