Hi Sarah! If you’re reading this I guess you are not in the desert and raving at Burning Man yet. I also know you might be busier than usual and you miss going to a new art show. So this picture is for you!
For those still reading, the above is my first customer avatar. I created it from scratch. It will attract the right kind of audience for my site and I now know it. I was just refusing to let go of my spreadsheets and design the hell out of my newborn site!
But then I became a creator.
A true creator, not doing work for works’ sake.
I divested myself of hope and made luck my own.
I was trying too hard to create a marketing funnel from scratch but was missing on the obvious. I had no audience in mind. Sure, it was vague at some point. But that lack of clarity was also bringing itself in other areas of my venture, social and personal life.
I was not present. I was the one in the funnel all along.
You see, building a persona to define your audience, like I just did with Sarah is the first and can’t stress it enough — the utmost important thing you need to do when creating a marketing funnel. Without personas to populate it, what would be of the magnificent machine? Just a poor automation, hours invested and little to no return.
The persona or customer avatar is a natural way that shows you the right path you need to take to speak to your audience. And to make sure it is listening.
Now let’s dive deeper into the subject and really learn something really new today.
I first met the “Persona” term in my mid twenties, in a semi sabbatical getaway that included Africa and Italy. In Africa you would find these totemic, tribal masks that vendors were trying hard to push you into buying. No bell rang at that time. But then I arrived in Italy and coincidentally right at Fonte Avellana, the place where Dante wrote part of the Purgatory. He used “Persona” to indicate our needing of masks.
So you see, persona does not equal person. We are still too attached. It is a synonym for “mask”.
How much of our purchasing intent, willpower, social status or peer approval stems from this “mask”. How many personas do you think we possess? It is very easy to lose yourself in this mirror like game, thing which Dante beautifully expressed in the Divine Comedy.
But in reverse.
You see, he begins to question the nature of his reality which puts him back and out of the rabbit hole: “Nel mezzo del camin de la mia vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura. Che la diritta via era smarrita.”
How can we truly engage with our users if we do not know their masks?
If they are hidden from us, they are hidden for the world itself.
Setting this up, filters persona avatars correctly. You dial and there is tone. Thus you attract the right people involuntarily doing a SEO basic:
putting user query + document relevance together.
Search engines love this.
So, when creating your first customer avatars, start by asking yourself basic questions about your target: where do they live, what are their buying objections, what are your answers to those buying objections, what call to action can you cater specifically to the person you are targeting, what hobbies does your customer avatar have and on and on. The more detailed and granular, the better and harder you will attract.
Like a magnet. And these are the true lead magnets.
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If you’d like to check out the art show mentioned in the photo credit.
