What is a Persona or Fan Avatar?
A Persona or Fan Avatar is a fictional, generalized character that represents your ideal raving fan. It will help you understand the motivating beliefs, fears and secret desires that influence your fan’s following and music buying decisions. Your fan avatar will help you define your music, personalize your creation process and marketing message, help you segment your target audience, and help you understand why some music sells better that others. For example, Trend Culprit’s top business assets is my audience list, I can segment my audience avatars and tailor my message to my email audience according to my different personas.
Through your music creation process it should be a requirement to collect as much data of your fans and ideally put it all into the framework of a Fan Avatar in order to ensure that you are targeting and fulfilling the person’s emotional points. Let’s go even deeper into why this process is so important, and what a Dream Raving Fan is.
A raving fan is someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce:
• Music
• Albums
• Merchandise
• Soundtracks
• Apps
• Posters
• Perfumes
• Apparel
• Movies
• Documentaries
• VIP and First row tickets
• Back stage tickets, etc.
They will drive hundreds of miles to see you perform, will pay high priced tickets to fly to your next concert and spend whatever amount of money to stay for the weekend. They will purchase your concert tickets a year in advance, purchase your entire hi-res music collection even if they have an old low-res version. Their google alerts are ready to go off on your next concerts. They have your signed posters, buy your t-shirts, the mug and the hat. And they can’t wait for your next release.
These are your true fans.
How can you make use of the Fan Avatar information?
“Understanding deeply to the core your True Fan, will impact literally every aspect of your music marketing and sales strategies and all the processes it entails.”
These processes include:
• Your Music Creation: What kind of music your audience is searching for? What type of music your fan will connect with? What kind of music they seeks to heal their emotional points?
• Your Content Marketing: What music videos and promo videos you create, what album and single cover you create, what social post you create, what should you create to attract and convert to them into a loyal fan?
• Which Paid Traffic Platform to use: Which platform your ideal fans uses, where you should buy traffic from, and what targeting options should you use?
• Your Advertising and Promotion Copywriting: What kind of copy will you use in your advertising, email marketing, press releases, magazine reviews, website, merch store, etc., that compels your fan to buy all your music and every product you release.
• Your Audience List: Which fan will receive which specific marketing campaign.
And these are just a few.
Any aspect of your music marketing and sales process that interacts with your dream fan (which is everything) will get better when you get clear on who your raving fan is.
Remember: This is the person who buys all your albums, follows you to all your concerts, purchase all your merch, is in your VIP list, pays your fan club membership, buys all your pre-sells before they release, so it pays off to understand who they are and present them with a message that moves them to action.
How to get started?
To get started creating your Dream Raving Fan Avatar:
1. Start with one and then add more as you define your fans
2. Make at least 3-5 Fan Avatars
3. You’ll need to survey, observe very closely or have conversations with your fans in order to accurately flesh them out.
4. Your fan avatar is a hypothetical character, but it doesn’t mean that the information is hypothetical. Make educated guesses where you don’t have any data but add to it as you dive deeper into your reserach.
5. It will never be completed, you will add to it as you get to know you dream fan better.
Review your fan avatars on a regular basis to make sure that your music and marketing
efforts are directed to connecting with their emotions, fulfilling their needs and desires.
Return to Part 1 of 2 of this Creating your Dream Raving Fan Series.
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Let’s do this!
Rock on!
Love, Mia
P.S. and don’t forget – you are now a TrendCulprit!
