We constantly talk about target audiences and how crucial it is for small businesses to understand their consumers. But how often do small businesses actually create an example of their consumer?
This week on the Small Owned Business (S.O.B.) marketing podcast, we talk about customer avatars, what they are, and how to create one for your small business. While having a basic understanding of your target audience is great (and important), when you go deeper and flesh out what makes your target audience “them” - that’s when you can connect with them more deeply.
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Chapters:
00:00 Thank You For Listening & Please Leave a Review
03:26 What is a Customer Avatar?
05:27 Basic Customer Demographics
10:33 Technology Adoption Curve
15:40 Psychographic Traits
26:38 Goals and Aspirations of Target Audience
29:36 Identifying Pain Points
32:29 Brand Values Alignment
35:07 Digital and Local Habits
36:46 Language and Tone in Marketing
45:14 TLDL: Key Takeaways on Customer Avatars _________________
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Chelsea: Hey everyone and welcome to the S.O.B. Marketing podcast. Where we celebrate to S.O.B. you are, and if you haven't figured it out yet - we mean Small Owned Business, we don't mean S.O.B...
Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.
Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.
Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.
*Beginning of Episode*
Vivian: We're back! Welcome back to another episode of the SOB, Small Owned Business Marketing Podcast. I'm joined by my lovely baby sister, Chelsea, over here today.
Chelsea: Hello, You're joined by me every single time but okay. Thank you
Vivian: I know. Well, it's a joint effort podcast here. For those of you that it's your first time tuning in, I call Chelsea my little baby sister because we do have a 15 year age gap. She is in fact a full ass grown woman. I will forever refer to her as my baby sister for that reason.
Little bit of housekeeping before we get into our exciting marketing topic that we're going to cover today. If you have not already done it - leave us a review. That helps to get this podcast in front of other small-owned businesses who need marketing support and who need a marketing resource, and we want to be that to them. So go ahead, leave us a review. It helps us out tremendously. Also, don't forget we have a TLDL section, too long, didn't listen. That's a chapter in this podcast episode. If you are on the run, short on time, go ahead and fast forward to that TLDL section. Chelsea's going to give you the meat and potatoes of the conversation. Then when you have time, you're going to come back and listen to the full length episode because that's just what you do as a small business owner, right? So you wanna get those contexts in that conversation and we want to ensure that you guys get to hear that full length conversation. So Chelsea, what topic are we covering today?
Chelsea: Well, Vivian if you are not new here, you guys, then you have probably heard us say that you need to know your target audience. That's like the number one rule of marketing is know who your target audience is. Who are the people who are interested in your products or services who would actually make a purchase, right?
Today we are going to talk about customer avatars, what they are, how to go about building one, and why it's important.
Vivian: Yeah, so let me give you guys a little bit of a visual, because y'all know I'm a visual girl. Let's say that you're playing one of those claw machine games. I don't know what they're called, Chels.
Chelsea: A claw machine.
Vivian: Is that what it's called? Okay. You're playing one of those. Your target audience is the collective group, right? It's all those little stuffed animals in there. It's important to identify your target audience because as a small business owner, you need to know how to reach that collective group of people. When you are creating a customer avatar, you're essentially taking that little claw in there and you're picking out one of those little stuffed animals and you're bringing it out. Now you are dissecting. I don't mean that in a weird way, but you are putting attributes to that person. You're building a 3d, I don't know, maybe it's 5D actually.
You're building a dimension around that person, right? You're giving them what attributes, you're giving them interest, you're just really finding out more about that person because in order to speak to the collective group, you have to be able to speak to that one person.
Customer avatar Chelsea, what different components is it comprised of? Do you want to like maybe give us a list of the components and then we'll go through each one of them?
Chelsea: Absolutely, I can do that. Your customer avatar should include some basic demographics, some psychographic traits, goals and aspirations, brand value alignments, habits, language and tone and personality traits.
Vivian: All right, so it sounds like to start off with the first one we're going to be talking about is the regular good old, what do you call it?
