Define Your Customer Avatar — Interaction, Calls, Surveys [Week-2]
Note: This article is part of a 12-weekly webinar series. I share my experience of Digital Marketing Online Internship by Digital Deepak.
Link: Week-1 Article
The assignment completion rate for Week-1 was 87%. And the credit goes to the salary incentive offered.
Also, I received feedback for my first assignment. And my account received credit with the first assignment’s “salary”.
Before this week’s webinar, I got 2 emails from DigitalDeepak.com
One of them was to get free stickers of “Digital Deepak” and “Digital Marketing Club” for being a subscriber.
The other was to join the Internship group on Telegram.
In the webinar, we got to join the Facebook group made for interns. So that we could discuss our challenges and resolve them.
Two groups exist so the interns are not behind on any communication.
A few people were having issues with emails not receiving.
Afterward, Deepak confirmed in the Facebook group that a system is in the works to get communication streamlined.
The app would provide all assignments, recordings, feedback, and communication in one place.
The class starts with:
Table of Contents
[-] Focus
[-] Mistakes are future-benefits
[-] Marketing is about good conversations
[-] Be authentic to communicate better
[-] How to write for the internet
[-] How to define your target customer
[-] Focus on the center, not on the border
[-] Live Exercise: How to find Customer Avatar
[-] Assignment: My Customer Avatar
[-] Key Takeaways
[-] Conclusion
Focus
Focus on the next two lines.
Though the human mind tricks us into believing we could process many things in a given time. There is a cost to pay.
We get tired after multitasking for 2–3 hours because the neurochemicals which we needed to focus are now gone.
In reality, it can only process 2–4 things.
Distraction is more harmful to the brain than drugs.
The more frequent it processes the group of things results in short circuits in neural networks. At which point it weakens the ability to focus.
Learn > Do > Teach
When you teach what you learn and practice, the brain starts to form stronger neural networks.
These strong neural networks make you see gaps in your knowledge and helps fill them.
This is why you don’t need to be an expert. You can teach anyone who is making mistakes that you have resolved.
Mistakes are future-benefits
Mistakes are learning opportunities. One should neither celebrate or criticize them.
When you celebrate a mistake, it means you actually want to fail and be incompetent.
And when you criticize a mistake, it is going to hurt you on a deeper level and would be counterproductive.
A learning culture is a way forward where you could rectify or avoid mistakes committed before.
One of the best ways to learn marketing is to listen to your audience and have conversations.
Marketing is about good conversations
If you have conversations with an audience like you have with your best friend, then that is a good marketing communication.
A marketer needs to join mental conversations with his/her audience.
Be authentic to communicate better
You need to be as authentic with your audience as you are with your closest friend.
Today, people are smart to catch people faking their personas.
They want to pay for the product/service only when it is from a trusted source.
To become that trusted source, you have to be authentic in your communication. This way you would not only become a better marketer but a better human being too.
How to write for the internet
To capture your reader’s attention, you need to make your writing [or rather typing] flow.
This is how top writers make their writing flow:
Each sentence of your writing should follow on with the previous one’s logic. You need to maintain a flow because distraction is your enemy.
The internet is full of distractions like ads, pop-ups, redirections, etc.
To achieve the flow in writing, a marketer needs to incorporate:
- Logical connections
- Topic sentences
- Transitions
- Clear, concise writing
- Varied wording and sentence structure
Who is a better marketer?
A better marketer is someone who can relate to his/her audience’s problems more.
To do that, a marketer needs to have similar experiences and a way of overcoming those problems.
People with more life experiences are generally better marketers.
Rule of thumb: Always be learning new skills, subjects and you would get to know about different people.
Who is your audience?
If everyone is your audience, then no one is your audience.
You need to dig deeper and carve out a niche audience.
To find out the ground realities of your niche audience, you have to listen-talk to people and understand their problems.
Then you would figure out the exact customer persona to target.
How to define your target customer
To define a target customer, you need to know the demographics and psychographics of your audience.
