Today I am going to talk about what personas and avatars are, why they can help focus your product, services or program goals, and how they can bring you more of the customers you love. Whether you are a new company or one that has been in business for 30 years, defining personas, creating avatars, and focusing your brand on acquiring more of those same individuals is the kind of focus you should be doing.
If you are not doing personas, your messaging is most likely noise filled with what you think will rank well on Google searches hoping to gain interest. It’s the same as saying your product is for everyone, which means it appeals to no one. I have talked to design and development agencies owners recently who have had to shut down firms because they were trying to be everything to everyone. This was untenable, stressful, and probably did not produce the results they really wanted to do for their clients.
Without a deep understanding of your customers you can’t meet their needs, let alone exceed their expectations
Personas are groups or categories of individuals that buy your products or services that have similar traits or characteristics. Avatars are fictional characters we create based on those personas to dive deep into their lifestyle, desires, and fears.
- Rank personas
- Go deep with avatars
- Make real connections
- Achieve unbelievable focus
Start with two or three personas. Then we’ll rank those personas. Ranking personas is based on either how influential they are to your brand, or how successful they are to your program. The higher they rank, the more you’ll want to focus on them. Create avatars, and rank them depending on how influential or successful they are to your products, service or program.
If 20% of your business made up the best clients to deal with, wouldn’t you want to attract more of them and slowly grow that figure to 100%? Creating an avatar for those groups of individuals gives aligns you with them. You can create a hyper focused brand personality that crafts it’s message, product, and services towards those individuals in a way that speaks directly to them — what they want to hear, at the right time in their lives, fostering trust and can build lasting relationships.
Avatars goes beyond statistical data and categorization of individuals. With avatars, you want to get and understanding of their life circumstances. Where are they in their journey when your product or service is right for them? What are the challenges they may have finding or knowing if your product is a good fit? What do they fear about their current situation that your solution alleviates? How can you get them closer to achieving their ultimate goals in life? When doing this in workshops, we go through a host of categories to dive deeper into who this person is.
We’re genuinely interested. Putting this much energy and effort into narrowing down our customers affords us the ability to make meaningful deep connections with people. The outcomes from having solid avatars shapes how you reach out, treat, and service your customers. Think about a product or service where you said, “Wow, this gets me.” — this is how they do it.
Personas and avatars are not a silver bullet, but one of many golden little bullets that can help make every aspect of your business hyper focused on your customers. Leaving no stone unturned. That sounds like a business I would want to work with.
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