Marketing Is Relationship | Customer Profile, Journey, & Parasocial Relationships

Jan 3

As human beings, our lives revolve around relationships. Why should our marketing be any different?

Today, I’ll be showing you how authentic marketing starts with really understanding your customer through a robust customer profile. With that foundation, you'll be ready to map out their learning journey and build a friendship through content marketing.

When you think about marketing this way, it becomes more human. It’s personal. If you’re ready to bring more humanity into your marketing and truly serve your customers, keep reading.

You Need a Customer Profile | Who Are You Relating To?

To build a relationship, you need to understand who someone is. That starts with identifying your target audience or ideal customer. Basically, who does your organization help?

If you already work within an established business, then you know who you’re helping. If you haven’t developed a profile yet, simply identify your top moneymakers then build a customer profile from them. If you aren’t sure, reach out to your sales team.

If your business is new, it’s more difficult initially. In fact, who you believe you're selling to might be different than who actually resonates with what you’re selling. You’ll likely meander around until you find the right target market.

Either way, it’s essential to know who you’re talking to. Your message will only succeed if it’s crafted specifically for your audience. You have a great story, but if it doesn’t resonate with your audience...you’ve got nothing. It’s tempting to gloss over this step, but nothing is more dangerous. Know who you’re talking to.

Five Bucket Profile | Demographics, Personality, Dream, Pains, Knowledge Gap

To help you picture this ideal customer, let’s use my 5 Bucket Profile System. Going through this process will allow you to understand who you’re talking to and start painting their story.

1. Demographic Sketch

This includes the basics: age range, gender, location, job title, income. It’s a generic profile you can use for targeting ads, but is incomplete. To really understand what makes someone tick, you need to go to step 2.

2. What They’re Like

Now you’re going deeper and answering questions like:

What type of person is this?
What is their personality leaning?
What do they enjoy?
What type of clothes do they wear? Is fashion important?
What do they value?
What is their political affiliation?

You can keep adding more questions, but you get the idea.

You're starting to understand their interests and paint a picture of who they are. You’ll notice trends. Your ideal customers may favor a certain style or all be attracted to similar authors.

Once you understand your customer, you’re better informed to create something specifically for them and really hit the nail on the head. You’ll know how to design your products and brand to fit the tone, style, and feel they love.

3. Their Driving Desire

Next, explore what drives them. As I’ve discussed before, we’re all on a journey. There is something we want (a goal) and we move through life trying to obtain it. Those goals change over time, but nevertheless, we never stop the quest.

To understand your customer, you must identify their driving desire. Answer these questions:

What is this person hoping for?
What is their ideal dream state?
What gets them out of bed in the morning?
Why are they doing this type of work?

Our dreams and aspirations exist in a hierarchy. There’s the ultimate ideal dream state. But then beneath that you’ll find smaller goals someone wants to achieve. Your business could address the smaller goals or the larger ideal state. Either way, you need to speak to the desires related to your product or service.

4. Pain Points

Pain points are daily obstructions and frustrations that prevent your customer from achieving their goals. To dig into their pain points, answer these questions:

What kinds of frustration do these problems cause?
What does life look like if they don't reach that goal?
How does that impact that person emotionally?
How does that impact them psychologically?
What primal identity fear does that scrape up for them when they encounter that thing?

We all have very deep, irrational fears about things circling life and death, security, and morality. When these pain points get triggered, we blow up about very tiny things. Knowing what your customer really worries about...what keeps them up at night or causes them to lose there cool -- that’s what will enable you to speak to them.

5. Current Topic Knowledge

Think about what your customer already knows and what gaps exists.

What is their topic knowledge?
What do they currently understand about what you do?
Do they understand that they even have the problem that you solve?
Do they understand that you solve this problem?
How much do they know about what your focus is within?

After completing all five steps, you’ll have a fairly good picture of who your customer is and how to bridge that knowledge gap between who they are and where you are.

Identify Their Learning Path | The Foundation of Content Mapping

To bridge that gap, you’ll need to do some reverse engineering. You know you want them to get to Z…but they’re at A right now. How do you help them get from A to Z? What does that journey look like? How will you transform them?

Mapping out this journey will inform your content marketing. What topics should you include? How should you steer your customer to the next step? Basically, you’re building your content marketing foundation.

Brand storytelling is really the combination of brand and storytelling. It’s forming your brand identity, then communicating it through your content marketing (see Figure 1).

Your brand identity includes your positioning, messaging, and value system. From that, you create a visual identity reinforcing those core tenets. But then you need the package for communicating these messages to your audience -- that's content marketing.

Content marketing starts out with your evergreen foundation which covers your brand identity. These should be your long-lasting pieces that communicate what you do, who you help, and your values. Then above that you have your consistent content channels to communicate and broadcast who you are to the world. So that way, when someone become interested in you, they’re met with your brand and sales enablement foundation.