Demographics mean age, location, annual salary, etc.
And Psychographics are behaviors, likes, habits, etc.
Focus on the center, not on the border
When you develop a customer avatar, that should be the center of your focus.
There are going to be outliers that do not fit in the customer avatar and that is okay.
Because the majority of your audience gets covered in the customer avatar exercise.
You would be helping all but the focus would be on the customer avatar.
Live Exercise: How to find Customer Avatar
Deepak conducted a live exercise showing how he defines his target customer and how he is able to write better to that customer avatar.
He gave us a Typeform survey to fill.
And showed the survey result.
Along with single choice questions, there were open-ended questions like “what’s your favorite movie of all time?”
These questions help in understanding your audience better and help in copywriting.
So that you can relate to people and bring those topics in conversations.
One of the best things about this internship is that it is not static.
To show the process of finding a customer avatar, Deepak took our fellow intern Sagar on the call.
And asked some questions like why he decided to take this internship, his goals among others.
This way he taught us how to converse with our audience to know them better.
Deepak also gives an example of this internship of how it came to be.
He conducted various polls, quizzes, surveys via social media, email.
And found the need to provide a Digital Marketing Internship.
By understanding his audience, the course didn’t need much marketing and sold itself.
Note: If you don’t have an audience then the accuracy of the customer avatar would be less. As there is not enough data to build customer avatar.
In this case, you should:
Assignment: My Customer Avatar
The assignment for the week is to take a couple of surveys and build a customer avatar from the aggregated data.
My niche audience is people who want to start a side business using affiliate marketing.
I chose this niche as I have had a small experience selling a lighter using affiliate marketing. Also, I sold some Amazon Kindle ebooks.
I am not a pro by any means and thus here I am in the internship to learn 🙂
After talking with a few friends, I completed my customer avatar.
Here is the Customer Avatar:
Siddharth Singh is 31 years old and has completed his Bachelor of Technology degree in IT from Pune.
He makes Rs 6–7 lakhs per annum.
He is working as a Customer Support Executive in a reputed IT company in Noida, UP, India.
His job is measured by customer satisfaction rating.
His biggest fear is to be stuck in a call center job.
He despises the time it takes for him to get to the office and back. It takes him 4 hours total.
He has been following some bloggers and wants to start a side business.
His goal for the next 2 years is to become financially independent.
Why customer avatar is important
A customer avatar is a foundation for any digital marketing strategy.
It helps us in understanding our audience and their pain points.
How it is going to communicate better
Once a customer avatar is developed, I can decide how to communicate with the audience.
In my example, I didn’t have a large audience to survey. But from what data I gathered, I can start by offering a free course on “Side Business for Call Centre Executives”.
Key Takeaways
[-] Focus is the single most important thing.
[-] Practice what you learn. Teach what you practice.
[-] Benefits of Mistakes and Failures lie in Learning
[-] If you cannot converse well 1:1, you cannot converse well 1:many
[-] To become a better marketer, be an authentic communicator.
[-] A marketer tries to come up with an angle of communication which is attractive to people.
[-] You cannot serve all the population of your chosen niche audience. Focus on the majority and help all.
[-] Keep a single customer in mind, while communicating with your audience. Be it via social media, email and other channels.
[-] To get a sense of who your customer is, join mental conversations with them.
[-] Email and messaging platforms are more powerful communication media than social networks. Because they give us an opportunity to connect with our customers on a 1:1 basis.
Conclusion
I completed my assignment for creating a customer avatar. In the research, I learned a lot about my target customer.
I can now communicate better with them using the knowledge shared in this week’s webinar.
Note:
In the end, it was announced that
There will be a graduation party in Bengaluru for all interns in March 2020.
People would get their certificates delivered by mail if they cannot come.
Top 3 students would get free flight tickets if they are not from Bengaluru.
P.S.
If you want to learn more, you can join the world’s largest Digital Marketing Facebook group here.
Also, let me know in the comment section if you are going to create your customer avatar.
Happy 2020 🎆
