Making Sales Is Easy When You Use A Targeted Customer Profile

 

The information you’re going to read in this article is literally the golden ticket to making more sales.

Yet so many affiliate marketers rush past this vital stage of planning.

And it’s only months later when affiliates have spent hundreds of hours or thousands of dollars creating content (that nobody wants to read) that marketers begin to realize the power of customer profiles.

If you don’t know what your target market wants—and I mean what they really want, not what you guess they want—then you cannot produce content that resonates with them and almost forces them to take action.

The number one reason why people don’t read content is because it does not represent who they are and the problems they’re trying to fix

 

A customer profile (sometimes called a customer avatar) is one of the best ways to help you create the kind of content that keeps your audience engaged long enough to convert them into buyers.

Only when you speak your audience’s language and show empathy for their pain do you begin to build up enough trust to offer them a solution to their problem.

But trust is fragile. You have to keep working hard to build up that trust, article by article, video by video, and social media post by social media post.

Every piece of content you create must show your readers you’re coming from a place of integrity and have their best interests in mind, only then do you continue to build trust.

And you can do all that if you take the time to create a detailed customer profile.

Plus you’ll be way out in front of thousands of other affiliate marketers who do nothing more than bombard their readers with stock images and $5 articles that do not connect with their audience.

The more you connect with your audience, the more they will start to trust you and believe you’re on their side, and that means you have a greater chance they’ll take the type of action you want them to take.

That action could be to click on an affiliate link, to submit an email address, or share an article on social media.

If people trust you, if people believe you’re on their side, then they will subconsciously be ready take the action you want them to take.

 

Let’s look at a real example of how answering questions you’re audience has and speaking their language works

 

Right now, I’m passing on hard-won advice to you, the reader (and affiliate marketer), on how to research and create a detailed customer profile.

And the choice of this article topic is not random.

A while back, I sent out an email asking for a list of what topics people wanted me to cover.

In other words, I’m answering a question my audience is asking.

As I answer the question, I’ll speak the same language as my audience.

I might use phrases like “churn & burn” or “rinse and repeat” or any other common sayings, phrases, or jargon that affiliate marketers use.

In other words, I’ll use the type of language my readers are familiar with to further build the connection and trust.

Then, I’ll answer other questions about creating customer profiles and avatars that you’re probably wondering about right now.

If I can do that, if I can answer questions you’ve got in your head right now, you’ll subconsciously begin to see me as an authority, which further increases trust, which, in turn, leads to a greater chance you’ll read this article all the way to the bottom of the page.

 

Similarities in websites’ visitors in all niches (stuff people don’t like)

 

Before I show you how to assemble a customer profile specific to your niche, I want to share with you some similarities all people have in every single niche.

And let’s use this article you’re reading now as a concrete example to help us understand these similarities.

Reading this article is not going to cost you any money, there’s no surprise affiliate link that is going to jump out and demand you click it and buy a piece of software vital to the creation of a customer profile. Nope. There is no sting in the tail. No nasty surprises are coming your way.

Remember people generally only like surprises when they’re fun. If you surprise your readers with a demand for cash or reveal that you’ve fooled them with a click bait headline, then you’re going to make them angry and lose some of the trust you’ve built up.

 

Other things to avoid that will make people stop reading your content and trust you less

 

• If your readers feel the only thing you’re interested in is selling without helping (in other words, you’re in it for the cash and nothing else)

• If your readers feel they’re not getting value from the article. Maybe the headline said one thing and the content talks about another thing

• If your readers feel there is no connection between you and them, that you’re some fly-by-night who knows less than zero about your niche, then people will stop reading your content

 

The Customer Profile Creation Process

You now know the number one reason you should research a customer profile is so you can create content that your audience devours, compelling them to take an action you want them to take.

One of the best ways to start this process is to stop thinking about your audience as a mass of people and begin to think of your audience as one person.

One person you are going to have a conversation with and offer a solution to a problem they have.

Let’s assume you’re in the relationship niche and the broadest possible classification of your target audience is “single females.”

Of course, that is far too broad and you if you attempt to market to such a wide audience, you’d fail (even billion dollar companies don’t market to audiences this wide).

I cannot stress how important this is.

You are not marketing to everyone.

You are marketing to only a small slice of a market.

And you do this by looking for commonalities that make this specific set (this market slice) of ‘single females’ perfect for the product you’re marketing.

(You have to know your product inside out to be able to match your target market’s needs to what your product offers).

Perfect for your product means finding things that these ‘single females’ have in common that is relevant and unique to the solution you’re offering.

For example, 18-year-old women probably don’t have the same kind of issues, feelings, and emotions about using a dating app as, say, a divorced, single mother of 40.

And if you are promoting BeIrresistible products, you can see by the demographics we’ve collected that the largest group of women interested in our products are aged 45 – 54.

That does not mean that you should ignore people younger or older, but you have a good starting point. You want to concentrate your efforts on finding out more about single women who are aged 40 plus.

So now our customer profile is getting more detailed.

The person you’re going to have a conversation with is now a “single, female aged 40+.”

We shall get into much greater depth about this person in a moment. First, though, lets give her our target customer a face so we can look at that face when we write our content.

Decide what they look like by using an image from this website. 

You can use the filter function, but I think it’s more fun to scroll through the list of faces until you find someone you like because you are going to write to that person each time you create a piece of content.
Now give the face a name and choose an approximate age.