Chelsea: Basic Demographics.
Vivian: Basic demographics. Y'all know what this is. This is probably what you're doing right now.
Chelsea: Actually, yes, this is likely what you have done. I'm not trying to call you out. OK. But you've probably done your basic demographics and went, I understand my target audience, which is not wrong. It's not right either.
Vivian: You could go deeper. That's what we're saying.
Chelsea: Yes. Go deeper because when you really have that clear understanding of your audience that's when you connect with them on a deeper level.
Vivian, whenever I create a customer avatar I actually like to do one specific thing first and not everyone does it. You definitely don't have to but in my personal opinion it really elevates the work that you're doing when creating this avatar and it's actually naming the persona.
Vivian: it's like, you're not going to know what this is. Back in the day, we used to have these little things called Tamagotchis.
Chelsea: How young, I mean thank you that you think I'm young, but like how, I'm 27. Well, I'm 26 right now. I know what a Tamagotchi is.
Vivian: So, did you ever, first, did you ever have one?
Chelsea: Well, well no.
Vivian: Okay, and second of all, I knew a lot of people that named them. So it's kind of like having your own tomogachi, you guys. Now you're naming your customer avatar. I love that you bring this up because it is not something that everybody does. I typically don't do this, but it makes sense to me that you would include this as your first step because one of the not related but on a similar vein to this.
I've been on YouTube for a long time now and we all know that I'm a little stuffy. I have a problem with just kind of letting loose and letting my personality shine. One of the things that I've recently started doing is actually incorporating and saying the name of a friend before I record or before I say the sentence or the paragraph. And the reason I do that is because it changes my tonality and the way that I'm, you know, just kind of relaying the message. So for example, I'll be like,
"Karen, the best example of a blah blah blah," right? Or "Lydia, you know, there are three things that are wrong with marketing plans", da da da. And so it does help when you're attaching a name to it because it definitely personifies. Right?
Chelsea: Yes, and also pro tip when you're creating any form of content this is a great thing to do. I tell, I have a specific client that I help her create her short form content, her video, video marketing. Whenever she's stumbling or something like that, I tell her, talk to me, tell me what you're trying to say, or act like you're talking to a customer. How do you explain this to them when they ask you this question?
Vivian: So you know what I'm thinking now that you've taught me this little trick about like actually naming your customer avatar. Once I've developed this whole like persona, then I can start using that name, whatever name I give them before I hit record on a YouTube video, because essentially that's the one person that I'm targeting. I'm hoping, yes, I'm collectively targeting small business owners.
But also we're not for every small business owner, right? We're not for the small business owner that has like 20 employees. For us, we really want to be able to help the small business owner that maybe it's like them and one or two other people, right? They have limited resources and a lean team and all that. I do think this could help a lot when I'm creating content and using their name.
Chelsea: Well, good. I'm glad. So this was a long way to get to the beginning of building your customer avatar, which is your basic demographics. So that's going to be your age, gender, location, occupation. What is their income level?
I would say personality traits. I would consider that basic demographics as well. I don't know about you.
Vivian: Well, so what personality traits? Like give me a...
Chelsea: Well think about, are they adventurous, are they independent?
Vivian: Yeah, I agree. I would lump that under basic demographics.
Chelsea: Yeah, this is the basic you should know about your target audience. Now, I have a personality trait, Vivian, that I want to talk about and I want to bring up because I know the only people who remember this is marketers because we were drilled, like this was drilled into us in college. But I don't know if anyone else ever thinks about this. And it's the technology adoption curve.
Vivian: Yeah, so expand on that a lot, and just so you guys know going into this, when she explains this, just know I am a lagger. I know this about myself. I identified myself as soon as I heard it in marketing class. I was like, "oh, that's me:. Even in my 20s, that's me.
Chelsea: Okay, so the technology adoption curve. You have this bell curve. The beginning of the bell curve is going to be your innovators. They are the people that as soon as a new technology comes out, they have it. They know everything about it. They are invested. Then you have your early adopters. They're the people who okay, it just came out. You know what? I've heard some things from innovators and I'm into it, so I'm going to also buy this technology.
