First Steps To An Awesome Customer Avatar (Free Four-Part Checklist Set)

Level 1.4.1: Customer Avatar Checklist - Your Avatar is the perfect person you’re aiming to reach, who you’ll be talking to, and who will buy from you, it represents your target audience. Not generally, but specifically: your perfect customer, client or buyer. The person who is gonna absolutely love your core product. This customer profile is a crucial foundation that every step that follows in the Funnel Framework is built upon. Without this, your marketing, your copy, your creative will be all over the place. But with this customer persona, you’ll understand your core customer base; their stage of awareness, the way they think; the way they feel; and where they hang out online. The point is to understand your target market so well - better than they even know themselves, that when you do speak to them; you really do speak to their real desires, motivations, wants and needs - and you do it in language that they understand.

Source: Symbiotic Ascension System Customer Avatar Checklist

The only way to really understand what your specific target audience really wants, thinks and feels is to dig deep, do the research and – ideally – talk to them. Think of this Four Part Customer Avatar Checklist Set as a ‘research roadmap’; a route to ‘what you need to know’; a starting point for your own ‘persona questionnaire’; and the first steps towards your own ‘Awesome Avatar’.

The completion of each checklist will help you gradually transform any abstract ideas you might have about your target audience, into more tangible, living, breathing human beings you can then get to know, understand and empathise with.

And once you’re on your buyer’s wavelength; once you can speak your client’s language; once you can communicate what really counts for your customers, then your copy can come to life for your core audience in a way that allows something quite magical to happen…

Authenticity is really a function of getting to know your target audience almost better than they know themselves, in which case you meld yourself, your voice, with their problems and desires. Then all of a sudden, you have a reaction of, “This person is inside my head”

Brian Clark

Copyblogger

Finding Your One And Only True Love (AKA: Your Perfect Persona)

Is your strategy to reach the widest possible audience, so you can sell the most possible stuff? Then what follows is probably not for you…

If you have something of quality and substance that you believe adds value to the world, then many, many people should, would, could be interested in what you have to offer. Problem is, if you spend your time, energy and money broadcasting the same message to everybody, you can easily end up with a diluted message that speaks to nobody.

A bit like mining for cryptos, playing the numbers game is a long, difficult and resource heavy one to play. So, if you’re going wide with your messaging, because you have a ‘Fear Of Missing Out’, then I’d suggest you’d be better placed to feel that fear, but – don’t do it. Anyway…

For those of us with little desire to take part in what amounts to a cash burning popularity contest, a more efficient and effective route to boosting your conversion rate, is to take a more quality over quantity approach, and dive for the pearls. Figure out who you’re dealing with, focus on them, get to know them and then – most importantly – write only for them.

Welcome to the way of the one…

Before you write, empty your mind of every subscriber that the email isn’t meant for. The naysayers, grumblers, unsubscribers, etc. will mess with your head. You don’t need them in your mind when you’re writing. Shove them out of your mind, focus on your one reader, and write entirely for that one reader.

Joanna Wiebe

Copyhackers

You can of course, develop many Customer Avatars or Buyer Personas, but you must begin with one. Ideally, the one with the least resistance to you; the one that will love what you do; and the one that is ready, willing, and able to take you up with a great big fat whoopi-doo.

This is not about exclusivity and it’s not about turning people away, it’s about – not spreading yourself too thinly by trying to speak to “all of the people, all of the time”. There is a difference.

So, how do you find your own ‘special one’, the ‘perfect persona’ for you and your business? Glad you asked…

Our Survey Said…

I’ve put together the following set of Customer Avatar Checklists based, basically, on the stuff I want to know about a target audience before I begin to write for them. This is my starting point. Always. These are the factors that enable me to better understand and visualise exactly who I’m talking to. So if you’re a little stuck, I’d say this is a jolly good place to start (not that I’m biased or anything). These Checklists will help you get to grips with the most important factors and help you focus on the most vital ‘what you need to know’ demographics, characteristics and behaviours of your own special target audience and help set you off towards copy that really connects and actually converts in four oh-so-simple steps…

Download The Checklists Here

Step 1: The Customer Demographics Checklist

It’s basic stuff, but it’s the stuff that can help turn your abstract Avatar into a tangible persona. Someone you can imagine talking to: man-to-man, woman-to-woman or any combination in-between.

