subject: Focus Your Info Marketing With Customer Avatars by:Neil Asher [print this page] How well do you know your customers? You capture a lot of data about them. You know what information products they buy from you. But how much more do you know?
For example, do you know where your customers live? Can you tell how old they are? Are they mostly male or female? Fat or thin? Tall or short? Just how much do you really know about them?
I always say that successful information marketing must be based on building relationships with individual human beings. When you adopt that philosophy and apply it to your entire information product business, you really need to get close to your customers. That means knowing them better than anyone else they do business with through Internet marketing.
With that in mind, I suggest that you create what I call a customer avatar. You need to combine all of your customers together in your mind, and make them into one person. You can use averages, or modal classes, or generalizations, or just pick out one person you feel is representative of everyone elsewhatever works best for you.
I've heard that they actually do this at American Express, the credit card company, in their marketing department. They have life-size cardboard cut-outs that represent the quintessential Gold Card Member and Green Card Member. The two have got different faces and ages; they wear different styles of clothing. The details go right down to the types of wristwatches they wear. You might feel like you have actually met one of them.
You don't have to go that far, of course, but you do need to have a clear picture of your customer avatar in your mind. And when you write an e-mail or put together a script or develop a new information product, you should talk directly to that person, and only that person, just as if he or she were sitting in front of you.
It's as if you're having a private dialogan active, first-person singular conversation. Talk to your customer avatar naturally. Speak as if you're talking to them in person, not writing formally. Then, as you design banner ads, links, affiliate programs, landing pages, sales letters, e-mail follow-ups, and all of your information products, do them all in the same voicetalking to that ONE person.
Once you streamline everything you do, focusing on your customer avatar, your business will seem like it was literally built for one individual, your best customer. That's when you start getting traffic and start building your list. That's the way to begin relationship building.
Then later, when a million people become good customers and come visit your website, or click on your links, or download your free reports, or watch your videos or whatever, they will all be saying the same thing. They'll say, "This feels like it was made just for me."
That's what I like to call the feeling of "You Get Me." You might want to write those words down: You Get Me. When someone feels like you "get" them, that's when they trust you. That's when they respond to you. That's when they buy your information products.
So go take a little time to figure out who your customer avatar is in your mind. If it helps, draw a picture of him or her on a piece of paper and post it next to your computer or where you work. Then, build your entire system for that one person and start driving traffic to it. If you do that, you'll build a business much faster and much more profitably, and I guarantee that the customers will love you for it.
About the author
Neil Asher (http://www.neilasher.com/freestuff.htm) has built five multi-million dollar companies from zero, including one he took to $8 million in sales in under two years. He has created and sold successful franchises in England, Italy, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. Visit his web site for access to 17 FREE videos, 6 FREE books and two hours of audio training, revealing "How To Make BIG Money Selling Information Products On The InternetEven If You Don't Have A Website And You've Never Sold Anything On The Internet Before."
