Can this A-list advice replace your customer avatar?

You’ve probably heard the ancient advice to write your sales copy to a customer avatar.

In other words, rather than thinking of your market as a gassy cloud, without substance or a face… you come up with a real person to represent your ideal customer.

So you have their name… a little blurb of who they are and what they want and what their problems are… and maybe even a photo you can look at.

And the advice is to write to this one person. Because instead of writing something vague and unbelievable… you will write something specific and real.

Sounds good. Except:

Your target audience might not be one single type of person. It might be two or three or more. For example, this daily newsletter I write? It goes out to business owners, marketers, established copywriters, and newbie copywriters.

Also, even though a customer avatar should be based on research… I find that in practice, it’s often an invention of the marketer’s mind. Because of this, a customer avatar can be misleading rather than helpful.

And as a third problem, a customer avatar might focus on the wrong things. Demographic info is often not relevant to making your sale. On the other hand, an avatar might miss crucial information to making the sale that is relevant. Two people standing shoulder by shoulder in the same market can be very different from each other.

So should you take your avatar and set it on fire, like the “Año Viejo” doll that Colombians burn on New Year’s Eve?

I’m not saying that. But there is an alternative to a customer avatar for you to consider.

It’s something I heard during a recent binge of listening to interviews with A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

Parris said to find the top 3 psychographic characteristics of your list. For example, for the Boardroom offers Parris often wrote for, these three characteristics were:

1. Paranoid (typical angles: What your bank doesn’t want you to know, 12 smiling swindlers)

2. Looking for an “angle” (a secret, a loophole, a way to get over)

3. Like to brag about how smart they are

When you figure out these top 3 psychographic characteristics, you can use them to inform your offers, your headlines, and your body copy. Take a look at any Boardroom control ever, and you will see it in practice. Something like, “Money-saving secrets your CPA is too dumb to know about.”

But your market might be different. Maybe they are gullible rather than skeptical. Maybe they need more proof than promises. Maybe they want a push-button solution, or maybe they have been trained to believe only hard work produces good results.

You can find all this out. Just look at what they’ve bought before… the copy that worked to sell them… and the copy that bombed.

Odds are, you will see patterns, unique insights, which might be different from standard copywriting dogma about what buttons you should push.

Write to these characteristics instead of to a made-up customer avatar… and you might develop magical persuasion powers, by tapping in to your prospect’s deep and unconscious triggers.

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