44:4 One page avatar

Lee:
Welcome to Trailblazer FM. This is Season 44, Episode Four, with information that will make you say, “Cor.” Oh, that was cheesy, but hey, my name is Lee Matthew Jackson, I am one of your two hosts. Your other host is…

Nicole:
Good morning, Nicole Osborne.

Lee:
Hello, Frau Osborne. How are you today?

Nicole:
I’m really well. I’ve got a big giggle coming, because you’ve been singing to me prior to going live.

Lee:
We will put that song right at the very end, just so you can listen to what made Nicole laugh. We’ll send you out with that, that will be flipping awesome. But Nicole, whilst we’re here, could you remind people what Season 44 is all about?

Nicole:
Season 44 is a special one, it’s about the one thing we invite agency owners to do to take their agency to the next level. And I know you might be thinking, “Oh my God, that is so much,” but in every single episode we share something which you can easily do. And we don’t want you to do it all at once, just one thing at a time to make you feel that you are really pushing your agency forward.

Lee:
Absolutely, and that’s why we’re only doing five episodes per season. That’s five things, that’s almost one thing a day in theory, although we probably recommend you do it over five weeks. But one thing that’s not going to take too long, that is going to make significant change. One of my favourite things to say is, small achievable actions lead to big change.

Nicole:
Big change.

Lee:
Big change. So let me set the scene. Many, many years ago, we were running an agency in the noughties, I know I don’t look old enough, thank you very much for saying that, Nicole, but we were struggling. We were an all-purpose agency, we served anyone who had a chequebook, which also meant that we were very stressed and we were living feast to famine. And mainly, it was actually famine and lots of borrowing money to keep going, it really, really sucked.
But at one point, we recognised that not only did we need to niche down, which is obviously a very important area, but also we needed to understand the people that we were serving specifically. I often talk about identity and understanding your own identity, your strengths, and all of those good things, but equally, understanding the identity of the people that you serve is paramount. When you understand the person that you’re talking to specifically, you’re going to know where to show up, how to show up, and what to say and that’s exactly what happened for us. Our entire marketing strategy, our entire messaging, and even our brand changed as a result of understanding a customer avatar. The niche was the beginning, but there is so much more. So, I’m going to shut up, and Nicole, just share with us some of your experiences and maybe let’s deep-dive into creating a customer avatar? And folks, do stay tuned, we are going to be sharing some flipping amazing tools to help you do this.

Nicole:
Yes, we’re very excited about the tool we’ve got today, right? So, for anyone who’s still sitting on a fence, whether they need an avatar or not, or a user persona, it really helps you to prioritise your marketing efforts. Because everyone is time-short, but when you know where your audience hangs out, you know exactly where you spend your time on social media, which groups to join, whether they’re like blogs or podcasts or videos. You also know what to say, because if you picture that person and you understand their challenges, really, what keeps them awake at night? What transformation are they hoping for with their digital marketing? You really know how you can appeal to them. So you attract that one person because you speak their language, and I found in my own marketing efforts for First Lollipop Social and now Wunderstars, whenever I picture one specific agency owner, perhaps someone I’ve met and I had to chat with in a Facebook group or at an event and I write that email just to appeal to that person’s worry. Give you an example?

Lee:
Yeah.

Nicole:
It seems like a lot of agency owners have purchased many, many fancy tools, but perhaps they haven’t used them well or not used them at all. So if I then talk about that, how that can make you feel and how you can get yourself out of that, that’s really going to appeal to that person who also experiences that. But I wouldn’t be able to do it, write an email or a blog to everyone. By talking to that one person, you really get through to people so hopefully this means that people have really bought into. Now, I know for my own business, I love to work with people where they’re happy to take action to really land more of their best fit clients.
And I think we talked about this beforehand, so the avatar of the best fit clients of people who perhaps follow your processes, who provide you with content, who are really open-minded about digital marketing ideas. So if you know that, it’s your avatar, your user persona, you can appeal to that. For me, it’s also people who thrive on accountability. I’ve actually written a blog already which talks about why you wouldn’t enjoy working with me. Now, you can only do that in your own sales efforts as an agency owner, if you know who you’re talking to. So overall, there’s so many benefits of having a, here’s a persona of evolving it over time. I don’t know why people wouldn’t be wanting to use it, right, Lee?