Now you have the early majority, so we're going up the bell curve. Your early majority is going to be the people who have done research, they've been hearing about this new thing and they're like, okay, there's enough things for me...I've read up on it a little bit. I'm ready to invest. I'm all in, right?
Your late majority, now we're over the bell curve. So your late majority are the people who are like, there's a good majority of information out there about this product now. We feel comfortable with it. We're willing to invest in it. Let's do it. Then you got the laggards, who are at the bottom of the bell curve. They're the ones who have waited probably like more than a year.
Vivian: I would be mildly offended if you weren't my sister that you're calling me out on being at the very bottom, at the tail end. But I think that's, I love that you included this Chelsea, because it is something that even as marketers, we are taught to think about people in this type of...the way they use technology, because it changes so much of what we do.
For example, If I am trying to attract, if I'm building my customer avatar and I identify that this particular person, Bob, okay, I'm going to go with a very unique name. Bob here is an early adapter, right? So he's not quite an innovator. So he needs a little more convincing to try my product, right? But that allows me to then craft the messaging a little better because I understand like, hey, he's not a lagger. He's not super risk adverse. He's not trying to like never risk anything, but by the same token, he's not like an innovator who is willing to just like, just let me test it out. Right. I'm also looking at it this way. For innovators, they're also a little more okay with I want to say with things not being completely flushed out yet. So if you're still having like little kinks and stuff, I think they're a little more graceful about that than a lagger who's like, y'all been doing this stuff for, you know, how many years this product's been around and you still haven't figured this out. So there are just a lot of undertones to it. so identifying your customer avatar and seeing where they're at in there does help tremendously.
Chelsea: Yeah, and I'm glad you explained it in a way that's not about technology, because yes it is about - it's the technology adoption curve - but the undertones you can relate to anything. Like you said, laggards are going to be way more risk adverse than early majority or early adapters.
Vivian, which one do you think I am?
Vivian: I think you are smack dab in between an early majority and a late majority. Okay. So you're like right at the peak of the bell card. I think you're, you're not going to be the one that's like doing the early innovation stuff, but you're going to catch onto a trend or to something a little sooner than the late majority, right? So you're kind of in between there. You're going to let people, you know, try it out. You're still going to be there early enough to where you could say like, hey, the trend hasn't passed. It's still a very new thing that people are doing. But is that an accurate assessment? How would you assess yourself?
Chelsea: I think so. No, I think that would be correct.
Vivian: I think if you were an innovator, you would die because...you are not good with risk. You see what I'm saying? Yeah.
Chelsea: Mm-hmm. Yes, that was correct. That was accurate. I wouldn't have said I was going to die, but thank you.
Vivian: I just don't think it's conducive to your mental health.
Chelsea: Yes, that's fair. So now we've done basic demographics. Let's talk about psychographic traits.
First and foremost, interests and hobbies. You need to know, surprise, surprise y'all, but you need to know what your target audience is interested in.
Vivian: What they're doing. This is such a big one because let me just use a very oversimplified example of this. Okay. If someone's hobbies are like television or Netflix or something, that's a very different person than someone who is hiking all the time, okay? I'm not trying to group people, people are multi-dimensional. I understand you could be Netflix and chill some days and then be super adventurous other days. But my point here being, if I know that my customer avatar that I'm trying to reach is more of a Netflix and chill person, if they love movies, if they love series, stuff like that, it would stand to reason that you do some OOH, out of home advertising, meaning streaming services.
*Freeze Frame*
Chelsea: Sometimes, even the professionals mess up. Here Vivian is actually talking about OTT - over the top advertising - and not OOH, which is out of home advertising. So OTT is going to be your, marketing on streaming services, OOH advertising is more like billboards.
*End of Freeze Frame*
Vivian: So if I place an ad for my boutique or whatever I'm doing on that out of home network, that means that I'm reaching them while they're sitting there watching. So all of these components are really, I think they start to mesh and they start to kind of put this puzzle together for you.
to where you're able to make decisions a lot quicker and a lot easier.