So, let’s begin with…

• Name
• Age
• Sex
• Location
• Education
• Occupation | Job Title | Role
• Income
• Marital Status / Family
• Home (rent/own/share/solo)
• Causes
• Digital/Tech/Web Awareness
• Interests
• Info Sources

Computer says…?

Step 2: The Customer Traits Checklist

Psychological innit? What makes your ideal Avatar tick, is what makes your perfect Customer do. Understand this, and you can better understand what your buyers, clients and users really need from you. That’s empathy my friend, and it’s half the battle. Because once you empathise, it then becomes less of a battle and more of an understanding. And if you seek to understand your customers, you can then connect and communicate in a super-duper state of symbiosis. Check?

We’re talking…

• Values
• Attitudes
• Beliefs
• Politics
• Lifestyle
• Ethics
• Religion/Spirituality

Compassion fatigue?

Download The Checklists Here

Step 3: The Cores Of Your Customer Checklist

The key to converting browsers into buyers, is understanding your core customers drivers.  It’s what makes them tick that dictates what, why and how they do what they do, do, do.

Things like…

• Problems
• Pains
• Fears
• Objections
• Challenges
• Obstacles

Ever had a…?

 

Step 4: The Aspirations Of Your Avatar

Aspirations are at the core of the cores, but are so, so important they get their very own step. But, what really motivates your Avatar’s aspirations? More than the what; it’s about the why. The surface stuff is useful, but what lies beneath?

Tell me what…?

What do I WANT? Most of all, more than anything? That would be telling. Really, really telling…

         I want Money!
         But why?
         To buy a big red Ferrari!
         But why?
         Let’s just say, it’s a compensation thing…

A trifle trite, but get the point right? There’s gold in them thar hills – but you gotta dig to find what they really, really…

• Lack? (oh do stop sniggering at the back)
• Need Most
• Desire Most
• Want Most
• Aspire To
• Wannabe

Now repeat. But, dig much deeper by asking…

Why, oh why, oh why?

Are you good?

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good

Good!

Once you can tick off all the items on these four fabulous Customer Avatar Checklists, you’ll be so-close to your Awesome Avatar…

You’ll be needing a room.

Click Here To Download The FREE Full Set Of 4 Customer Avatar Checklists For Keeps Now!

Look Inside The Avatar PDF Checklist Set & See What You Get >>

Interactive Checklists means no printer required. Just tick things off from your computer or mobile (using any basic PDF app) and you can re-use it afresh every time you start on a new Avatar/Persona/Profile or use your last one as starting point for your next one.

Oh, and did I mention? Yup. It is F-R-E-E.

No animation or oh-soo slow? Doh! Click here

The Big PS…

These Checklists are the beginning of a 3-part process, so if you’re keen to keep moving and don’t want to get stuck, you also should check out…

Symbiotic Ascension System. 3 Steps To An Awesome Avatar

This Awesome Customer Avatar Workbook provides Entrepreneurs seeking more relevant and authentic communication with their Perfect Customers, a key to greater insight, understanding and empathy; opening the door to copy that is truly congruent, deeply connects and actually converts.

A simple development process, split into three user-friendly parts, each building upon the last so you can develop a deeper, richer, more fully rounded sense of who your target customers actually are, what they really care about and why…

Part 1: The Questions – a set of four checklists to help you clarify what you need to know about your Customers, Clients or Users.

Part 2: The Answers – this is where you actually ‘fill in’ the information, so you can flesh out your Avatar’s traits, drivers and aspirations to establish the basis of your core buyer persona reference document.

Part 3: The Stories – a set of exercises that brings everything together, to help develop deeper insight into your Perfect Persona’s thoughts; feelings; needs; and most importantly – actions. And it’s this crucial part that will transform your Average Avatar into an Awesome Avatar!

You can  dig deeper into these more advanced Customer Avatar worksheets by checking out the follow-up to this guide here:

How To Transform An Average Avatar Into An Awesome Avatar With Customer Backstories

Nick Conneff on Linkedin
Nick Conneff
Over the years - ok decades - Nick turned his best work in initially as a deep house DJ turned producer, then a property investor turned entrepreneur but he's currently turning his hand to helping like-minded entrepreneurs with funnels copy and digital marketing. He's nice like that.
 
Significant projects in the past have included running a record label and setting up a charitable education & welfare program.
 
He works both from his home in the UK and - when the weather takes a predictable turn for the worst - remotely from warmer climes.
 
Catch him while you can... (and before he turns again).
  
Connect With Nick On Linkedin Here.
 
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