Lee:
Exactly. And I love how you said writing that email. So if you do picture yourselves, folks, writing an email to a specific person, you are going to make sure that email resonates with them. Perhaps you know that person is under a lot of stress at the moment so you are not going to put them under pressure to send you something immediately. You might start that with, “Hey, no pressure. When you get some time, are you okay to send me over X, Y, and Z?” Because you know that person, you know the pressure that they’re under, you’re going to make sure you tailor the content to them. Therefore, if you have this buyer persona, this customer avatar, where you understand your target audience, you’re going to tailor all of your content to them in that way. So for example, this podcast, I understand that you, as an agency owner are actually a bit time poor when it comes to doing things that won’t benefit your agency.
You’re probably doing everything for your clients and making them look like rock stars and you are probably a little bit too exhausted to do anything else, which is why we’re doing this one thing. We understand our audience are time poor, but do want to be able to do something that’s easy to move the needle forward just a little bit? So we are not doing podcast episodes where we are giving you lists and lists of things to do and big grand dreams that will overwhelm you and that you’ll never get done. So that’s, I guess another example of why having that avatar is essential, and we’re not trying therefore, to speak to lots of different types of people, which it’s just going to dilute the messages, isn’t it?

Nicole:
Yeah, absolutely. And then you end up sounding like everyone else. And do you know, particularly in our last episode, we were talking about how to personalise pictures and proposals. And do you know, if you have that client avatar, it’s going to make that so much easier because you show them that you’ve listened to their concerns, that you get their world and you can then use that to make them think, “Oh, they’ve listened. This is definitely the agency I want to work with.” So when you have a client avatar, you can use it across everything. Now, some might ask, “So Nicole and Lee, so how do we become up with a client avatar you want us to use?” So the tool I always recommend, and Lee absolutely loved it when he first saw it, was actually by HubSpot. And the have is amazing, this super, super duper, easy to use, really fancy, but yet so easy, make my persona tool.
And we’ve linked it in the show notes and we will definitely encourage you to use it because it takes you through a series of questions about your ideal clients. You can even give them a picture, I think it always helps if you have a picture in mind and you give them a name. Don’t choose a name or someone you don’t like, that won’t work. It’s the same when you name your children, it asks you to think about, okay, so what are they facing in their business? What stage is their business at? What are they interested in? What movies do they watch? What blogs do they visit? Where do they get their information? And then you collect all this information, you can actually download it in a PDF and we also recommend that you just printed that out so when you have it on mind, you can share it with your teams, you can share it with someone who’s helping you with social media.
So definitely try out that tool, it is so easy. And Lee, I just wanted to add to that, when, I work with clients on specific social media channel, we actually do an avatar for that social media channel. So let’s say you’re trying to get more visibility on Instagram or LinkedIn, what feeling do you want people to get? What value do you want people to get when they get to your feet? What are they interested in? And it really makes it so much easier because one thing we always struggle with, or we have nothing interesting to say, don’t know what to post, but when you have that client persona, you’ll know exactly what to post.

Lee:
The beauty of this tool for me was being able to, they answer all of those questions, but then be printed off and I’ve got it on my wall, the lady’s called Jane, and I have a little look at Jane before I do anything basically. And one of the biggest questions that was on there that popped out to me was, where does Jane go to get answers? And I realised, well that’s YouTube and podcasts, “Holy moly, I need to find

Nicole:
That’s huge.

Lee:
Yeah. For me, it’s massive, so if I then start writing a blog and spending three days on this blog, Jane probably doesn’t read the blog, she would rather watch a video of me telling her something in five minutes, rather than reading a blog that’s going to take her hours. So instantly that not only allows me to create content for her, but it stops me from wasting time on the things that might not be so relevant. I think we often feel we need to do everything, we need to have a TikTok, we need to have a blog, we need to have a YouTube channel, a podcast, a Facebook group, or you name it, we have to do it and we spread ourselves so thin. So being able to look over at Jane with her cool little profile picture and the fact that I know where she turns up is so helpful.
But you don’t have to stop just at that top level, just as Nicole was saying, you can create the personas for specific platforms as well. Someone on Instagram is going to consume content in a different way to somebody say on Facebook. So for example, I can’t put links into Instagram and I can’t drive traffic as easily, say just on a picture. I can in a story, so I might do something different in a story with a different type of content, which is more quick fire and a quick call to action versus something on Facebook where I could do a really long form post or the same on LinkedIn, et cetera. So there tend to be two different types of character, don’t they, consuming that sort of content as well. Somebody’s who’s going to read a massive LinkedIn post is not necessarily scrolling mindlessly through the reels of Instagram. Sorry, you’re going to say something, Nicole?

Nicole:
Just giving your second avatar name, I think I’m calling her Nicole.

Lee:
Oh yeah, nicole.

