How To Visualise Your Prospect Like They Were Sitting Right In Front Of You

The purpose of your discovery questions is to ensure you understand the full environment you’re advertising within.

Not just who your prospect is demographically and psychographically. But, also, the landscape of competitive positioning, common pricing, marketplace trending, influencer impact, keywords, search volume, etc.

The more clarity you can gain on demographics and psychographics the better you will understand your market and prospect. The better you understand your prospect the better you will be at crafting a message that resonates with them.

You need an understanding of;

• Age
• Gender. This is important because the way you communicate with a mainly female target audience is very different from the way you would communicate with a male targeted audience.
• Ethnicity
• Job/Income
• Location. Are you dealing with individuals who are local, national or overseas? Certain words and phrases differ depending on the location of your target audience.
• Marital status.
• Education
• Hobbies
• Interests
• Political affiliations
• Favourite magazines or newspapers. This cames into play when you’re crafting your big idea because it helps you to understand what they are accustomed to seeing, what are they accustomed to being offered, what are the price points, what are the features and what are the typical conversations that they have.
• Favourite books
• Past purchases

For all of these elements, you want to have least a basic understanding of who you are talking to.

This is how you ensure your ad ideas and creative are fresh and compelling.

As an addition to this step, I like to dive a bit deeper. There are key questions you need to answer to ensure your ad campaigns are emotionally congruent with the main marketing message. This is essential for a high sales conversion rate.

Questions such as…

What does your prospect deeply want or desire?

There’s a difference between wants and needs. When it comes to marketing we focus on what the prospect wants. Wants are more compelling than needs.

In his book “How to write a Good Advertisement” Victor Schwab defined 4 categories of wants;

1. What do they want to gain?
   Health, time, money, prestige, etc
2. What do they want to be?
   Good parents, up-to-date, creative, influential, etc
3. What do they want to save?
   Money, time, worry, work, risk, etc
4. What do they want to do?
   Win affection, acquire something, satisfy curiosity, etc

What does your prospect see, hear and feel right now, and at each step of your marketing campaign? What’s the primary emotion being stimulated by the headline and campaign lead?

What does the prospect or service being offered do or change for the prospect? And how will that result make the prospect feel? For example:

• Earn more money = Feel successful
• Learn something = Feel independent
• Build a nest egg = Feel more secure
• Loss weight = Feel attractive

Your whole marketing funnel is designed to move them from the emotion they are experiencing right now about their problem or situation to the emotion they want to experience when they purchase your product.

What closely held beliefs does your prospect live by?
Prospects already believe certain things about the marketplace, about you, about certain products, about their situation and you need to have an understanding of what those things are if you are to get buy-in.

• What do they need to believe about you in order to buy?
• What do they need to believe about themselves in order to buy?
• What do they need to believe about your product/service in order to buy?