If you had a business, would the ideal experience actually be?
Talk about starting with the end in mind.
One of the best ways to re-imagine anything, is to actually step into the experience.
I was watching an Eben Pegan talk he did for Tony Robbins on How To Think Like a Marketing Genius. It’s a long video filled with gems, and I especially liked his recipe for designing your business flow and the ideal experience.
The recipe is pretty simple:
- Create your Customer Avatar.
- Create your Business Avatar.
- Create your ideal path and story with customer touch points.
- Automate where you can, but stay relevant, personable, and specific.
When you create your Customer Avatar, get specific. Start with your broad customer segment, but then use one customer as a representative. For example, Erwin is a male, has 100 IQ, he’s bored, makes 50K a year, is 13K in debt, and has low self-esteem.
When you write, write as if you are talking with Erwin, not at him, and not at a generic, abstract, customer segment. Have some empathy.
Also when you write, remember that it’s a dialogue or conversation. Focus on the small subset of attributes that your customer segment has in common and can relate to, and relate to that. If talking about your music isn’t relevant to the broader set, then leave it out. Stay relevant to the broader set, but get specific by keeping things personable, down to Earth, and real by thinking of Erwin. Help Erwin out.
To create your ideal path and story, keep it simple. Draw a simple timeline, and plot out the happy path or journey that your customer will take. At each customer touch point, what would the ideal interaction be. What’s the end state?
Ultimately, you are creating a storyboard of how to script your business. When you know how the story of your business should actually flow, you can automate where it makes sense.
Eben gave examples where he uses scripted email Auto-responders to automate the interaction with his customers. Sometimes it’s a piece of advice. Sometimes it’s interactive, such as a “Question and Answer” email. Sometimes, it’s what he calls a “Mail Bag” where he answers some of the top questions his readers asked, that he thinks is relevant to the broader community.
In all cases, Eben says the key is to keep it personable, specific, and actionable. It’s humans, not eyeballs, not monetization, not traffic. It’s people with real fears, real pains, real needs, and actually treat them like an individual, not a herd.
To recap, you walk the story of a specific customer interacting with your business in the ideal way. You storyboard it, along the customer touch points.
That’s right. Re-imagine the ideal experience.
That’s how better businesses are born.
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Image by jonny goldstein.
Year in Review 2012