Know Thy Customer Avatar: Demographics, Psychographics, and the Science of Digging Deep
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Socrates said, “Know thyself.”
Not a bad idea.
But if you want to be a better marketer, take Stephen Covey’s advice: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Seek FIRST to understand your ideal prospect, that is.
THEN to be understood by your ideal prospect.
Few things will help you sell more than knowing what your ideal prospect – otherwise known as, your CUSTOMER AVATAR – is doing in their spare time:
- What websites do they frequent?
- What books, magazines, and newspapers do they read?
- What news channels do they favor?
- What radio talk shows do they listen to on their way home from work?
- What podcasts are crammed onto their iPhones or iPods?
In sales and marketing, this is what’s known as psychographics.
Of course, knowing these things – the likes and dislikes, beliefs, hopes, dreams, desires – gives you incredible insight into the mind of your prospect.
It’s the jet fuel that drives your marketing because it tells you how to talk to them.
What will grab their attention?
What will engage them?
More importantly, what will get them to respond to your sales message?
Master the science of understanding your target market, and you can fumble around in the dark in many other areas of your business and still make a great living.
But if you suck at it, you’ll spend a lifetime chasing your tail …
… Skating the thin line between profits and bankruptcy.
Yeah, it’s that important.
But more on that in a moment.
We recently sent out a survey asking what book had most influenced your life, and why.
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Top 9 Most Influential Books of Your Life
After the final tally, we ended up with 9 books on the top of your collective minds.
1. “Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz
2. “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill
3. “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki
4. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach
5. The Bible
6. “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand
7. “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.
8. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey
9. “The Richest Man in Babylon” by George S. Clason
Knowing this tells us a lot about our list, and how to talk to you.
Not the least of which is:
You care deeply about your personal and financial success …
You will soak up anything related to earning more money, in less time, with less effort – so you can make a bigger impact and spend more time doing the things you love …
You see your entrepreneurial endeavors as a source of more than just money, but also as a source of meaning in your life …
And you are highly intellectual, and respond well to challenging new ideas and concepts that can help you succeed on a grander scale …
Is it any accident that this describes our perfect client?
Obviously, this is just scratching the surface.
If this were your list, you would want to sit down and keep digging.
You would want to figure out everything this list of books tells you about your ideal prospect’s emotional and psychological make-up.
Then, it’s time to move on to the next piece of the CUSTOMER AVATAR puzzle.
Understanding your target market is a three-pronged approach:
1. Demographics
2. Psychographics
3. Tracked Behavior
These three branches of analytics give you tremendous insight into the likes, dislikes, beliefs – and the deep-seated hopes, dreams, and desires – of the people who are buying your products and services.
The whole purpose of which, is to go out and find more just like them.
Part 1: DEMOgraphics - WHO Are They?
Demographics are the “bare bones” of market statistics.
They include age, gender, marital status, family size, income, and education.
They can also include things that go a bit deeper like race, religion, and ethnicity if you sell a product or service where these are important.
There are a number of software tools you can plug into your own web sites or platforms to cull this data for you. Including free tools like Google Analytics and paid tools like Quantcast.
If you’re just getting started, a great tool to start your search is Alexa.com.
I’ll use the web site of one of my clients (who shall remain anonymous for privacy) to demonstrate.
Let’s see what Alexa tells us about the demographics of visitors to their web site. Alexa compares visitors to those of the general internet population, to give you a “below average” or “above average” rating.
Take GENDER, for example:
This tells us there is an above-average number of males visiting the site (and opting in to our list), and a below-average number of females.
There’s also AGE, which shows that the majority of visitors to our site are age 55 and over:
CHILDREN shows that visitors are less likely to have children than the average.
In this case, you can can infer from the average age that they are not necessarily children-less, but are simply “empty nesters” whose children have already left home:
EDUCATION shows us the majority of visitors are slightly above-average in the college department, so our typical visitor is well educated:
And INCOME shows us our average visitor is also relatively affluent, earning upwards of $100k per year.
So they likely have the resources to invest in higher-priced products and services:
Do you think this information will influence how we talk to our prospects in our emails, in our videos, and on our sales pages and landing pages?
Absolutely!
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools provide even more specific data to help you make critical marketing decisions.
I don’t have room to discuss them thoroughly here, but they’re both must-have tools for every marketer, as a basic starting point.
So be sure to install both of them on your site, and learn how to use them.
Part 2: PSYCHOgraphics - WHAT Are They?
