Crafting your Customer Avatar

With our goal intact, the next strategy piece will be to define the audience for your webinars—we'll call this your Customer Avatar.

Much of succeeding with any webinar strategy comes down to ensuring that your webinar speaks to a specific audience. It doesn't have to be perfect, but having a customer avatar will allow you to craft different components of your webinar with a target in mind.

When crafting your avatar, you'll want to start by specifying the demographic: age, gender, marital status, income level, job title, location, company type, team size.

Once we've done that, we can dig deeper into two core pieces of your avatar: their goals/aspirations and their challenges/pains.

Goals and Aspirations

Each component of your webinar process should be crafted in a way that helps move your audience towards their aspirations/goals.

Let's explore an example! Say we own a software company that helps manage company values, workflow and operating procedures for each department.

Our customer demographic might be a 35-year-old human resources manager with a college degree working in a software company with 30+ employees. We'll call her HR Mary. Her goal is to streamline the onboarding process for the company, creating a seamless transition from final interviews to a productive team member.

Her aspirations may include better team morale, reduced manual workload, faster employee activation, and increased productivity within the company resulting in increased growth.

Awesome! That's a specific outcome and we can get a good picture of exactly what HR Mary is actively aspiring towards.

Of course, we'll also want to look at any pain points.

Challenges and Pains

Pain points should be highlighted to increase relatability during the webinar process. This allows your message to better connect to the challenges and pains your audience is going through, helping to establish a belief that their problems may be addressed.

Let's continue with the same example! HR Mary may find that she has limited time during the day to do research on exactly how to set up a proper onboarding system that scales. In this case, the lack of time is a big pain point.

Another pain point can simply be the current state of things: scattered documentation throughout the company. This means that the current onboarding system is merely a slow, clunky, manual process.

The challenge might then be summarized as employees taking longer to be trained with onboarding that's scattered and disjointed. This might result in projects being delayed, support headaches adding up, or internal issues taking longer to be solved.

With each pain point outlined and clearly defined, we're in a great position to speak to our audience in a value-driven manner.

Bonus: Finding Your Audience

As an added bonus, you can also brainstorm where you think your audience might hang out or what they might pay attention to. This grants us the opportunity to understand how we can best market to these prospects (something we'll explore in a future course).

In the case of HR Mary, we might look at local meetups, popular human resource blogs, complimentary software, hiring job boards, or recruiting advertorials.

Gathering the Data

If you're just starting out, you may need to make some assumptions for specific pieces of your customer avatar.

Some other great methods for capturing these insights include running surveys, browsing forums where your customer avatar might hang out, or engaging with the community through Facebook/LinkedIn groups or Quora and Reddit threads.

There are many places that you can gather real insights on your audience, so don't be afraid to explore and experiment.

With your goals ready and your customer avatar outlined, we're ready to create your webinar event.