To accurately and successfully market to your audience, you need to know who they are, what keeps them up at night and what they want or need. A great way to think of it is,
“If you’re trying to reach everyone, you’ll reach no one”.
Last week Managing Director of CopyHouse, Kathryn Strachan was joined by the Managing Partner and Chartered Psychologist of Innovationbubble, Dr Simon Moore, to discuss how you can unlock your brand’s potential with customer psychology and customer avatars. You can watch the webinar on-demand now or read the highlights from the event below!
A customer avatar is an ideal customer for your business. So regardless of whether you’re in the B2B or B2C market, creating a customer avatar is essential! You can’t market to everyone, so you need to understand who you’re talking to, and creating customer avatars will help you do just that.
By tapping into this buyer persona, you can understand your consumer on a deeper level, therefore, better catering your brand services and content to them.
When creating a customer avatar, numerous elements must be taken into consideration.
For example, If you happen to be a content marketing agency working within the B2B market, this could be your potential avatar.
Even in the context of a B2B business, you must remember you’re selling to a person, and empathy is hugely advantageous. Freddy’s profile alone shows that he is not the final decision maker, but as the Head of Marketing, he still holds an authoritative position.
The final decision maker is important to consider when creating a customer avatar, especially in the B2B market.
It equipts you with the knowledge that the person you’re talking to may not be able to make the final decision therefore it’s vital to create a content strategy that answers their questions and their superiors questions.
This way you can in-directly provide solutions to their challenges at each level of the decision making process.
Core values and beliefs:
Knowing your customer avatar’s pain points and what’s keeping them up at night will help push your marketing efforts further as you can present solutions to your customer’s issues.
By studying Freddy’s core values and beliefs, we can see that he is constantly busy and needs a helping hand but is worried as he prefers to have control.
Therefore, we know that the best way to market to him is through proven case studies. This shows Freddy that we can take the weight off his shoulders through our services, yet he’ll still remain fully in control over the wider realm of things.
Key needs:
Finally, we have his key needs. As Freddy is not the final decision maker, we need both Freddy and the CEO of this fictitious character to jump onboard. So, we’re going to market our services in a light that best showcases how we are going to help solve Freddy’s pain points, add value to their brand and make both Freddy’s role and the CEO’s life much easier.
During the webinar, Kathryn used the perfect analogy to describe marketing without personalisation, she said:
“If you’re in a crowded room and scream, ‘Hey everyone, look here!’ it’s unlikely everyone will look.
However, if you shout, ‘Hey you in the red shirt’, the people wearing a red shirt will turn around because you’re specifically addressing them.”
It’s crucial that your customer feels valued at all stages of the sales funnel. Even if they are not the final decision maker, personalising your communications can reassure them that they are in the right hands.
By personalising your marketing efforts through establishing and catering to your customer avatar, you can build better relationships, generate more leads and ultimately drive sales.
In the webinar, Dr Simon Moore showed how brands that Innovationbubble has worked with attracted more clients when they catered towards filling in the gaps of what their client’s customers needed.
Although showcasing your brand in the brightest light is excellent, it lacks value if you constantly market the positive and fail to tap into human emotions and what your customer avatar wants and needs.
Dr Simon Moore explains how 10% of the human brain does the following:
However, 90% of the brain is more driven towards:
Tapping into your customer’s emotions, habits, motivations, and so on is just as effective, if not more so, than simply targeting everyone and hoping your marketing efforts will reach your target audience.
A great example of the importance of tapping into your avatar’s emotions was described in the webinar by Dr Simon Moore.
“Take a pair of glasses. The practical functionality of glasses (the 10%) is to help people see. However, that does not engage your consumer. What motivates them to purchase a pair of your glasses are the frames. Do the frames make your buyer look sophisticated, intellectual or sexy? Are the frames practical, durable or of high quality?
This is the 90% element of the human brain that persuades them to make a decision. So instead of selling practicality and function, you’re tapping into emotions, habits, motivations and catering for your customer in a way that truly matters to them.”
- Dr Simon Moore, CEO and Chartered Psychologist at Innovationbubble.
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