Selling with Integrity – Learn to Love Avatars
Selling with Integrity requires knowing your audience intimately. Taking the time to meet your avatar inside their own minds allows you to be a problem solver for them – a trusted adviser – a go-to solution provider.
You offer the most awesome product/service in your sphere!
Congratulations!
Pat yourself on the back!
Be happy!
I trust that you have become so intimate with your customers that it’s almost as if you were inside their brains looking out!
You know what they think about and what keeps them up at night with worry.
You know their behavior when they turn on their computer, or search the web on their mobile device.
You are rock solid in this most important area of social selling!
What?
You don’t really know what keeps your potential customers awake with anxiety?
Seriously, you don’t?
You are not deeply aware of the online behavior – search and social – that identifies those who are in need of your wonderful product/service?
Don’t be alarmed!
Most small business owners are just like you. They have a wonderful solution to a problem and a decent business structure. But when it comes to marketing and social selling in particular, they are a bit befuddled as to who, what, where and why.
It’s very simple to get an ideal solution into the hands of someone with the matching problem, if the
Choose What’s Right. Take Time to Understand
problem holders are exposed to the solution when they require it. Isn’t that what good selling with integrity is really all about? It’s certainly not fancy slogans, manipulative gimmicks, coercive lack and loss mentality jargon. High integrity selling is simply a matter of placing your solution directly in the path of the problem.
If you could do this- if you could stand squarely in front of the one who is struggling with the problem you solve at the moment they are most frustrated – would each and every one of them buy from you? Probably not, but the percentages would be substantially higher than that gleaned from a somewhat random, mostly guesswork marketing campaign.
Learn to love Avatars
My clients laugh at me, but they gamely follow along as I guide them into an intimate relationship with their Avatar(s). By the end we are on a first name basis with Matt or Marvin. We know his exact age, marital status, geographic location, favorite color, number of kids and pets, car he drives. We know if he is vegan or a meat eater, and if he works-out or prefers the couch. We have delved deeply into his psyche to understand how our solution will positively impact his problem.
One of my clients is a freelance writer. Matt is her Avatar. After years of marketing to an amorphous group of “people who need someone to write blog posts for them”, my client is now marketing to Matt. She knows that he owns a small manufacturing business and that he understands the value of content creation. She also knows that Matt has gotten increasingly frustrated because writing is not something he does well and he doesn’t have time for it even if he did. He has just one other employee and this person cannot produce their written content either. Matt is married, with one child and lives in a small city in Canada. His company is 5 year old and doing well, but ready to push for a big growth year.
My client knows that Matt finds Facebook silly, but that he likes meeting others who have small businesses, on Twitter and LinkedIn. He does not spend time on social media for fun, and thus is not on there every day. When he does login to Twitter he searches terms like “manufacturing efficiency” and “small business content marketing”. On LinkedIn he searches for peers.
So now, when my clients markets to attract Matt to her freelance blog writing services, she knows what to post and where to post it. She knows Matt’s frustration and his goals. She is aware of why and when he uses social media and she does not waste her time in places, nor on topics, that have nothing to do with Matt.
By defining Matt so well as her Avatar, my client knows what keeps him awake at night with worry about his business and she knows where online to hang out, so that Matt can find her easily and realize she is the answer to his prayers. She can write posts and articles about things that Matt considers important.
Selling with integrity requires this type of relationship with your real and created Avatars. When you know what keeps them up at night you can talk to them about it. When you understand their actual behavior online – search and social – you can adjust your own social selling and SEO decisions appropriately.
Selling with Integrity requires knowing your audience intimately. Today is a great day to begin diving in to deep understanding of your avatar!
Image attribution (lead image): http://www.123rf.com/profile_yupiramos (Stock image)
Deborah Tutnauer
Latest posts by Deborah Tutnauer (see all)
- Sales Pitches Don’t Sell - July 28, 2015
- Selling with Integrity – Learn to Love Avatars - June 23, 2015
- Social Selling – They Don’t Care What You Know - May 19, 2015
