If you’ve been in business for a few years, you likely see a number of types of customers inside your business.
For example, in my language business, StoryLearning, we have customers learning with wildly different goals:
Some for work
Some to keep their brains healthy
Some to speak with their partner in their language
To make matters worse, every language tends to attract different people.
People learning Spanish tend to want to chill on a beach.
People learning German tend to want to work.
People learning Thai tend to…
— ok let’s not go there.
Let’s pick a different example.
A few entrepreneurs I mentor run training programmes and have clients at two distinct stages:
- Pre-qualification
- Post-qualification
For example:
“I want to become an interior designer.”
“I am an interior designer.”
This is simpler, but equally tricky, because these two camps of people are looking for wildly different things.
Enter the confusion, for content creators:
“How the heck can I speak to both groups of people at the same time?”
Whichever type of avatar you create for, it’s going to alienate the other.
It can feel like an un-winnable situation, like a funeral director and a stripper fighting over the Spotify playlist.
So what do you do?
Most people just end up in a dull middle-ground, creating content that “kinda speaks to everyone”.
In the case of the language business, it could be:
“The fastest, easiest way to learn a foreign language!”
(This, by the way, is literally what every language app under the sun has on their homepage. Oh dear. How could you ever choose between them?)
The underlying fear is this:
“I don’t want to turn anyone away!”
But, no!
Commit not this gravest of marketing sins!
The key is to go against your intuition, double down and be hyper-specific.
There’s a weird effect that happens, when you get specific:
By offering one specific thing, you become MORE appealing to the masses!
By being specific, you instantly scream ‘credibility’.
The logical brain perks up and says:
“They teach something specific, they must have a good system going on!”
This is far more powerful than looking at a business and thinking:
“Oh, they cater for everyone? How nice!”
Worlds apart.
You can differentiate by avatar.
But you can also differentiate by USP / method.
What you should do is both.
For example:
In StoryLearning, we differentiate mostly by method: Learn with stories.
But we also have a specific avatar we write and create for.
(That’s going to remain secret. But it’s not something we scream about. Rather, the messaging is subtly woven into everything we do, such that our ideal customer will instantly know if they’re in the right place.
Point is…
When you have split avatars, the worst thing to do is try to talk to everyone, everywhere.
Instead, you double down on what makes you unique.
Doing this well isn’t just about a pithy headline on your website. (Although that’s important too.)
Doing this well means baking this messaging into everything you do:
- Your YT videos
- Your emails
- Blog posts
- Sales pages
… just like I wrote about in the Marketing section of my Case Study.
That’s how you sell before it’s time to sell…
And get people 99% ready to buy before they hit the sales page.
Namaste,
Olly