Defining Your Customer Avatar is Crucial to Your Marketing Success
Running Facebook ads can be a game changer in your business. But if you find that you are running ads on Facebook these days and you do not know who your ideal avatar is, then you are most likely simply contributing to the Zuckerberg fund, and it’s likely not going to work out very well for you.
Yikes, that may not feel too great to read.
My name’s Jody. I’m the Founder of Social Charlie, and we specialize in Facebook ads for high ticket coaches and consultants. Now, more than ever, we need to know who our ideal avatar is. Long gone are the days when you would ask someone, “Who’s your ideal avatar?” And they reply, “Oh everybody. We target women over 30”.
You Need Crystal Clear Messaging
You absolutely must have your avatar dialed in and have your messaging dialed into them too. You need to know those things that is keeping that ideal avatar awake at night. You’ve probably heard that before but sometimes we need this reinforced. Because dialing into our avatar, really taking the time to research them and know them, can take time. It can be a bit of a lengthy exercise, but it is well worth it.
Especially if you’re a high ticket coach, chances are if you’ve got people that are applying and you’re working with people, they’re filling out forms, you are getting a gold mine of information there on those application forms.
Use Their Own Words About Themselves
If you’re asking the right questions, which hopefully you are, people are actually writing down what their pain points are, what their struggles are, what they want to resolve, where they would like to be in 12 months or even in five years time. You have that data right there that you can pull into your ad copy. Do you see the power in that? The exact words that your ideal client is coming to you with, use it in the ad copy.
Some people find that when you’re initially talking to people or a potential client, they don’t exactly know what it is that they’re wanting to resolve. They may present with this pain of not having enough leads. “I can’t get enough leads. I need more leads. I need more leads.”
So, you need to go a bit deeper and go, “Well, why do they need more leads?” That’s where talking with your ideal clients, you’re going to find out why they want more leads. Is it because they’re lying in bed at night stressing about the bill that’s coming at the end of the month, and they need more clients so that they can afford to live, to put food on the table and to pay their rent. That’s the nuts and bolts of it.
While they will have a desire to assist people and serve them well, obviously they do still need to live. So therefore they do need to make sales, and they make sales by getting more leads in. So it’s knowing not just the surface level issue that they may present with, but digging much deeper, by resolving this surface level issue, what is it that you hope to achieve?
That is where talking to them, getting the data from those forms, and being able to put those words that other people have said back into your copy. When people read the ads, that they’re going to say, “Wow, they’re talking directly to me. Yes, that’s exactly where I am at.” It’s not just the I need more leads struggle. It’s going deeper than that, and connecting with that.
Identify Which Avatar To Focus On And Go All In
And to do that, you then also need to identify which avatar you are targeting. So you may likely have a few different avatars that you could target. Now I’m just going to use me as a case study here, or as an example, for this whole experience that I’ve just recently gone through, as I’ve launched my new training and a new program. I had to identify who my ideal client was and who we were going to start marketing to first. There are a number of ideal clients that I had for my program for Facebook Ad Intensive. The FBI as we call it.
We needed to identify who we were going to target first of all, because until we did that, for me and also my team, it was a bit like, “Oh okay, this is the message for this person. This is the message here.” We were really confused in our messaging and how we could sort of umbrella a few people in one. And while the avatar that we select, and the messaging there, will still attract other people, we needed to dial into this one avatar.
Now, the potential avatars, we had three offhand to start with that we could be targeting. One would be coaches and course creators. People who are in the trenches. They’re DIY-ing their ads themselves. Maybe they’re starting out, but they’re wanting to learn Facebook ads. They don’t have the funds to go to a freelancer or an agency, or maybe they have and they don’t want to let go of that part of their business just yet. So it’s targeting coaches and course creators who are wanting to know more about Facebook ads and how to get leads for their program.
Two would be Facebook freelancers. So people who run Facebook ads for other people in the coaching space, or maybe not in the coaching space, and they want to learn a good system of how to run ads for this niche.