Chelsea: Yes, absolutely. We also have motivations and fears. So I have an example of this. Vivian, for my senior thesis in college, which was six years ago.
Vivian: Dang! I'm joking.
Chelsea: I was about to say, excuse me, when did you go to college? Yeah, exactly.
Vivian I'm trying to remember when I graduated, 2005. It's been a hot minute.
Chelsea: I was 7.
Sorry. Okay, y'all, I went to college. I had a senior thesis. The senior thesis was about creating a marketing plan and essentially rebranding a specific business. So we went in depth on the interests and hobbies and fears. We created a customer avatar for this target audience, for this brand. I am guesstimating here because I don't exactly remember because again it was six years ago and I don't have any of these files anymore. I don't have any room on my computer. I had to delete them all. But they were young to middle age adults. They're the life of the party. They are the early majority. They need to know the new popular spots. They're very about their local community. They want to be popular.
They fear not being noticed. So that's the fear. They fear that they're not being noticed. Their motivation is they want to be popular. They want to be seen as the cool kids, right?
So funnily enough, Vivian, which this kind of, we're kind of going off track, but I have to tell the story. Vivian, I recently saw this brand at Harris Teeter and I have opinions.
Vivian: What are those opinions?
Chelsea: So this is, it's alcoholic ice cream.
Vivian: Okay. Which is pretty new.
Chelsea: Mm-hmm. It's pretty new. Alcoholic ice cream is like a premium thing, right? Because there's a whole process to it. It's expensive. So they are a premium brand They're doing a very bad job at branding themselves as a premium brand though.
They have a premium price. They're expensive. But even their packaging is just not very good. And it just doesn't scream premium. I mean, the packaging is just white cardboard. You slap the sticker of the business logo on it.
Vivian: Out of curiosity, how much are they charging for a pint?
Chelsea: $14.
Vivian: Really?
Chelsea: Yes, because I saw it and I was like, maybe, you know, for old times sake, I'll get a pint. I was like, I'm not getting a pint. Absolutely not.
Vivian: Out of curiosity to our listeners out there, would you pay $14 for a pint of ice cream if it was infused with alcohol? Yes or no? Just tell us yes or no. This is fascinating me for a couple different reasons. I would stand to reason because, correct me if I'm wrong, Chelsea, there are not a lot of alcoholic ice creams on grocery store shelves right now.
Chelsea: No, now there are more businesses than you think there are. But they are very hard to find, and this is the first time I've ever seen one at a grocery store.
Vivian: Okay, so here locally in Charleston, we have a van that drives around, it's called Booze Pops. They're freeze pops. They infuse them with alcohol. Okay, well, but it's not in stores. They actually have a truck that drives around and they do charge, I think it's $9 for a thing like this. Yeah, and so it is a little more expensive, but my point being, you don't have a whole lot of competition in store, in grocery stores.
It's interesting that they're probably the most expensive ice cream on the shelf. Rightfully so because they're having to alcohol in it. But also the packaging should be meshing with that. And I'm interested in the fact that you said they're in Harris Theater. I get it that's a lot more distribution for them. Curious to know if they tried partnering with like a Whole Foods or something like that where it was a little more of the people that were going there wouldn't be gawking at that price and they'd be more in line with what they're spending on groceries, right?
Chelsea: Yeah. I will say, they did also, they weren't in the ice cream aisle. They were in the alcohol aisle. They had their own little like freezer. The freezer was branded and the freezer branding looked decent. Like it looked good, but when you actually go to get the product, it's just white cardboard.
