Module 1, Step 3:
Create Personas (Avatars) for each
Just as we refined the market that we served by finding our best specialty (or niching down), we’re now going to do the same with the audience that we serve.
Our goal is to serve more cooperative customers in a mutually respected relationship and less customers that dominate our time with frustrations while beating us up on price.
To do this, we need to craft our messaging clearly and concisely to our best customers. As such we will be identifying our Unique Customer Personas (UCPs) in this section. These are sometimes called Avatars, Buyer Personas, Marketing Personas… all the same thing. We’re putting a definitive identity to our ideal customers.
Our goal isn’t to alienate ALL the bottom feeder prospects. Many will find our online presence, compare it to our competition, and move forward with us simply because they feel a connection and trust factor.
Many good customers are otherwise bad customers when they feel they’re taking a chance on a company simply because the company gave the lowest price. In other words — we create that customer with our brand messaging, our expectations, our trust-building factors, our online reviews (more on that later!), and finally… our actual service!
Make no mistake — we have to be committed to offering the best service to accompany our best brand. Anything less will come off as inauthentic and prospects read that a mile away.
1. Unique Customer Personas
Specifically identifying our Unique Customer Personas (UCP) will guide our brand in the right direction. They will help us choose the kind of photos that we use on our website and social media. Most of all, identifying with our UPCs guides our marketing copy — we’ll be able to speak more definitively about our offerings as if we’re speaking to that real person in the flesh.
No more vague generalizations and industry buzzwords. No more copy/pasting copy from competitors. When we really know who we’re talking to, we know what to say to them.
Assuming that you’ve been in your industry long enough to know who you’ve enjoyed working with and who you haven’t, we’re going to embark on concisely identifying a UCP for each target audience that we defined earlier.
Pretend that this is your ALMOST perfect world and you can pick a customer from your past that will be cloned a hundred times over and you will work for them about 50% of the time (the other 50% will be made of good customers mixed with challenging customers – this is your ALMOST perfect world).
The UPC that you’ll define in this worksheet should be a real, actual person that you’ve worked for. We’re going to identify them specifically right down to their first name. If you have a few different target audiences (probably), make one UCP for each.
When finished, we’ll have a fully defined person that we’ll use as our reference point for building the rest of our Best Brand.