Part 3 of 7: Unlocking Your Perfect Customer Avatar

Welcome to Part 3 of our 7 Part series on creating your own online business, from scratch, that can scale to 6, 7 and 8 figures. Any previous editions will be linked below!

Part 1 of 7 - The Refreshing Truth About Making Money Online
Part 2 of 7 - Coming Up With Your 7 Figure Business Idea

At this point, hopefully you are already toying around with ideas for your business, but whatever you do… You’ll fail if you miss this.

Now we need to figure out who we are going to sell to, and this may be the single most overlooked part of this process for most, but is incredibly important.

The more clear you are on who you are going to sell to, the easier the rest of the process is. I promise you, it’s SO worth you taking the time to do this.

Let’s imagine, for a second, you have a product that can help average golfers add 10-15 yards to their tee shots in 30 days. If you have no idea who would benefit from this product it’s really hard to come up with a pitch, and also hard to figure out how to get traffic to this offer. 

If you try to come up with an ad, a pitch page, a sales video… but you have no idea who to sell this to you won’t know what to say. If you’re talking to a random stranger on the street that you’ve never met, it will be very hard to sell them. BUT if you only spoke to people that you know would be a perfect customer, I bet you’d know what to do say.

I’ve helped thousands of people create ads for Facebook and one of the biggest issues I end up helping people with isn’t the words, it’s not the images, it’s not the audience… it’s the fact that they are not clear on who they are talking to. When you know who you want to sell to, everything I just mentioned before comes pretty clear. 

So we have this great product that helps people hit the ball farther… now we go through some questions to figure out who we are going to sell to first. This audience may expand in the future, but I like to start out with the “yes, these people will buy this” audience and not the “these people might buy this if I have a great funnel”.

Here are questions and ideas you can use to figure out who your ideal customer will be. It’s usually easiest to start with basic market research and psychographic information.

• Age

• Gender

• Marital Status

• Buying Habits

• Goals

• Challenges

• Objections

• Who They Listen to (who they take advice from)

• Where they spend their money

• What do they read

I know, this seems like a long list but it’s super fun to play this out because if you can define MOST of these criteria about for your avatar, the remainder of what we are doing makes itself, as we use this avatar as our “north star”. We get to pretend we are talking to a specific person, and not a huge group of people. 

Let’s do this with my golf example. If I had to GUESS who the ideal customer would be, it’d look like this:

• Age | I could start with a range, but I’ll start with a number to show you how extreme you can get. Let’s say 45 years old.

• Gender | Male

• Marital Status | Married

• Buying Habits | Golf stuff (clothes, balls, gloves, etc)

• Goals | This is where you get to have fun too. I could say something basic here like “To Get better at golf”. I’ll try “To beat their buddies in their weekend round and golf trips”.

• Challenges | They can’t hit the ball far enough, but they think it’s because they aren’t good enough at golf. 

• Objections | They don’t have the power to hit the ball farther or they slice the ball which kills distance.

• Who They Listen to (who they take advice from) | Normal golf channel guys and Youtubers

• Where they spend their money | Golf courses, Taylormade, Instagram golf brands

• What do they read | Golf Digest

So as you can see, you can almost close your eyes and visualize this guy wearing a polo and knee length grey shorts right? Shirt tucked in, white golf hat with a perfectly curved brim, lips ready to crack a dad joke about leaving the wife and kids at home and getting some freedom. 

The more specific you get, the easier it is to picture this person. But you can also ask the following question to help you get an idea for who your ideal client could be. 

• Who are three people that you know that would benefit from this RIGHT NOW?
  
  If you’ve gone into the right niche, it’s likely that you have spent time in it so you probably know people that would benefit from the product itself. I’ve spent decades playing golf, I know dozens of people that would benefit from hitting the ball farther. In fact, every golfer I know wants to hit it farther (this makes for a hot product when this happens). So now I try to imagine someone who wants to hit it farther and maybe has told me that in the past.
  

Once you’ve had the product for sale and gotten some customers, you can also ask yourself who actually benefited the most from the product… that helps you realize who you could shift your marketing to. 

One of the things that I like to do, once I have my avatar in mind, is expand on the “problem” and “objections” to create different angles I can approach this person with. It helps to write out the problems this potential customer might have, because we can use these with our ads. 

In the golf niche, the problems might be:

• Can’t stop slicing the ball, which is causing them to lose distance (this is usually caused by poor swing shape or an open club face… these are relatively easy to fix and fixing these will add distance because a “fade” shot shape kills distance). 

• Has a “two way miss” which means one time they hit it left, the next time right (usually caused by an inconsistent swing and trying to correct too many things, we can address this)

• Has a very slow swing speed (usually from lack of body ability, short swing arch, no follow through, etc and can be fixed or worked on to address)

• Loses the ball off the tee (usually an issue with one of the above)

• Hits big hooking draws (usually from a closed club face and being too “in to out”, we can address these)

See, you may not know anything about golf but as I define the issues a golfer has it helps me know what to talk about to attract them. Now I could have an ad that speaks to the golfer that wants to add more distance and put up a better score… but can’t stop slicing the ball. The ad, the APP (Automated Pitch Process, we’ll cover that in the next edition) and my outreach all starts to write itself because that’s the kind of person I’m looking to sell to. 

If I went into the next phase thinking “I can sell this to anyone that golfs”... I haven’t taken the time to get clear on who I should be talking to so I end up talking to no one.

Just imagine these headlines:

“Get better at golf” 

Vs. 

“Stop slicing the ball and become the longest driver out of your group with these 5 drills”

The more specific you get with who you are selling to, the easier this entire process becomes. 

Creating a sales video, talking to people about your product, making a members area, filming tutorials, making a sales page… these are all the tactical things that we will need to do at some point for our product, but they are not the thing that will likely make it succeed or fail.

You speaking to the proper person who has a problem you can solve is the determining factor. Give me an ugly page, a stuttering delivery, and any other issues you will conjure up in your mind about “the tech” being the issue… and I’ll take that over someone who has NO idea who their avatar is any day.

I like to think that marketing isn’t all that hard, even though many people think that “marketing” is what’s stopping them. The truth us, it’s just that people miss really important steps like identifying who to tell to by figuring out all of the incredibly important aspects above. If you want to be a great business owner, sell a lot of stuff online, make a lot of money… stop trying to rush everything and get clear on the details of who and what first.

Please, take the time to review what I’ve listed, take the time to run through these steps and write your answers down. One of the best exercises you can do is list out the objections your ideal audience may come up with, this is where you are going to form the material you use to market this entire business!

What are you going to sell, and who will sell to. 

We’ve covered both of those in this 7 part series so far but now it’s time to move on to the building side and this next edition is going to be a big one. These first three editions are to set the foundation and the next 4 is where you take the most action.

I’ll be trying my best to give you steps you can, and should, follow along the way.

If you like the idea of having a REAL and legitimate online business, set with a great foundation, that’s fully scalable up to 6,7, or even 8 figures… and you like any of what you’ve been reading, maybe you’d like to share what you’ve been reading! When you do, your friends or subscribers will get this same 7 part series!

Please… grab that link and give it a share! It helps us out immensely!

Either way, you keep being awesome… and I can’t wait to share some life changing breakthroughs with you!

See you at the top,

Travis Stephenson