Vivian: Let's redirect this back to the initial thing that you were talking about. You introduced this brand and all of that because what you were saying is part of your project that you worked on your senior year for this particular brand was to develop the customer avatar. One of the big things you guys looked at was that motivations and fears, which I think a lot of times gets dropped, but this could be a north star for a small business for many different reasons. Once, if you know what motivates somebody, you can change your entire ad to really hit that home. Also, you could use fears in the same type of way. If I know that my target audience, my customer avatar is a single mom who is short on time and one of her biggest fears is that she's not going to be able to, let's say, to be able to track what her children are doing on the phone, right? She needs an app to be able to do that and I'm the one selling her the app. Then I can easily like play into that and like talk to those fears and be like, hey, we know you have other more important things to worry about, know, like putting food on the table, getting, you know, going to work every day, attending extracurricular activities. This is the one thing we don't need to worry about. And it's because we offer you this solution for $2.99 a month. There you go.
*S.O.B. Community Commercial*
Vivian: You know what we keep hearing from you fellow S.O.B.s?
Chelsea: Small Owned Businesses.
Vivian: Yes, small owned businesses. You guys are so overwhelmed with your marketing.
Chelsea: And we totally get that! You didn't start your bakery, or your boutique store, or your jewelry business to become full time marketers or content creators, or ad designers.
And marketing can feel really overwhelming.
Vivian: Oh yeah. Then you S.O.B.s try to go figure it out, because that's what you do. You Google stuff, watch videos, and end up spending hours trying to figure it out, only to sometimes end up more confused.
Chelsea: This is my full time job and trust me, the way marketing is talked about on the world wide web can be really misleading.
Vivian: Let's not even talk about trying to hire an agency for help. It's daunting, they don't know your small business like you do, and so they are not as effective. And let's not even talk about the cost.
Chelsea: We understand why a lot of you S.O.B.s feel ready to give up. That's why we even bothered to create The Seasoned Marketer.
Vivian: That's also why we started the S.O.B. Community. We wanted to create something practical and affordable for people who can't, or simply don't want to, outsource their marketing.
Chelsea: Right. So for $50 a month members can get free downloads and templates, step-by-step tutorial videos, a weekly live Q&A call with both of us marketing professionals and other S.O.B.s. You also become part of a supportive community to bounce ideas off of.
Vivian: It's like having a boardroom of like-minded individuals and marketing professionals where you can talk through all your marketing questions.
Chelsea: Without having to pay boardroom marketing agency prices!
Vivian: So if you're tired of wasting time trying to figure it all out on your own...
Chelsea: Or spending money on things that don't work, join us over at the S.O.B. Community.
Vivian: We'll help you turn your marketing stress into marketing success. And hey, it's just $50 a month.
Chelsea: So click the link in the description to join, and we can't wait to see you in the S.O.B. Community.
Vivian & Chelsea: Now back to the episode.
*End of Commercial*
Chelsea: So you have motivations and fears. Now we can move on to goals and aspirations. So what is your target audience striving for? Like what are they trying to achieve both in their personal life and their professional life?
Vivian: Okay, interesting. Why are we dividing professional and personal?
Chelsea: Because you want the full picture of someone. You your personal goals and your professional goals are different. That's why you want to know both of them.
Vivian: Yeah, and I think it just plays into the more information you have about somebody, the better. I hope that you guys take all this to heart. We're not asking you to make this stuff up. I think at the end of the day, when you're thinking about your small business, your product, or the services that you offer, think about who it's truly helping. Right? For us, our target audience overall is small business owners. But when we pull out that customer avatar, it's actually more granular than just small business owner. For us, we could be talking to that small business owner that has a full-time job. And they're on the side building this business. Okay, well, we have the marketing resources that's going to help them to eventually be able to leave that job, right? Because they're growing their small business with that. Getting that full picture of like both their aspirations personally and professionally can help to, I don't know, create that messaging.
Chelsea: Absolutely. I have two little examples. They're not as in-depth as what you just did. Thank you, Vivian. But I just have written down, you know, maybe they want to support locally more often, or maybe they want to take better care of their body.
