Complete Transcript – Episode 7

Building Your Customer Avatar: Understanding Your Ideal Audience for Affiliate Marketing Success

Hi – and Welcome to the Smart Affiliate Marketing Podcast.

My name’s Paul – and in this episode, we’re going to start building your customer avatar, helping you understand your audience so that you can target your messages and communications effectively to get maximum engagement, build rapport and make those affiliate sales!

So why is it important for you to understand your ideal customer?

Firstly, it helps you target your messaging. You are able to target your messaging and communications so that you build rapport with them.

If you know what they like and what they don’t like, their pain points, their goals, you’re better placed to be able to help them achieve their goals and move away from their pain points.

It will help you be consistent in your messaging and branding. It will build trust between you and your ideal audience, and overall, it will help you connect more deeply with your ideal audience, and ultimately drive the growth of your business.

So how do we create your customer avatar?

There are three areas I concentrate on when creating a customer avatar.

The first is demographic information, the second is psychographic information, and the third is behavioural information. Now don’t let these big terms put you off. I’m going to briefly discuss each of these.

Demographic information is the importance of identifying things like age, gender, location, income and occupation. This will help build a picture of your ideal audience, enabling you to communicate better with them.

The next type of data we need is the psychographic information. So these are things like your customers, ideal values, their interests, their lifestyles, hobbies and pain points, with the pain points being perhaps one of the most important and the behavioral information we are seeking is what they do online, how they use social media, how they consume content, and what tends to be their purchasing triggers.

Understanding all of this will give you a big advantage in your marketing efforts. So how do we obtain this information about our target audience?

There are a number of ways, and the first one, if you have this available, is to use customer relation management and analytics tools on your existing website or CRM platforms to find the information your software has already obtained for you.

Also, you can look at sales data.

You can conduct surveys and polls with your audience. So you could send out an email or ask a poll on social media, for example.

Another way to get this data is to engage on social media so you can listen and monitor the groups where your ideal customers hang out.

You can use tools like HootSuite or Brandwatch to help track mentions, hashtags and discussions relevant to your niche. You can directly interact with your followers, responding to comments and questions, join in relevant groups or discussions to help you understand their interests and opinions.

If you’re just starting out, you could analyze your competitors, customers, how they engage with them on social media and websites, look at who is interacting with them, the type of content that gets the most engagement and the feedback from their audience.

You could also join online communities and forums within your niche, on platforms such as Reddit, Quora and so on.

You can use online tools and resources such as Google keyword planner or any other keyword tool. You can use audience insight tools on platforms such as Facebook, and you can use Amazon to find books within your niche and look at the online reviews and testimonials, because often these will give you an insight into what your audience is thinking.

I’ve given you a lot of data there, and this is basically your homework between now and the next episode to start looking for this data and to build your customer avatar.

So in summary, we’re looking for demographic information, psychographic information and behavioral information in order to build up a good picture of what your ideal audience actually looks like.

Once you’ve gathered all of this information, it’s good to craft a profile of your ideal customer using this information. It’s a good idea to give your avatar a name, a personality, and even let them have a quote or USP that reflects their desires and frustrations. This will give you a great overview of your ideal audience, and it’s something that you can refer to in all of your marketing efforts, and when you have your customer avatar, it’s going to help you to create targeted content messaging and product recommendations that resonate with your ideal audience.

The better you know your audience, the better you are placed to be able to help them, and it will enable you to select the right affiliate programs and marketing channels for their particular needs.

Here’s a list of tools that you can use to help build your customer avatar:

1) Google Analytics. You can use this to track website behaviour.

2) Facebook Audience Insights, this provides demographic and psychographic data about Facebook users.

3) HubSpot, they have a buyer persona tool that you can use, and this will guide the creation of a detailed buyer persona with templates.

4) Survey Monkey is number four, and you can use this to create and distribute surveys and collect customer feedback.

5) Number five is Typeform. This is an engaging survey tool used to collect detailed customer information.

6) Number six is SEMrush, S, E, M, R, U, S, H, this is basically a keyword tool which offers insights into search behavior and competitive analysis.

7) Number seven is Hootsuite Insights. This tool basically tracks brand mentions and trends across social media platforms.

This is a brief list other tools are available. Feel free to Google any particular tools you’re interested in to find the most suitable one for you.