Nicole:
Nicole likes to see stories. So maybe this is a good time about, we talked about the benefits and we talked about how you and I use it and how we can see agencies can easily use it but I might still wonder about, Lee and Nicole, how do we actually come up with this information? And I feel we should share a couple of points of this because it really can be quite easy, right? So talk to your customers, have these chats about, okay, where do you actually get your information? Which platforms do you enjoy? What content interests you most? Talk to your team because if you have a team around you, they’ll be talking to your customers. Really reflect on the average client experience and who you actually like working with most and then find out more about those kind of people.
And I would go as far as some gentle social media stalking. So I often ask my clients, okay, give me a couple of people who you either working with or you would love to work with. And then we have a look, what do they do on LinkedIn, what do I do on Facebook? Just to get a feel for it. Now, obviously, if you are bigger agency, you probably have access to a fantastic CRM system. So again, you will know where your clients are based, what companies do they run, at what stage they are in their business. So wherever you can gather information to help you form a more accurate picture of who you are working with, who you want to work with and how you can appeal to them, just use that information, it doesn’t have to be complicated. I think you that’s my key message.
We have avatar and it puts people off, but when actually, it’s just a series of question which really helps you to shed some light into who you like working with the most, because it’s all about having joy at work, finding the right clients who pay well and who are fun to work with and having the avatar will really help them to do that.

Lee:
“But Lee and Nicole”, I hear you say, “I’m a brand new agency owner and I’ve only just defined my niche and I don’t have my ideal customer, what should I do?” Well, don’t worry, I’ve just come up with an idea for you. Go and have a look at people that provide the same service, the similar niche as you, and take a look at where they’re showing up. But don’t copy them, have a look at what engagement they’re getting and what questions and conversations are coming up on their social media from their audience. Because that will be super helpful in directing you and helping you understand where people show up. Not only social media, but you can show up at events as well and meet with other people, ask them similar questions that you might then be putting into your customer avatar. So if you are new to the game and you don’t have loads of clients that you can pool from, now you know what to do.

Nicole:
Lee, I absolutely love suggestion because do you know sometimes when people go to events, they put themselves under so much pressure. I must get a new lead, but actually what you really ought to be looking for is talking to people and finding out what they’re thinking about, what they’re interested in, what they’re struggling with and that can really help you populate your client over time. So pleased you came up with that idea, oh, love working with you, Lee.

Lee:
So, so here’s your new question, oh, sorry, your new mission when you go to an event, instead of a new lead, it’s, I must get new insights into my ideal client. Because when you get those insights, that’s going to eventually form your message, form your products and will pay dividends. Rather than trying to sell the room at an event, use it as an educational tool. Holy moly, we sound super clever today. Folks, don’t forget, you can go and check out the amazing questions in the HubSpot persona. You can go check trailblazer.fm and we will put a link in there for you. Also, please note that on our episode for today, there is a further reading section with several blog posts that deep dive into customer avatars. So if you want a little bit more than just that HubSpot tool, feel free, go in notes and have a look at all those different links that we’ve put in there in the show notes.
I would recommend though, if you do, just have a go for a little bit of fun with that HubSpot tool. It’s so quick to use, you can do it within 10 minutes and that feeling of, “Holy moly, I know this person,” is incredible. And if you do find that, please do let us know in the comments of this episode.

Nicole:
And once you’ve had your light bulb moment about your own client avatar, let us know in the Facebook group because we are pretty sure this is going to encourage other people to embrace this one thing and to come up with a client avatar for their agency. Of course, we’re going to be talking about client avatars and how to use them to really help you in your marketing at the amazing Agency Transformation Live event in November, so do come and check it out. We’ve also got in addition to amazing reading list for show notes, we’ve got a couple of blogs we want to just briefly mention. So once you know who your avatar is, you can go and really up your game when it comes to your content marketing.
So go over on YouTube, we’ve got a blogs where content marketing for agencies, how you get noticed and found by your best clients and secret sauce to success. Use it on your agency homepage as well because once you know who you’re talking to, it’s so much easier to draw people in and to welcome them to your world. So if we’ve got a blog there as well.

Lee:
Thank you so much, Nicole, I’m super excited about agency transformation and you are going to be one of our speakers. So folks, if you’re enjoying listening to Nicole and the amazing wisdom that she has to offer and the way she delivers her content with flare, then please do head on over to agency transformation.live. Remember to comment, remember to join us in the Facebook group. If we don’t see you in the comments or at Agency Transformation Live, how about we see you in the next episode?
Welcome to season 44, this is your host Lee, the man who makes the ladies say, “For”, joined today by the one and only Nicole

Nicole:
Nicole.

Lee:
…Osborne.

Nicole:
She make the ladies say… Okay, yeah, I’m all comfortable now.

Lee:
Good, I thought you would be.

Nicole:
This is the trouble Lee goes through to warm up Nicole.

Lee:
Exactly.