Vivian: Yeah. Well, I think that's, those are huge. They're very, I think it changes the way you approach people. Right? I think that's the one thing we, always use the example of like when you're selling to somebody and you basically...if you're selling them off the rip without knowing anything about that person, it's almost like you're standing on one side of the street. They're on the other side of the street. You're yelling at them like, hey, come buy my product, whatever. It's like, that's not going to lure people over, right? It's going to be when you start speaking to them about all of this stuff that we're saying, when you're talking to them about their goals and aspirations, when you're leaning into, you know, what are, I think the next one, Chelsea, we're going to talk about is pain points.
Chelsea: Exactly.
Vivian: So what is "pain points"? How does somebody go about including that into their customer avatar?
Chelsea: This one should be, well, I don't want say it should be super simple, but what challenges or problems does your avatar face that your product or service can solve? What's the whole purpose of your product or your service? I can give you an example, The Design Demon. She sells, well, she sells a bunch of stuff, but her primary thing is jewelry. I like weird jewelry. Okay, I want to show off my Hot Topic/Limited 2 personality, but there are not many brands.
Vivian: Excuse me, are those not complete opposites? Hot Topic and Limited 2.
Chelsea: No, you wouldn't understand.
Vivian: I feel like you're a mashup.
Chelsea: Well, that's the point. That's the point. There's not many brands that can give you both in a combination. So I don't have that many options to fill those needs, but you know who does? The Design Demon. She's working on my pain points, and I appreciate that.
Vivian: She's luring all the people that are very Hot Topic but still Limited 2. I love it.
Chelsea: I would like to just say that that is her explanation of her brand.
Vivian: She legit puts that out there. Well, and yes. That is the thing I love about when you're talking about all of this stuff, this isn't made up marketing crap, y'all. This is stuff that really works because as Chelsea said, she used that terminology. She waved that white flag and she was like, if you're a hot topics girl, you're a little kinky, but you also got the good girl side to you, Limited 2, I'm right over here. I make jewelry for you. Right.
So I love that she has defined her audience so well that she knows what their pain points are, which is there aren't very many jewelry makers or very many options out there for people who want a mixture of the two. Want a little bit of spiciness with a little bit of, you know, angel.
The other thing that I think we don't talk enough about with pain points and why including them into your customer avatar can make such a big difference is, what a way to make somebody feel seen. When you get that down pat, when you are able to articulate to a potential customer exactly what their pain point is and they're like, holy crap, somebody gets me. You get me. You see me. You understand and you're selling me a product or a service. You have the solution that I need.
Chelsea: Yes, thank you. i love that.
So I also have brand values alignment. Let me explain this a little bit because that sounds kind of confusing. It's basically your brand and your target audience: Do your values align? What values does your target audience have? What values will this customer avatar, this persona have? Does it align with your business? Because that can be very important too. Maybe you're not aligned. That might just mean that you don't focus that much on it.
Vivian: I see this a lot more on the side of Instagram that I'm on, okay? I'm on the side where all of the girly pop mummies are now making like sourdough bread and all of that because we're all wanting to use less chemicals or have less chemicals in our stuff, right? And so they're learning how to go out and make homemade bread. They're trying recipes that are a little more whole foods, less like sauces. They're making their sauces and doing all this stuff. Or they're, AKA me, raising chickens, right? And so they have organic eggs and all this. I think the reason I bring that up is because on that side of Instagram that I'm on, I'm seeing this a lot with the brand alignment in the values. If I choose to use a new shampoo, I'm looking at the product that they use or the ingredients that they use in that shampoo. And so therefore, if you are targeting that group of people and if I am your customer avatar, then you better make sure that your ingredients kind of align with that, right? And so I think it does help with giving you that full perspective and also with ensuring that you're putting your money where your mouth is. If you're saying that you're offering a clean alternative to something, it better be clean because people are going to be checking that. But that relates to not just that particular industry or segment of people, it relates to, I think, everything else.
Chelsea: Great example, Vivian. I love your...you calling yourself out with your chickens.
Vivian: Actually, I'm calling my husband out with the chickens because I don't got nothing to do with them.
Chelsea: Well, that's a good point. That's cool. That's a good point.
