Ideal Customer Avatar: Understanding Your Brand Story Hero
Digital marketing requires more than just technical knowhow.
Packing your website with SEO keywords, setting your demographics on Google Ads, finding all the right hashtags...playing the numbers game and getting eyes on your stuff is just one small element in a much bigger picture.
Effective marketing also requires empathy, creativity, and human connection. Streamlined through storytelling.
Good marketing portrays a hero's journey to a better life—starring your audience (embodied by your Ideal Customer Avatar).
Every word on your website should be for them. Their concerns and doubts, their hopes and dreams, the things they struggle with day to day, the things they don't yet know they always needed.
It's on you to tell that story in a way that connects with their lives.
What is an Ideal Customer Avatar?
The Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA) is a character profile created by marketers to uncover the benefits they’ll use to sell a product or service.
Marketing is character driven. Why? Because life is character driven. Your life is a tapestry of stories woven through space and time. So is mine. Which means, top-quality copywriters don’t sell products — or even solutions.
The best copywriters sell a better version of life.
How can you write about a better version of life, if you haven’t envisioned the details of the unimproved one?
Your ICA is the character you take on your customer’s journey. You’ll learn more about them as you teach them more about you — and the valuable solutions you offer for problems they have. Put your ICA on a quest toward self improvement. As guide and narrator, your job is to provide knowledge and tools to help them grow along the way.
Enhance your potential customer's journey via:
Insightful blog articles
Free resources
Data and evidence
Entertainment value
Stories of those who’ve gone before
Your website’s words hold up a mirror showing visitors a reflection of truth. Your value proposition shows them what that mirror would look like with a few tweaks here and there. How can you demonstrate the tweaks if you haven’t outlined the initial reflection?
You’re basically the god of your website’s world, looking down from Mount Whatever and steering the course of all who enter your realm…