To help you further with your customer avatar creation, here is an ideal customer avatar for a fictional person in the health and well-being niche:

 After some careful research, the avatar has been put together as this fictitious person:

Name: Hannah Smith,

Age 34

Gender: female,

Marital status: married children, one child who’s four years old.

Location: lives in an urban location, New York City, for example,

Education: has a bachelor’s degree.

Occupation: she’s a marketing manager, and her income is $80,000 per annum.

Psychographics: on the personality side she is motivated, health conscious and environmentally aware. Her values are health sustainability, family, well-being and personal growth.

Her interests are yoga, organic cooking, running and mindfulness practices.

Her lifestyle is considered active. She balances work and family life, prioritizes self care and wellness. Her hobbies are reading wellness blogs, attending fitness classes and meal prepping.

Behaviour: her shopping preferences are indicating she has a preference for online shopping for convenience. She reads product reviews and values quality over price. She has a brand loyalty and is loyal to brands that align with her values, particularly those offering organic and eco friendly products.

Media consumption: she follows health and wellness influencers on Instagram, subscribes to health newsletters and listens to wellness podcasts.

Technology usage: she is active on social media, uses health and fitness apps, prefers shopping on mobile devices, and probably has a watch similar to a Google Fitbit.

Her pain points are time management. She does struggle to find the time for self care due to a busy schedule with work and family. She has health concerns and worries a bit about maintaining a balanced diet and finding trustworthy supplement brands. She also has product overload and feels totally overwhelmed by the number of health products on the market, making her unsure which ones to choose.

Onto her goals now and in terms of health, her goal is to maintain a healthy lifestyle, improve her energy levels and support her family’s well being.

Her personal goals are continued personal growth and self improvement, and she aims to Manage stress effectively.

She also has professional goals and is looking to advance in her career whilst maintaining a work life balance.

From this avatar, you are then able to create your marketing messages.

For example, a primary marketing message to somebody like Hannah would be: “Healthy Life Supplements are your trusted partner in achieving a balanced and vibrant life. Our organic, eco friendly products fit seamlessly into your busy schedule, ensuring you and your family get the nutrients you need”.

You can see how crafting a tailor-made message like this will resonate much higher with your ideal audience than if you don’t create an avatar, and you don’t necessarily understand them as well as you would having created an avatar.

Another message could be “join our community of health conscious individuals who prioritize quality, sustainability and well being, stay energized and focused with healthy life”.

Again, this is a highly targeted and well crafted message to resonate with your audience and to get them to join your following, and you will have established the preferred communication channels, such as email, social media, websites, mobile apps, for example, helping you stay in front of your ideal people.

And overall, this is going to help you in your marketing efforts to effectively reach and engage with your ideal people, and it will foster a strong customer relationship, which is only going to help your affiliate sales.

A useful example of this is perhaps when I started in internet marketing, the first niche I went into was the anxiety niche, having been a sufferer myself. Because I’d been a sufferer, I thought I knew everything I needed to know to connect with my customers, but I only had my own point of view and how it had affected me, so my marketing wasn’t really resonating with my target audience because I was only looking at it from a personal perspective.

It wasn’t until I did some online research and crafted a customer avatar that I achieved any success whatsoever within the anxiety niche.

So I do highly recommend that you take the time to understand your potential ideal audience, because this is only going to help you build relationships, help them know like and trust you, help you know their pain points and how you can help them achieve their goals.

Because, as I’ve said in previous podcasts, you have to help your people in order to become successful yourself.

So, it can be tempting to avoid doing this step, but this is one of the key steps to success within affiliate marketing, and if you’re determined to succeed, then this is a step you really have to take.

You’ve found your niche – now go ahead and create your ideal customer avatar.

Do the job well, and it will help you immensely.

You can also tweak this ongoing.

It doesn’t have to be static and remain the same forever as trends and industries change.

You can tweak your avatar accordingly.

Don’t think that this has to be set in stone.

It is a movable feast.

Hopefully, by now, you’ve chosen your niche, and you’ll be on your way to building your ideal customer avatar.

Which leads us on to the next step, which will be discussed in the next episode, and that is how to find ideal offers to promote to your customer avatar.

In the next episode, we’ll be looking at this and how to use affiliate marketing networks for this purpose.

Feel free to like, follow and subscribe to this podcast so you don’t miss an episode.

Please take the time to create your customer avatar, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Smart Affiliate Marketing Podcast. Bye for now!