So next we have digital and location habits. So basically, where are they both online and just in general? You know, what platforms are they using? How are they consuming information online? This is: one, just very important for your marketing because you need to know where your target audience is to be able to reach them. Two, it just helps you understand the type of content that they're consuming.
Vivian: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it helps to you with like, you know, we recently, unfortunately just had those fires out in California. If you know geographically where the base of your people are, like if you look at your analytics and you're like, man, a lot of my people are in that geographic area, it helps with that communication. But on top of that, I love that you brought in that you're talking about the digital space too.
Like where are people on that digital space? Because it does change, you know, everything that you're able to push out to reach them.
Chelsea: Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up geographically as well. Locations also. Try to go a little more in depth with this, are they going to, is your target audience, is your customer avatar going to a Starbucks or are they going to a local coffee shop?
Vivian: Yeah. Leaning into that Chelsea, because those details are really important. And this is the last component to this: language and tone, right? Now, this is kind of a funny example, but you know, it plays into it quite a bit because as I mentioned earlier, Chelsea and I have a 15 year age gap. The language you use with me can be completely different than the language you use with her. And that's just because of our generational difference.
So we always joke because there are times that she'll use words and I'm like, I don't know what that means. So if someone was using that terminology in an ad, I would very quickly tap out and be like, that ad is not for me. I am not their target audience. So it is important to include that into your customer avatar.
Chelsea: Yeah, and also, this should have an impact on your brand voice. Better understanding the language and tone of your target audience is probably going to impact the tone that you use as a brand, and it should.
Vivian: Some of my favorite reels right now on Instagram are when they get, a casino did this and who was the other one that did this recently? It was maybe a museum or a library.
Chelsea: I know what you're talking about. It was a library. At least the one that I just saw was a library.
Vivian: So it was a 60, 70 year old man. They had gotten him to use the lingo that kids are using this day. He's like walking around the library showing them, I think they had just done like a facelift to it. So they were showing them new spots where they can "hang" and do all this stuff. He had...
Chelsea: They did not say hang, okay.
Vivian: Okay, what did they say?
Chelsea: Well, I don't remember off the top of my head.
Vivian: Okay, it was not the word hang apparently, but it cracked me up because it was such a juxtaposition of an older gentleman that you know has no clue what these words mean or maybe they taught it to him, but this is not how he would talk in everyday life, and yet giving you a tour of the library using the hip lingo.
Those are my favorite videos right now. I think it's because there's such a weird distortion of like what the person is talking about in the lingo and the tone and the language they're using against visually who they are.
Chelsea: But it's a great example of knowing your target audience. They want to bring in GenZ to enjoy the library.
I'm sure the got a GenZ employee to write all the, to write the script for that video. I think at some point he's talking about the outside, they have tables outside around the library. He says "if you need to touch grass after your menty b" perfect. Which Vivian, do you know what any of that means?
Vivian: Touch grass, basically get back to nature, right?
Chelsea: Yeah, yeah, "after your menty b"?
Vivian: When you have a mental breakdown.
Chelsea: Look at you! Okay, okay, good for you.
Vivian: I'm getting better at it.
Chelsea: I love that for you.
Vivian: I'm hoping by the age of 50 I'm going to be a guru.
Chelsea: In what? In GenZ? It's going to be Gen Alpha then.
Vivian: in Gen Alpha. Remember I'm a lagger, I'm a lagger so I'm not going to be on the Alpha train until...
Chelsea: I know some Gen Alpha terms, but not that many.
Vivian: What's one Gen alpha term you know? Just one.
Chelsea: Ohio. Skibidi, skibidi toilet.
Vivian: what's Ohio? What's Ohio? Besides a state.
Chelsea: Ohio is either when something's cool or not cool. It depends on how you're using it.
Vivian: So you could use it both ways.
Chelsea: Yeah, I personally would only use it in a bad way, but you know.
Vivian: Like that's so Ohio. Like this whole conversation is so Ohio to me. Because we're redefining words, y'all. That's why there's a Webster's dictionary. Can we like...before urbandictionary.com, there was good old Webster.
