3.5: Creating Your Mini Avatar

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🗣️Transcript

Hello and welcome back! This lesson’s called Creating Your Mini Avatar and it’s all about bringing your target market to life. And we’re going to zoom in on a single individual who I call Student Zero.

But first, here’s what you’ll learn:

To quickly recap, your target market description – [Group] who want [Goal] but [Obstacle] – narrows your focus from “anyone” to a much smaller group of people your course will be built to serve.

Despite that, if you could peer directly into your target market you would still see a lot of diversity. Different backgrounds, different ages, different locations and so on.

And that’s great. It would be plain weird if all of your students were carbon copies of each other.

But I believe the most effective courses are built as if they were created for just one person. In fact, you’ll hear the same advice in a lot of writing classes – write as though you’re speaking to just one person.

When you’re building a course, it helps to put yourself in the headspace of a typical student. And that’s easier if you have a specific person in mind.

Now, you’ve probably heard of a customer avatar. It’s a popular business concept these days. An avatar is a profile – sometimes a very detailed one – of your ideal customer, typically used to guide product development and marketing.

You conjure up this imaginary ideal customer and give them a name, an age, an occupation, a location, an education, an income. You might decide whether or not they’re married, whether they have kids, even what type of car they drive.

And you can go as deep as you like. There are whole books on creating avatars.

However, I’m not a fan of going too deep with this when defining your target market.

Firstly because the finer detail is usually guesswork. And secondly because that lower-level information doesn’t really help you decide if someone’s a good customer.

For instance, I don’t really care if someone drives an Audi, a Toyota or a rusty old van. If they could benefit from my course, I’m happy to have them!

But I do believe a simple avatar helps you with having a specific person in your mind’s eye when you’re designing and building your course.

So let’s say your avatar is a man in his fifties called Mike who has the same goal and obstacles as the rest of your target market but his own unique background and personality.

When you’re designing your course you can imagine it’s Mike that you’re leading through the various stages. When you’re wondering what to put in your lessons you can ask yourself questions like: “Would Mike understand this or would he need a few more examples?”

That’s why I call this person your Student Zero. They’re the person who’s working their way through your course even as you design it. Before the first real student is even enrolled.

You can put as much detail into your avatar as you like or you can keep it short and simple. One paragraph is often enough to get you started, a kind of mini-avatar. Just give your “student zero” a name, a rough age, a location, and an occupation.

Then take a guess at their likes, dislikes, their fears and frustrations.

I find it’s also useful to include a sentence or two of backstory that sets the context for them joining your course.

For instance, if your course helps people with weight loss, you might say something like: “Bob has struggled with his weight since his late teens.”

Or if your course helps struggling coaches, you might say: “If Susan can’t crack the code for getting more clients, she may have to go back to her old job, which she hates.”

Finally, I recommend grabbing a photo from Google Images that looks like the person in your head. Anything to bring them to life for you.

By the way, you’ll find some example mini-avatars in the Resources section beneath this lesson, so make sure you check those out.

Just remember: your avatar is not a perfect description of everyone who might benefit from your course. It’s a description of one person, imaginary but vivid, who is firmly within your target market and represents the group as a whole.

By the way, your Student Zero can be a pure invention or they can be based on someone you know. My Student Zero is based on someone that I worked with one-to-one on their course. And they’re exactly the sort of person I would have invited to take this course had it existed at the time.

Once you have your Student Zero, try to keep this person front of mind as you work through the rest of this course.

And look, I know you may have done this kind of “ideal customer” exercise before. If so, feel free to dig out that work and adapt it.

But if you haven’t, it shouldn’t take long to create your mini-avatar, and even a simple one will sharpen your course creation efforts.

Okay, that’s it for this lesson! One more lesson in this module to go.

Bye for now!

🛠️ Resources

❓FAQs

What about that situation where the course buyer is different to the course student?

Earlier in this module I mentioned the possible scenario where the course buyer (or decision maker) is different to the course student.

Since your mini avatar is designed to help you while creating your course (not defining your market) you should based it on a typical student, not a typical buyer.