I chose the following name and age to go with the face I picked.

Lana Steiner

Aged 47

 

Now, when you write content, you have a face and a name (a friend) that you’re speaking with. Of course, we need more details, and I’ll show you how to get those in a moment.

But the main point to keep in mind is this. When you write your content, you only want to talk about what it is like to be a single woman in her forties.

You don’t want to talk about anything else.

You want your reader to feel that every piece of content is for them and just for them.

You do this by digging further into who Lana Steiner is.

And you do this by researching women in her age range and finding out the commonalities.

Which I’m going to show you how to do in a moment, but before that, let’s consider the voice of your customer.

 

What is the voice of your customer?

At the ground level, what specific words and phrases are your customers using that reflect their needs.

Does your target audience use terms like:

  • Ghosting
  • Benching
  • Stashing
  • Haunting
  • Catch and Release
  • Bread crumbing
  • Sidebarring

Or do they simply say:

  • Single
  • Lonely
  • Chucked
  • Finished with

Believe me, it will make all the difference if you can find these power words.

Power words help you form a strong mental connection with your audience so you can talk to them like you are talking to a friend.

If you don’t talk to people using power words or with knowledge of their problems and speak to them as if they are your friends…

Then what you’re doing is almost like standing in the street shouting a message out loud to everyone walking past and hoping some of the right people will hear you.

Remember that it’s better to have 1000 motivated buyers than 100,000 unmotivated people who do nothing.

 

Join the conversation that is going on in peoples’ minds

There is a conversation going on in your customer’s head right now, and completing the detailed customer profile is going to let you tap directly into that conversation.

By the time you’ve completed the customer profile, you can, if you want, write out how that conversation would go if you sat down with them and had a conversation.

Remember that even though your content is published in the digital world, “analogue people” are reading your words and looking for answers to their questions.

Completing a customer profile is going to help you figure out your audiences’ motivations.

Why is your customer searching Google?

What outcome do they want?

If they want a relationship, why do they want a relationship?

Do they want a relationship so they have someone to grow old with?

So there is someone to help pay the bills?

So they have someone to take to parties?

So they are no longer seen as single women?

There is much more to a person’s motivation for finding a relationship than something as black and white as “I want to fall in love again.”

This is why good marketers immerse themselves into a customer’s life.

 

The biggest mistake a marketer can make is making assumptions about their target market

An assumption is a guess or guesses and when we guess we generally guess wrong. We guess wrong because our guesses are based on what we think, not what our target audience thinks.

Yet many affiliate marketers still make guesses of what they think their audience wants.

Let’s look at another market to prove the point about not making guesses or assumptions.

As a man who shaves everyday, it would be easy for me to make a guess about what problems men have with their razors.

However, my guess means nothing at all. It’s my opinion in my head, not necessarily the opinion of the market.

The only way to find out what men want from a razor is to find out the commonalities about people who use razors.

If I guess, I might focus all my attention on the act of shaving, whereas the biggest gripe might be (as the Dollar Shave Club found out) that razors are a pain to buy because they are locked in cabinets and hard-to-open packages.

So my guess that people want a better razor is wrong.

People want a better way to buy razors.

Dollar Shave Club did not guess what their audience wanted, they went and found out through research what their audience wanted, and that’s why the company was sold for around a billion dollars.

 

How To Create Your Detailed Customer Profile That Makes Selling 10X easier… Starting with How To Research On Reddit (even if you know nothing about Reddit)

Reddit is full of real people talking about real issues. It’s one of the ultimate go-to resources for market research.

Here is how you go about researching your niche.

First, type this search string into a new tab:

site:reddit.com/r/”SUBREDDITNAME”

But swap out “SUBREDDITNAME” for the name of a subreddit.

If you don’t know the name of a subreddit you can guess (using a broad name) and see what happens.

In this example, I’m going to search the subreddit “relationships.”

So this search string: site:reddit.com/r/SUBREDDITNAME

Becomes: site:reddit.com/r/RELATIONSHIPS

Next, I want to dig even deeper into subreddit itself.

So at the end of the search string, I add a phrase like: dating again at 40

So the full search string I use is this:

site:reddit.com/r/RELATIONSHIPS dating again at 40

Using the search string above I get these SERP results.

Here is the link to Reddit from the top search result.

But for ease, here is the information I’m looking at when I go to Reddit. And I’ve highlighted what I consider to be the most valuable information, including power words and phrases like: “I wish I could turn the clock back.”

Remember if enough people in your target market use the phrase “turn the clock back” then you know if you write an article called, “How To Turn The Clock Back On Your Dating Life” you’re speaking the language of your market.

But there is much, much more information we can get from this one post on Reddit and continue to build our customer profile.

From the one search, you can pull the following information before you start to read the replies.

 

  • Feels (mentally) younger than their true age
  • Feels (physically) younger than their true age
  • Worried about joining a dating site because of her age and what other people think of her being a widow (status)
  • Feels a lack of available options to her now that she is in her 40s
  • Avatar language: “Put myself on the market”
  • Age appears to be the biggest ‘mental problem’ this person has

You can do this research in the following order at the following places:

Reddit

Forums

Amazon Reviews

Google/blogs/articles/Q&A

 

How To Record And Collect All The Information You Find (Template sheet)

Make a copy of this Customer Profile Template and then use it to help you create your customer profiles.