How to Get Deeper Insight into Your Audience

Hey, everyone,

Chris here. I've got a short post for you today about how to better understand your target customer so you can more effectively communicate the value you bring. 

If you haven't seen the video yet, you can find it on my blog.

(In this week's video, I'll even give you a brief tour of my home workspace. So if you're curious, be sure to check it out.)

Today I was learning about building an avatar. Some of you might know what this is, and some of you might have heard of it as building a sketch of your ideal customer. It's a really cool exercise that I found in this program that I'm in for building product launches.

I'm getting ready to launch an information product to a niche sector that's about building business. It's kind of a product that I used to do, and I'm relaunching it. So I'm really happy about that. And it's really cool. So I'll keep you updated on that.

But I gained some useful insights on creating an avatar or a picture of the ideal customer. It's super important to have a target avatar or a target customer to look at and relate to because what's really crucial is knowing who you're messaging and who you're talking to.

A lot of business people know this but maybe don't go into much depth. For example, I used to sell sewing machines and so it was pretty straightforward to end up thinking, Okay, I'm messaging sewing people and people that like embroidery or like quilting. So we would make sure to talk about things related to that stuff.

But what's even deeper and more important, which I found out later on and that I'm learning even more about now, is finding out what keeps people up at night and what their main problems are. Basically, what are the things that are important to them? What are the problems they're trying to solve?

Because at the end of the day, that's really what a product or service is doing for anybody: it brings value by helping to solve a problem or by meeting a desire or need. So understanding that about the ideal customer is important because if you go too wide and too broad, then there's just too many people and you can't have the specific kind of messaging to speak directly to the desires, wants, needs, and problems of your target audience.

So you want to think carefully about what keeps people up at night, what they really have problems with, and what challenges they're trying to solve. You want to think about what is it they really want to know. You might think you know what they need, but what do they want? What people actually want is the really important thing, because just bringing to them what you think they need might actually be what they need, but they might not care as much about that. They might think they need something totally different and really they want something totally different.

So bringing people what they want, or solving a problem that they want to solve initially is a great way to bring people in and then start solving the problems they need to solve and making them aware of them as they listen to you.

It is also really important to understand what opportunities an avatar might have or somebody might have.

These are just some basic insights, but you can easily put them to use. You can even make a quick list (and you can do this in probably less than 10 minutes) by asking yourself:

• What are the main problems that my ideal customer faces?
• What do they really desire?
• What are their opportunities?
• What are positive things that could happen for them?

This is assuming you already understand the basic demographics, like: What's their age range? What's their gender? Maybe it's both genders. Where are they? Where do they hang out? These are the kinds of basic marketing demographics that are like marketing 101, right?

But with the questions we looked at above, we're going a little bit deeper and going into the psychology of your ideal customer to really hone our messaging.

I'm really enjoying this training and getting a lot out of it, so I wanted to share some of the insights I've gained with you.

I hope you're having a great day. Thanks for reading.

-Chris

P.S. As you can tell, I get excited about marketing and have a lot of fun with it. Not everyone feels the same way! If you're interested in letting me and my team handle your marketing for you, we can put to work what I talked about today plus lots of other insights and techniques to bring you more business. Fill out this form to get the ball rolling.