Do You Know Who Your Avatar Is? INS 27

You’ve got to be able to market to right target audience

You’re marketing everyday via your website, Facebook ads, Twitter posts, and podcast if you have one. Pretty much all of your offline and online endeavors are spent marketing in some form or fashion.

If you’re posts, images, audio recordings, video, or newsletters are directed toward your avatar, which is ultimately your target audience, then you will get interest in your product or service. You’re speaking directly to them and they’re listening.

For RNFM Radio and Innovative Nurse, we know EXACTLY who our target audience is. Not only are we speaking to nurses (primarily), but we’re also sharing insights on career advice, personal branding, and entrepreneurship. We have firsthand knowledge of the pain points and actually know that they exist. It’s unlikely we’d be contacted or followed by a community of non-healthcare professionals (except this does happen and has resulted in a new launch as a mention on this podcast).

You’ll have a better understanding of where to spend your efforts and dollars

I know where my avatar is and you should too. If you know that your avatar isn’t on Twitter, then it’s likely that much of your marketing efforts spent there will not go far. However, if you’ve dialed in that they’re on Facebook, well then much of your efforts should be spent there, and right now Facebook ads are a bargain compared to other forms of advertising.

Niching down is definitely fine, but you’ve got to go deep

Being able to niche down will certainly help you dial in some of that focus and your service offerings, but it’s much more than that. With your avatar, you’ve got to go deep. You’ve got to reach into their lives, what they like to do, their fears, ultimately what matters to them. Both the niche and the avatar are important here.

How do you introduce a friend or family member?

When you introduce a friend or family member to someone, you likely know a lot about them. You go into detail about them. You may not necessarily start with their fears, however what you’ll likely do is talk about their interests and what they do for a living. It’s these details that can help that initial introduction grow into something deeper even if it’s for a few moments, but this kind of detail will help you create that connection with your business.

1. Demographics

• Where does she/he live?
• What’s his/her name?
• What does he/she look like?
• What kind of personality are we talking about here?
• How old is he/she?
• What does he/she do for a living (in this case, nurses)?
• What does fun look like for this person?

2. Pain points

• What’s her biggest desire? (To switch up her career and have freedom to choose)
• What’s her biggest problem? (Work related stress, time management: getting it all done – there’s little time for healthy meals, not enough time with family)
• How can you help her right now? (I could create and give something of value like a short e-book on work life balance for the busy professional, however this podcast is also a good example)

3. Where is my avatar hanging out

• What events are they participating in?
• What online forums do they use?
• If they’re on Facebook what pages do they like?
• When they’re doing an online search what are they looking for?
• Do they prefer video over podcast, or both?
• Does this avatar like to be found online easily and do they actively engage?

Our personal experience with our avatar

So it’s obvious (as stated above) that we have dialed in on our avatar and I’m going to share with you a case study that I ran just a few months ago.

I created an Avatar of who I wanted to target as a potential audience member for those desiring to start a small business. Now since we’ve been doing this awhile this really came easy to us, but I’ll share with you how it helped us get more granular.

Keep in mind that we understand there’s a large pool of potentials out there, but we literally made up who we were after based on some data that we had mined over the years.

Sharon our avatar doesn’t just want to start a business, she wants this venture to benefit her entire family and set herself up to have some flexibility that she anticipates needing in the future as her kids get older and more involved in after school activities.

She loves the nursing field, but she also has many other personal interests both related and unrelated to her industry. We also know that she has a family, including young children, and when she gets a chance to spend more time with her family she feels more satisfied.

She wants to travel more, establish deeper friendships/relationships, and to have opportunities to engage in conversations that are more aligned with her interests.

We also know that she is a huge fan of using time management tools and has recently embraced the use of online and mobile apps to help her keep that busy personal and professional schedule in line. Ultimately she’d like to get to a place in her career where she can volunteer more time to her community, but to also have the time and financial resources to travel.

She wants to start a business and she knows that it will be challenging, but with the end goal in mind to have more personal time she envisions herself in a position where she will eventually be able to have a business that creates multiple streams of income, but allows much of it to be passive.

As you may be able to deduce, this creation process can go even deeper if you allow it, but at this point we were able to create a compelling call-to-action.

Now, would you be interested in a Facebook community or page that provides a resource for a topic like “Tips to get more personal time back in your life?..” Well, a few of these targeted ads with similar calls-to-action proved that there are apparently quite a number of people that feel stretched and just want to figure out how they can alleviate some of that demand and stress with their schedules.

How about a Pinterest board devoted to traveling tips and places to visit? You can create boards with inspiring visuals and content related to “How to actually travel on a budget and not compromise the quality of your experience.”

So, by actually confirming that this avatar exists, we know that we need to keep creating content around this subject matter. Sharon helped us get to this point and we want to appeal to “her.” (of course it can be a him, but you get the point.)

Sharon is smart and we know that we’re going to lose her with targeted content like “Work from your own home and make millions in just a couple of hours a day!” Of course, I know this might be extreme, but I’m sure you’ve seen something similar.

We create:

If we know that Sharon is a nurse and in a highly stressful job where emotions can run high, then we need the tone of our platform and community to not only be fun, but obviously friendly and inviting.

We want to make sure Sharon is going to have opportunities to connect with like-minded professionals looking for the same.  All engagement will be responsive, supportive, and encourage our members to provide value to each other through storytelling. We’re not here to over self-promote as a platform, but rather to promote the community’s endeavors through positive dialogue and social sharing.

Did I mention it should also be friendly? We’re going to be paying close attention to the energy in the group and help shift any variables that would likely steer us in a direction that was not supportive.

So we create realistic content, and add support and education with attainable goals that can be realized for the individual who is willing to devote their energy to building something extraordinary.

Now again, this is just a general basis of where and how to start creating your avatar as I can speak from experience to say that we’ve spent months in some cases dialing in on our avatar. We’ve also had to switch things up in the middle of our endeavors as we were missing our target audience. Just know that you need to get clear on your avatar to help drive the success of your customer and your business.

You are Nurse Rockstars!

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