Chelsea: Okay. Okay, millennial.
Vivian: All right, so going back to our topic here. Let me also use an example though of a very, how this shifts very mildly for some small businesses. Take for example us, one of the things that we realized going into 2025 is, when we were writing captions, Chelsea and I had the very upfront conversation about both of us being being on board with just writing the way we talk.
It's been a shift. And the reason we're doing that shift, though, is because the type of small business owner that we want to welcome into our S.O.B., Small Owned Business, community, right, our paid membership community, is the small business owner that's not looking for a stuffy place. They want to go in there, be able to have real conversations about stuff. Some of those real conversations are not tailored. They're not polished.
We decided we don't want our communication anymore to be polished. That's very hard for me because I still work in a corporate setting where I think I still have to do a lot of that polishing. So it takes for me a longer time to come out of it. Chelsea's much better at it because she already naturally just kind of writes that way. But it was a conscious decision that we both had to make moving forward on how that tone was going to change within our communication.
Chelsea: It's not even just like wording or tone. It's the type of words. Well, that's wording, but the type of words we use, Sure, we're "experts", marketing experts. I do quotations because again, marketing is such a changing and evolving field. There's always something new. So, you know, as experts, we have to constantly be reading up on stuff, but you know, we know the big buzzwords. We're not going to use them, because we're not here to say, we're experts and we know these fancy words. We're here to say, hey, we're experts. Let us, I don't want to say dumb it down, but let us just talk to you real talk, no nonsense, no extra stuff so that you can understand this, so you can do it on your own.
Vivian: Yeah, and also I think what that does too is it gets rid of this confusion because let's all be real. We can easily, we were having earlier, we did a live with our friend Jordan Ilderton. What's interesting is, you know, she coaches some of these small business owners and what you find is sometimes they could be talking about the same things, but they're not, okay. They're using the same word. They're not talking about the same thing, because they are not defining it in the same way. So when someone says my marketing is not successful, she goes in and she's like, well, let's look at it. When you break it down, the way they're looking in or quote, deeming success might be that they have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Well, maybe their marketing is working, but it's just not relating to follower count. So I think that's where defining gets extremely important. So the tone, the words that you choose to use.
Also, I'm going to tell you as someone who has done a ton with communication, internal and external, whether that be for PR or internal corporate stuff, the words you decide not to use says a lot. And I think more often than not, we forget that. We think, well, I included this. OK, but what did you exclude? Did you purposefully exclude that, which I'm 100% on board with that. Sometimes I purposefully do not use certain terminology because of either the negative connotation or an idea that it might build in somebody's head that I don't want them to even like go down that route. So, sorry that was a huge tangent that I went on.
Chelsea: I don't think that was a tangent. I think that was a great example. I think that was good. Well, Vivian, do you think we could do the TLDL?
Vivian: Yeah babe, I say let's roll right into that TLDL.
Chelsea: Let's do the TLDL. So if you skipped ahead to this chapter, the TLDL - too long didn't listen.
That's great. Here's going to, I'm going to give you a synopsis. Go back and listen to the entire episode. It'll make a lot more sense when you hear the entire conversation. But this week on the SOB Marketing Podcast, we talked about customer avatars, why they're important, how to create them. It's important to understand your target audience. When creating a customer avatar, you want to know: basic demographics, personality traits, psychographic traits. You want to know their goals, aspirations, their pain points, their values, their digital habits, their location habits, and their location and tone.
So if you want to hear what all of those things are, then you're going to have to go listen to the episode. But just real quick, that's what it is.
Thank you again for listening and make sure that you follow or subscribe, like, do all the things, leave a review. And if you have a topic you want us to talk about, let us know. Leave it the comments section or send us a DM on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok.
Vivian: Smoke signal us. Anything.
Chelsea: Don't do smoke signals. I don't know those. Don't do Morse code. I don't know Morse code either. Or you could send us an email at Help@TheSeasonedMarketer.com.
And y'all go be the best S.O.B. that you can be.
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