The dictionary defines psychographics as:
“The study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research.”
In practice, it’s the science of “digging deep” to discover the psychological makeup of your typical prospect, and what drives them.
So you can answer questions like:
- What does she believe about your type of product?
- What are her fundamental beliefs about the problem your product solves?
- How does she feel about other “gurus” or authority figures in your market?
- What is her most urgent problem regarding this issue that she wants solved?
- What does she most want to avoid?
- If she could wave a magic wand, what would she want more than anything else in this area?
- How does she feel when she looks for the kind of product you are selling?
- How does she feel when she reads your ad?
- How does she feel about your offer?
In order to write effective copy, and create powerful marketing campaigns, you’ve got to be fully knowledgeable about the key factors guiding your prospect’s buying decisions.
If you can understand all these things, you have the tools necessary to seize the attention of your potential buyer, and offer a powerful solution to a problem they already have and want desperately to solve.
So where and how do you get this kind of detailed analysis?
Well, one of the best ways is through surveys.
You can survey your current list using a tool like Survey Monkey.
Or you can survey new prospects using tools like WebinarJam, which allow you to place a customized survey on your thank you pages.
Once a prospect registers for your webinar, they’ll be taken to this page where you can ask them questions that give you deeper insight into their needs and desires.
Here’s the single question survey we include in our client’s webinar:
By asking this seemingly simple question, we get amazing insights.
This includes everything from one sentence answers to entire essays on our prospect’s businesses, such as the results they’re currently getting and what they’re looking to get out of our training.
Of course, we use this to make our client’s webinars, products, and services better.
And to improve our marketing by better understanding what it is that’s driving our ideal prospect, and the solutions they’re willing to invest in.
Part 3: Tracked Behavior - HOW Do They Act?
You’ve likely heard of split testing.
It’s simply testing two versions of a page (i.e. a webinar registration page) against each other to determine which one gets better results.
Well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tracking behavior.
You can track what your average prospect (or buyer) does once they land on your website, register for a webinar, get your email, read a blog post …
… Or any number of other interactions they have with you, or one of your marketing assets.
How they behave or act speaks volumes about how well your marketing is connecting with them, and how effectively you’re speaking to them.
It also gives you a tremendous amount of intelligence that you can use to make things better …
… Allowing you to quickly scale what’s working for you, and just as quickly ditch what isn’t working – so you can increase your sales and profits incredibly fast.
I could write a book about the tools available today to help you track the behavior of your prospects and buyers. It’s an art and science of virtually endless proportions, allowing you to track and analyze just about anything to the nth degree.
One way we track behavior is through a webinar tool called WebinarJam, which gives us the low-down on exactly what our prospects are doing once they hit our registration page.
For example, here’s a look at the traffic statistics for a brand-new webinar we just launched that’s still in the testing phase:
You can see here that we had:
- 175 unique visitors to our registration page
- 74 signed up for the webinar, a 42.29% sign up rate
- 55 registrants showed up to the webinar, a 74.32% show up rate (which by the way, is a stellar show up rate in this market!)
These numbers give us the baseline intelligence we need to improve our registration page – and hopefully, find simple ways to increase our registration rate.
Plus, find a number of ways to potentially increase our show up rate as well.
Then, we can dive deep inside of the webinar itself to discover how well the webinar keeps people’s attention.
We can see how many drop off in the first few minutes, how many stick through to the call-to-action, how many click through to order, and so on.
In addition to this data, other screens within WebinarJam report details on how well you’re monetizing your webinar – including sales conversion, earnings per click, and earnings per attendee.
Along with email notification statistics, such as open and clickthrough rates.
All of this data is incredibly helpful in determining where you can make improvements to your recruitment campaign, so you can get more people to sign up for your webinar …
… Your enforcer campaign, for getting people to actually show up at the allotted time …
… Your liaison campaign, for opening a dialog with people who watched the webinar but didn’t buy …
… And your reconnaissance campaign for surveying people who still didn’t buy (what were they thinking?) after the deadline.
Not to mention the actual content of the webinar itself, so it does a better job of selling.
Guaranteed Way to Grow By Leaps and Bounds
What I’ve shown you here today is just a fraction of what’s possible with the tools now available to online business owners.
Once you learn how to properly read and interpret the demographics, psychographics, and tracked behavior these tools give you …
… You have a guaranteed way to grow your online business by leaps and bounds …
… While quickly trampling any competitors that get in your way!
Paul