DMI Class 2 — Custom Avatars
A very warm hello to all the Interns of Deepak’s Digital Marketing Internship. I’m Nergis and this is my report for class 2.
Let me start by wishing everyone here a very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year. May you all achieve a large percentage of all the goals you have set for yourself.
Coming to class 2. Deepak started by informing us that he is currently not starting a whatssap group for us. And honestly, I’m quite happy with that. I’m not particularly enamoured with whatssap groups because 1.) I’m already a part of too many — immediate family group of my husband, daughter, daughter in law and son , my siblings with their families group, husbands siblings with families, cousins from dad’s side, another one from mom’s side, college group, school group, oh God it just goes on and on, and I’m sure it’s the same for everyone too. Secondly, I’ve found that very often the group members get totally carried away, forwarding irrelevant stuff, and with such a big group it’s going to be very difficult for Deepak or any other admin to monitor the content. Plus, we already are connected on facebook and on Telegram and that’s working quite well, I think.
Before starting with the content for class 2, which was going to be ‘Custom Avatars’, Deepak reminded us to take a moment to express gratitude for all that we have. Indeed, one can never do enough of that. We are blessed and we should never forget to thank the universe and the almighty for it.
The other thing Deepak shared with us before starting the teaching part, was that an amazing 87% of interns had completed their 1st assignment. 87% ! I knew that was fabulous (because I’ve been a part of innumerable online courses myself {sheepish face} that I’ve not finished yet) but I didn’t know how fabulous. I did a little research and found that online course completion rates are shockingly as low as an average of 15% — ranging between 5% to 40% generally. I also found that incentives could, as much as triple the success rates, and monetary rewards converted much better.
However, before we pat ourselves on the back, let us also remember that this is only the first class assignment we are talking about. The rates do tend to fall drastically as classes go by. But like I said in my class 1 report blog post, this internship is quite unlike any other I have ever done, and believe me I’ve taken a lot on online courses in a multitude of interests. Earning back a good amount of reward for completing each assignment is a HUGE motivation. And its human nature to love to get gifts and free stuff. However rich a person may be, he or she will always be delighted to receive unexpected gifts.
An amusing incident comes to mind here. 2 weeks back my husband ordered something on swiggy or zomato, don’t remember which one. After he had placed the order, he realised that he could have applied a discount coupon of Rs 100. So he cancelled the order and placed it again. But now he couldn’t apply that particular discount coupon because it was a ‘first order’ coupon. He put some feedback into the app, he called up their customer care and spent almost an hour trying to reason with them, arguing with them, getting angry — trying to get them to reduce Rs 100 from that order. Finally I told him, Really Gaurav, what’s wrong with you, its 100 bucks for heaven’s sake! Just let it be. We did have a hearty laugh over it later, but the point I’m trying to make here is that — its fascinating, what people will do to get something free! It’s not even about the money sometimes, it’s just that delight at getting a gift or discount or something free. And that’s the basic human nature that we as marketers must know how to tap.
Deepak also motivated us by sending us our scores as well as feedback for our assignments, again, another first in any online course I’ve ever done. Humans like human contact. They need approval and a feeling of being appreciated. Getting individual scores and personal feedback makes me want to do better the next time. Never mind even if we make mistakes. Like he says, ‘mistakes are future benefits’!
Ok so getting on with our topic of learning for class 2. Deepak expanded on the concept we learnt in class 1 that ‘Digital Marketing is more about Marketing and not so much about Digital’.
Today’s core concept is that ‘Marketing is about good conversations’. To be a good marketer, you have to learn to be a good communicator. And if you cannot converse well 1 to 1, then you’re really going to find it difficult to converse 1 to many.
One of the best ways to be a good converser is to be yourself, be natural, be transparent, be real. Be as you would be with your close friends. If you are fake, or pretend to be someone you are not, people will eventually see through you. Whereas, if you are authentic, even though you might rub some people the wrong way, by and large, you will be appreciated for your honesty and more important, people will trust you and be drawn to you.
As you have more life experiences, you will also become a better marketer. One of my favourite quotes is that ‘There is no substitute for experience’. Although I say that for doctors generally, it applies to everything. And you don’t get experience sitting within the 4 corners of your house. You get experience when you go out and meet new people, discourse with them, exchange experiences with them.
