If you are an internet business owner who has made the following mistakes, you might want to take some notes before you travel the world again.
- Lacking a customer avatar
An Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA) is a typical customer who would buy your product or service. In order to run a successful online business, you have to fully understand your ICA, including their age, gender, location, income, profession, education, interests, hopes & dreams, fears & frustrations, etc.
When your ICA’s partner switches off the light at night, what keeps your ICA awake?
What is your ICA’s political view?
What does your ICA eat for lunch from Monday to Friday?
Now I’d like you to write two essays:
- My Ideal Customer Avatar – In this essay, you’ll describe your ICA in detail.
- A Day in My Ideal Customer Avatar’s Life – Let’s say your ICA’s name is Lucy: this essay is A Day in Lucy’s Life (You’ll describe what Lucy does from the moment she wakes up in the morning to the moment she goes to bed at night.)
When you know exactly who you are talking to, your messaging will be very, very clear. Truthfully, it’s easier to get a wider audience when your business’s messaging only targets a specific ICA.
- Lacking consistency
In your online business plan, you’d better write down things like:
- Produce content for Facebook and Instagram every day.
- Make a video for YouTube every Wednesday.
- Write an article for my blog every Friday.
The underlined words are the keywords because content marketing only works when it’s done consistently.
Seth Godin famously said, “Content marketing is the only marketing left.” Indeed, who doesn’t skip every ad when they watch YouTube videos? Who doesn’t look at their smartphone when they see an ad on TV?
That means running ads is not effective in this day and age because this isn’t 1965. Yes, in the popular TV show Mad Men, the advertising agency looks very glamorous. But that happened in the 60s when people were only consuming content on TV and in the newspaper – they had to pay some attention to those ads because they didn’t have lots of distractions at that time. Yet in 2022, content marketing is the only way to make the customers pay attention to what you are offering because quite frankly, no one cares about ads anymore!
Most online business owners know what content marketing is, but not everyone can do it consistently. The person who can do it consistently is the winner. Please let me explain.
If your audience know that you publish one video on YouTube every Wednesday, they would look forward to watching your new video on Wednesday.
If your audience know that you write one article every Friday, they would look forward to reading your new blog article on Friday.
That is to say, you are on their mind regularly…. All the time!
“When content marketing and consistency are combined, you will have a profitable online business because you will get the audience’s attention and keep their attention! Your audience’s attention is the oxygen of your online business. When that is looked after, you can relax and travel the world.”
