How to Speak Directly To Your Ideal Client (Avatar) In Every Post

Do you know exactly who your target audience is?

Do you know where they live, and where they hang out?

What they like and dislike?

You may have heard that it’s important to speak directly to your ideal client or customer (your avatar) in your emails and your social media posts and blog posts…

But it’s hard to do that effectively unless you really feel like you know that person on an intimate level.

My Friend Kate

So, before I continue with today’s lesson, I’m going to introduce you to a friend.

Her name is Kate.

She lives in Atlanta Georgia. She’s recently divorced, has 2 awesome daughters, and she drives a blue oversized SUV.

Prior to ending up in Atlanta, she grew up in Virginia. She attended the University of Virginia, which is where she met her now ex husband. She studied business administration and shortly after graduation she got a job working in corporate America.

Soon thereafter, she got married and moved to Atlanta with her husband. She continued working a corporate job which, although she liked it okay, it never left her feeling quite fulfilled.

Outside of work, she loved to play the guitar and singing at open mic nights. She’s always loved being creative and interacting socially. And she always felt like there was something missing… something more she could contribute or do with her life, she just wasn’t sure what or how.

Recently, Kate ended up going through a divorce, and now more than ever, she’s looking for a way to reinvent herself and make her mark on the world.

When she comes home from work at night, after putting her daughters to bed, she spends time on the internet looking for ideas about ways she could make an income by doing some of the creative things she loves to do.

She feels called to create an online course that teaches beginner folk guitar lessons. But every time she looks around to try to figure out where to start, she feels really overwhelmed.

So, the person I just introduced to you, my friend, is made up in my mind. Her name is Kate and she is my ideal client.

Where Does Your Avatar Hang Out?

Writing a story like this about your avatar is super helpful, because once you REALLY feel like you know who you are talking to, you can figure out where they are hanging out online and then you can craft all of your social media posts so that they speak directly to this specific person.

When you do this, you will attract the right people to you.

What happens all too often is that we spend so much time trying to appeal to everyone… and worrying that we might offend someone or not appeal to someone. And when we market this way, we end up not attracting anyone, because we aren’t specific enough in our messaging.

The other problem is that we try to post random things on all kinds of social media platforms, instead of posting specific things on the specific social media platforms that our target audience is hanging out on.

So, once we know who it is we want to get our message in front of, we can figure out where they are spending their time, and then we can spend our time just in those places, rather than wasting our time trying to find them in places where they aren’t hanging out. Make sense?

Questions To Answer About Your Avatar

Here are some questions you can answer to help you get really clear about who you are speaking to in your posts and messages.

1. Where does your client live? (Big city, small town, rural area…name the city, get specific.)

2. How old is your client?

3. Marital status of your client?

4. How much does your client earn a year?

5. What are your client’s hobbies? How does he/she spend their time?

6. What books/magazines does your client read? What TV shows does your client watch?

7. What are their likes and dislikes?

8. Are they local to you, or do they live all over the world?

9. Are they a certain ethnicity, or do they come from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds?

10. What challenges are they struggling with?

What Social Media Platforms Does Your Client Hang Out On?

Once you know who you are speaking to, the next step is to pinpoint exactly where they are spending their time online.

Your goal should be to figure out the top 3 social media platforms that your avatar hangs out on.

And this is NOT about what are YOUR favorite 3 platforms… it’s about getting in front of the right people, so we need to find out where they are hanging out.

For example, Snapchat tends to attract a younger audience, so if your product or service targets baby boomers (or older), Snapchat is probably not the idea social media platform for your brand.

Professionals over the age of 35 make up the majority of LinkedIn users.

If you’re targeting middle aged suburban men, don’t invest all your efforts on Instagram—studies show that the majority of Instagram users are women from urban areas.

Another good way to figure this out is to look to your direct competitors—which social media platforms do they use most? Odds are, if they’ve found success on certain platforms, you will, too.

This article on Business Insider will give you a more in-depth look at some of the demographic trends for social media networks.

Provide Value and Engage

Once we have our top 3 social media platforms, the key is to provide value and engage with our audience.

In today’s busy internet world, our success will be better if we narrow down where we are spending our time on social media so that we can:

• Interact with the right people (our target audience)
• Have time to engage on the platforms we select so that our audience feels taken care of
• Not spread ourselves too thin and have time to succeed on the platforms we choose.

This is KEY.

A good rule of thumb is to provide value 75% of the time, and ask for your audience to take some type of action (read a blog post, purchase a product, subscribe to your list) 25% of the time.

So basically, out of every 4 posts you put up, 3 of them can be fun, silly, engageable content… and the 4th one can be a  call to action to get people to read your blog or buy your product.

** If you haven’t read Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary V, I highly recommend it. he does a great job of going into detail about this specific topic.

And make sure you don’t just post and run! It’s important to hang around on these platforms and engage with your audience (answer questions and respond to comments) and also take the time to engage on other people’s stuff.

A great way to do this is to simply click through on the usernames of the people who are engaging on your content, and head over to their profile page and engage on theirs. This will help your audience see that you are accessible and real… and it will also help get you in front of even more people in your niche.

There you have it. You now have everything you need to be able to speak directly to your target audience in every post and message!

I’d love to hear from you…

What were some of your takeaways from this post?

Do you have any other strategies for speaking directly to your ideal client (avatar) that were not mentioned in this post?

Please leave your takeaways, suggestions, comments and questions below.

Talk to ya soon,

p.s. Ready to take this training one step further and really dive in, get clear about your target audience, and create a course specifically for them? If so, check out my new course, Nail Your Niche, right here! It’s being offered as a live 4-week program at an 85% discount until Sunday. 🙂