Content is Friendship | McNabb Storytelling Stages of Friendship

Content marketing is like building a friendship. You come on soft knowing it’s a long extended process. In the end, it’s going to attract significantly more people than direct sales. Only a few people are immediately ready for direct sales. After those are onboarded, the rest of your customers get to know you through content marketing.

Content marketing builds relationships over time. It also spreads your reputation and builds up brand equity.

To better understand how this works, let’s discuss the stages of friendship. There is a journey people go on when they encounter your brand through your content. At first, they don’t really know who you are. But if they’re interested in finding out more, they’ll go through the friendship pyramid and get to know your brand more intimately.

When you create content, you want to lay in out in a logical relationship progression. What kind of content would you share with a new acquaintance? What about with your closest friends? It’s important to start out slowly with appropriate content people can digest, then save the meatier topics for later.

I couldn’t find a great process for the stages of friendship so voila -- here’s the The McNabb Storytelling Stages of Friendship. We’ll work backwards.

McNabb Storytelling Friendship Stages *Copyright © 2022 McNabb Storytelling LLC.*

Unknown: You don’t know these folks at all

8. Nonexistent: You have no idea these people exist. You have no clue about them.

7. Randos: These are random people you’ve just been introduced to, but are basically still unknown to you.

Familiarity (Awareness Stage): You know they exist, but you’re not their friend yet.

6. Wave Friends: So these aren't quite acquaintances yet, but you remember their face and you kind of smile and wave when you see them. You could have a wave friend for a very long time. You may never even speak to them or know their name. They’ve just a wave friend.

5. Acquaintance: When someone moves beyond being a wave friend, they enter the realm of acquaintances. You may know their name (or maybe not), but you talk to acquaintances. You exchange a few sentences, but that’s it.

Friendly: Basic friend categories

4. Casual Friends: You know their names and you’ve had some conversations with them. You may go on occasional social outings together. You may have even had them over for dinner once, but it didn’t really go beyond that. You’ll stop and have extended conversations with them, but they're all fairly superficial conversations because it's casual.

3. Friends: Next, you have your actual friends. You enjoy being around them and see them regularly. You just haven’t opened up your heart as deeply to them like you do for your best friends.

Inner Circle: Most intimate relationships

2. Close Friends: These are the people you trust. You roll with them. Whenever you invite a group of people over, these are your go-to’s.

1. Confidant & Best Friend: You do life together. You share your most intimate details and struggles. It’s the closest relationship.

Parasocial Relationships | The Weirdness of Society

There is a relationship that has formed between us and online personalities and brands called a parasocial relationship. We start to believe this person is our friend because we spend so much time engaging in their content. We might even see them as a mentor...but they have no idea they are. Still, to us, they’re a part of our circle. Maybe even the inner circle. Even though they have no clue who we are, they’re impact on our lives is so significant, it feels like a genuine friendship.

This is the kind of relationship people are forming with your brand. So you have to understand that a funnel isn’t just a funnel. It’s not just a sales process. You are forming a friendship. It’s courtship. It’s how humans relate to one another. So, you’ve got to make your marketing personal.

You have to understand who you’re talking to and what they care about. You have to see this person in your mind as real...because they are. It’s not just a follower or one of a number of customers. It’s an actual individual who is looking to engage in a real relationship. You want to form a strong relationship with that person. So you’ve got to think about your marketing itself as relationship building. You’re forming parasocial relationships with your customers.

It feels weird to admit the strangeness of the world we live in...to acknowledge some of the people who’ve had the most impact on my career are people I’ve never met. They have no idea I even exist.

For example, one day the name “Gary Vaynerchuk” popped up. I listened to the entire audiobook of Crush It. So I felt like I spent 9 hours with Gary Vee. Then I subscribed to his podcast and consumed his social content. Through all this, he was guiding me along my journey, helping me to understand and realize concepts and things about marketing and sales that I had never thought of.

The same thing happened to me with Donald Miller. Although I did meet him briefly at his workshop, he meets hundreds of people there and definitely has no idea who I am. But for me, I went on to read his book and listen to his podcast. I saw him as a mentor. At first he was a stranger, but I quickly worked up the friendship pyramid to see him as an authority to advise my career and personal growth. That all happened without him being personally involved. It was a parasocial relationship.

Once you understand this strange element of our current society, it gives you an “aha! moment” with your marketing. Now you can be much more human with your marketing. Because that’s what people are looking for. You start rewarding your audience for their attention. You’ll take care of them and treat them as a human being. You’ll see them as a friend and start making content that’s meaningful to them. The kind of content that helps them along their path and to help them become who they want to become.

Bryce McNabb