And thirdly, and my heart is really with this crowd, is career-change opportunities. Like for myself, that’s where I started off six or seven years ago as I was looking for a career change, wanting to work from home because going off to the office wasn’t suiting me and my family.
It’s very scary. So that career change opportunity for people who are wanting that lifestyle balance, where they don’t have to trek off to work, where they can work from home, and have a legitimate opportunity serving other entrepreneurs by running Facebook ads and marketing and building funnels, and all that kind of thing. So career change opp, freelancers and coaches and course creators.
So that was three different avatars. So I had to dial into which one we’re going to start targeting to first. So for us that was targeting, okay, we’re going with coaches and course creators. But again, we particularly don’t just target to any coach or course creator. We’re particularly focused on high ticket offers. So high ticket coaches. So again, from that niche, and from that one avatar, we’ve gone down to a sub-niche, to a sub-avatar, a particular one that we’re going, okay, it’s high ticket coaches. It’s not just any coaches. We’re not particularly here for people who are only just selling $27 products, $97 products, and they don’t have anything on the back end. Those offers are fine and they are a great part of a high ticket coaching funnel, especially with the way Facebook is working today.
There’s a lot of people going on, “Oh it’s a Facebook nightmare!!. You can’t afford to do the low ticket offers anymore because you’re not making any money on Facebook.” Well, it’s actually a pretty good idea to offset your ad spend with some lower ticket offers to get people on board so that they can learn more from you, see what your teaching style is like, establish more trust with them after they’ve come in and they’ve purchased your product, and therefore they start a natural ascension to want to work with you. So that when you’re getting on sales calls, they already know who you are, they already know what you’re about, and they’re just saying, “Here. Here’s my card.” Rather than trying to just get them to see an ad and watch a webinar and convinced right away. I’ll admit that it is indeed a bit of a harder sell there. But that’s a message for another time.
So once you’ve figured out who your avatar is, look at the various avatars in that one avatar. You may have a couple there as well. And with that you’re going to craft that messaging, perhaps three different sort of messaging. So you’ll have ads that may target this first avatar or the second avatar or the third sub-avatar, to really get that message across to them. Now you can begin to see which of those starts to perform the best and start targeting that audience.
So identifying your avatar, knowing what their pain points are, putting that into the messaging in your ad copy and then watch and see what content the people are engaging with. This will help point you in the right direction for creating more Facebook ads for that audience, and then also enable you to scale, because there’s no point scaling an ad that people aren’t clicking on, or it’s got a really high CPM or really high cost per click. That’s Facebook just letting you know that this isn’t working for this audience.
Customize Your Audience Sizes and Test Headlines
And with Facebook loving broad audiences these days, like millions of people. We used to do like 100,000, 200,000, was a good size. A few million people is a good audience size. It is more imperative than ever that your copy is resonating with them, that you have a captivating headline. And rather than doing all these various split tests on image A, image B, image C, image F, make sure that your copy is dialed in and do more testing like with the headline, that you’ve got an effective headline hook. Yes, the image will stand out in the newsfeed straight away. That’s what people notice first of all and then they’ll go down to the headline. This is one more reason to make sure that you are sticking with trends and strategies that are working today. Marketing strategy from 3 years ago on Facebook ads will not serve you very well.
Make sure that that headline packs a punch, that it is bringing the attention of your ideal avatar. They’re going, “Oh, that’s me.” And that they then are encouraged, or they have the desire, to go and read the rest of your ad copy, which is drawing them in even more, and then they’ll click and go over to your site.
Knowing your avatar, knowing their pain points, agitating that pain point just slightly so that you’re stirring it up, so that they’re going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s me” and introducing yourself to them and how you have a solution for them is an essential part in effective ad copy these days.
So I hope you found that of value.
Drop a comment below and I’ll circle back and answer them for you if you’ve got any questions about that.
But if you want to know more about avatars and messaging, I’ve got a ton of information over in my free Facebook group.
Just head over to http://jodymilward.com/group, and you’ll get that information there. There’s videos there that you’ll be able to dig into, and that’ll help you with your avatar and your copy and creating winning Facebook ads.
Until next time,
Jody
