Ryan Deiss - Digital Marketing For Dummies

Applying demographic information brings your customer avatar to life. In this section, you add information to your avatar such as age, gender, marital status, and location.

Although the usual demographics are critical, the exercise of filling in the “Quote” field (shown in Figure 1-3) can be particularly helpful to get inside the head of your ideal customer. The Quote field is how this avatar might define himself or herself in one sentence, or it’s the motto the avatar lives by. For instance, our quote for Agency Eric is “I surround myself with people smarter than I.” This sentence says a lot about this avatar’s character and motivation to purchase our marketing training products. Brainstorm ideas for your avatar’s quote with your team or someone who knows your business well.

FIGURE 1-3:Demographics bring the customer avatar to life.

Demographic information for your customer avatar is also useful for choosing targeting options in ad platforms like Facebook. Bring your avatar to “life” as much as possible, even by visualizing the person if you can, because when you’re writing content, email, or sales copy, it can be beneficial to write as though your avatar were sitting across the table from you. Demographic information like age, gender, and location gives your persona a look and feel.

This section of the worksheet can help drive new product or service development. It can also help inspire the copy and ad creative you will use to compel your ideal customer to action. Copy is any written word that makes up your ad, email, web page, social media post, or blog post. Ad creative is an object that communicates information in visual form, such as an image, a GIF (graphics interchange format), a video, an infographic, a meme, or another form of artwork that you use to convey your message. You use copy and ad creatives to call out to your audience, capture people’s attention, and address how your product or service adds value to their lives by solving a pain point or a challenge they face.

When selling certifications to Agency Eric, for example, our company would do well to build solutions to his challenges and pain points and use language that addresses them in our marketing messages. For example, this avatar would respond to sales copy like the following:

Are you tired of losing proposals simply because you don’t offer content marketing services to your clients? Certify your team with DigitalMarketer’s Content Marketing Mastery Course and Certification.

Copy like this receives a response from Agency Eric because it is specific to one of his pain points, which is the fear of losing business to competitors (see Figure 1-4).

FIGURE 1-4:Understanding the challenges and pain points of your customer informs your marketing efforts.

In the final section of the customer avatar worksheet, answer why your customer avatar might choose to decline the offer to buy your product or service. The reasons your avatar doesn’t buy are called objections, and you must address them in your marketing. For example, if we know that Agency Eric is concerned with the amount of time his team members will be out of the office or unable to work while getting trained, we can send an email that overcomes that objection with a subject line like this:

Get Content Marketing Certified (in One Business Day).

You can prepare your own customer avatar as we discuss with the help of a resource from DigitalMarketer. Find it at https://www.digitalmarketer.com/lp/dmfd/customer-avatar/ .

An important part of planning for digital marketing success is understanding the value your organization brings to the marketplace. The value your company provides is far greater than the products or services it sells. In fact, people don’t buy products or services at all; instead, they buy outcomes.

Imagine a group of people who are discontent for one reason or another. This group of people are in what we call the “Before” state (see Figure 1-5). No matter what you’re selling, you’re trying to reach a group of prospective customers who are in this Before state. To gain some insight, write the adjectives that describe your prospective customer before she has experienced your product or service. Is she sad? Out of shape? Bored?

Source: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/customer-value-optimization/

FIGURE 1-5:Businesses provide value by moving prospects from a “Before” state to an “After” state.

Now, leap forward into the future, to the point after your prospective customer has experienced your product or service. What is her “After” state? How has this person changed? In the same place where you took notes about her Before state, describe her After state. Is she happier? Healthier? More excited?

The shift from the Before state to the After state is what your customer is buying. This shift (or outcome) is the value that your business brings to the marketplace. Furthermore, the role of your marketing is to articulate this move from the Before state to the After state.

The understanding of this transition from Before to After is what allows you to craft what is called a Statement of Value. This statement is important because it sums up the value of your product or service. To craft your Statement of Value, simply fill in the blanks on the sentence shown in Figure 1-6.

Source: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/launching-a-business/

FIGURE 1-6:Fill in the blanks on your Statement of Value.

The role of your marketing is to assist in moving a prospect, lead, or customer from one stage of the customer journey to the next. At the beginning of this journey, your customer is in the Before state. By the end, you will have taken your customer on a journey to that customer’s ideal After state.

If your business has acquired even a single customer, some kind of customer journey is in place. Perhaps this customer journey was not created intentionally, but it does exist. Or perhaps you call it something else in your organization, such as a “marketing (or sales) pipeline.”

Regardless of what you call it, becoming intentional about the movement of cold prospects, leads, and existing customers through the stages of this journey is the purpose of your marketing. When you’ve properly charted your ideal customer journey, you quickly find the bottlenecks that are restricting the flow of prospect to lead, lead to customer, and customer to raving fan.