I don’t plan to leave any jewellery for my kids, or any riches or property. They have been gifted instead a good education (though I believe more dropouts are making it big these days — just kidding, I’m still of the thought that there’s also no substitute for a good education — your education will never go waste, it will come in use somewhere, always), they have the ability to think for themselves and they are encouraged to widen their horizon by travelling to new places. My daughter, who is in her final semester of Masters in neuro-psychology, just takes off on her own the minute she has more than 3 days holidays. Right now she’s in Nepal incidentally. Of course I don’t think I can travel alone like she does, it’s a new thing of this generation I believe, travelling alone. But most of you guys are of that generation — so travel, travel as much as you can. Don’t wait for someone to join you. Like Kunashni, my daughter says, ‘Mom how will I make new friends if I keep going with the same people all the time’! Visit one new country every year, and if you can’t do that, visit one new state in India. Nothing will broaden your horizon and your vision more than travel. Communicate and converse with new people, India is a vast pool of places and people that will take you a long long time to go through, from east to west and north to south!
So getting back to communicating well, sit down for a moment and think — who are you most comfortable and natural communicating with? It’s normally a good friend, right? And why is that? It’s because you know him very well. You know what he likes, what he dislikes, what are his problems, his secret aspirations and more.
Therefore, if you want to communicate in a similar manner with your customers, you have to get to know them intimately. You should be able to talk to them as if you are talking to each one privately. But how will you do that when you have a thousand customers, or rather you want a 1,000 customers, or 10,000 customers.
Yes, you can do that very easily, once you have created a custom avatar for your target customer, a custom persona for the ideal customer you want. Because when you start communicating with that one custom persona, each of those 1,000 or 10,000 people will believe you are talking to them individually.
Custom Avatars are made up of demographics and psychographics. Demographics would include physical characteristics like their age, gender, marital status, location, income details etc., whereas Psychographics focuses more on psychological characteristics like their goals, motivation, vision, fears, aspirations, their pain points, their priorities in life etc.
When you create a custom avatar, you need to focus on the center of the results chart, not on the border. Now, what does that mean? Well, when you see the results of your custom avatar survey, you will find that a major percentage of the results will fall in sync. There will of course be other results that stand at the periphery of the circle. But our focus should be at the center not at the periphery.
To make us understand better, Deepak shared a custom avatar form that he had created and we all filled it out. After we saw all the results, he then gave us 8 criteria and asked us to state what % of those criteria were applicable to each of us. From the people who fell into the ‘100% right’ category, he chose Sagar Bhalerao to be his custom avatar. He then actually spoke to Sagar, asked him some questions to understand more about what he was interested in, what he was looking at in terms of the internship and what he wanted to do after that.
The whole point of this exercise is to know exactly who to converse with when we talk to our customers. So that, when you address your custom avatar, you are actually addressing all the people who fell into the centre of your customer avatar profile circle.
The whole exercise of filling out the form, seeing the results and selecting the customer avatar was really exciting. Our assignment for the day was to write about day 2, create a customer avatar survey form and get it filled by at least 2 people in our niche or even in any other niche.
My customer avatar is Dilip Raju . He is 34 years old, married, stays in Coimbatore. He is an undergraduate, in a job currently earning 6–10 lakhs annually. He is an ambivert, has been an average student in school, has not bought online products or courses and his biggest fear is securing the future of his family and of losing his job.
I had about 8 results to my survey at the time of writing this. However, I was not very satisfied with the results. I realised, after I saw the results, that it is far more important to concentrate on the psychographics than on the demographics of my customer avatar, at least in my niche, which is make money online. The reason is that demographics can change, but the psychographics will generally stay the same. Therefore, to really know my customer, I should make more effort to understand him or her from the inside, ie the personality traits, rather than from the outside or physical characteristics. With the world becoming smaller and smaller with the onset of the digital age, and everything becoming accessible online, the demographics, although good to know, might not weigh that much in importance as compared to the psychographics. If I am able to understand the goals, dreams, vision, fears and aspirations of Dilip, I will be much better equipped to converse with him, regardless of whether he has a car or not, whether he stays in Coimbatore or Calicut or whether he is 35 or 53. My customer who is 35, unmarried, stays in Kolkata and doesn’t have a car or credit card might have very similar goals, aspirations and fears regarding my niche as might a 57 year old married woman in Mumbai with grown up kids, car and multiple credit cards.
Again, I’m not saying demographics are not important, just saying that I feel it might be more relevant and advisable to give more weightage to psychographics. Therefore, I plan to remodel my survey form to include more psychograhic questions to really go deep into understanding what makes my respondents tick. I’m eager and excited to see what will come out in those results!
We ended the class with the assignment details and date of next class announced, which happens to be today, by the way.
Looking forward to Class 3! Cheers!
Stats Research Sources :
http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
