Marketing and sales have a lot in common. The biggest similarity? They both have to find your customers in order to do their jobs. And while inbound marketing can beat cold-calling any day, both need information on who to target. In their most recent enVisioning Success podcast episode, Introducing Avatars: The Heartbeat of Your Business, co-hosts Julia and Laura go over the importance of having ways of visualizing your ideal clients for marketing and sales. But how do you get this data? Today, we will cover how to find the information and target your business’s clients, using your current trends and moving towards higher ROI avatars.
Ideal Client Profiles Vs. Customer Avatars
Our COO Julia Becker Collins has talked a lot about Ideal Clients Profiles (or ICPs for short) in the past, such as in this blog post, Identifying Your Ideal Client Profiles. At the same time, our CEO, Laura DiBenedetto, prefers to use Customer Avatars. Both are ways of visualizing your idealized customer—not just who you sell to now, but who would be the easiest to sell to with the highest ROI. The major difference is the presentation: ICPs are mostly just demographic and behavioral data, while an avatar uses this data to create a person who represents this information. Both start in the same place: collecting customer data.
Finding Your Customer Data
Information on your current customers, your performance within your market, and who sees your content online has many sources, from anecdotal to data-driven. Below are four of the most common sources.
- Your current and past clients are your starting point. The information you can get from this is completely based on what customer data you retain. Addresses, receipts, and surveys can all be useful data points, especially with repeat customers.
- Wins from your sales team are your next stop. Depending on the size of your company, you might be your sales team. Who have you had the most success selling to, and where? Who gets further down the sales pipeline than others?
- Analytics data from your website and other platforms can help you process information on who sees your content and takes certain actions. Google Analytics is a powerful tool for websites, and most social media platforms track basic to advanced demographical information.
- Separating out actual customers, both current and possible, is essential. For example, filtering demographic information by geography may be important if you have a service area—website traffic from India isn’t going to help you if you operate in New England only.
Using Customer Information for Better Marketing
So, once you have this information, what should you do with it? A great first step is working with your marketing team (or getting a virtual marketing department with an agency) on a client profile or avatar. Next, you’ll want to leverage this information to know what to spend your limited resources (time, money, expertise) on for the highest return. Updating your content, picking the right social media platforms, and running targeted advertising campaigns are all examples of how you can use this information. See our blog, Are You Marketing to the Right Clients? for more information on successes and common pitfalls.
About the enVisioning Success Podcast
This article is based on topics discussed in enVisioning Success, our weekly podcast hosted by Vision CEO Laura DiBenedetto and COO Julia Becker Collins. In it, they discuss all things business and marketing, from lead generation to leadership. Find us on PodBean to download from your platform of choice, or subscribe to our mailing list to get new episodes and other news delivered directly to your inbox.
Gathering and acting on this information can be challenging, especially if you’re spearheading this entire campaign. You don’t have to do it alone: Vision can help. We have experience modernizing established brands and building up marketing in competitive niche industries, with a comprehensive vision of both marketing and business strategy. Contact us today to learn more about our services and start discussing how to find your avatars and better market and sell to them.
