How To Design A Winning Customer Avatar In Less Than 15 Minutes

Reading Minds For Fun & Profit

Jim Hamilton is back.

And he’s here to share his Avatar Design Flow to help you design a winning customer avatar in less than 15 minutes.

In 5 prompts, you’ll define your ideal customer’s:

• Demographics: Who they are

• Psychographics: What they believe and value

• Unwanted Solutions: What they’ve already tried (and rejected)

• Identity Shifts: How they see themselves before and after

• Day-to-Day Life: What a typical day looks like

Plus, you’ll get a clear, concise avatar summary to use in all your future AI chats.

If you want to attract the right customers and speak directly to their needs, these audience insight prompts will make sure you’re never guessing who you’re writing for.

In case you don’t know, Jim is a copywriting expert who's written emails for Cole Gordon, Travis Chappell, Justin Moore, and many more in the online space over the last 8 years.

And if you missed his first couple posts, you can find them here:

• How to write a story-driven emails that sells

• How to use storytelling to uninstall your customer’s false beliefs

Here's Jim:

---

True story:

The better you know the person you’re writing to, the more sales you’ll make.

Only problem is, doing market research sucks.

Who wants to pore over angry Amazon reviews and pointless Reddit threads all day long?

Not me.

But back in the days before ChatGPT, that’s exactly what you’d have to do:

Spend hours and hours researching your customer avatar to try and understand how they feel, what they think, and the specific words & phrases they use to describe their problems.

Plus there was no guarantee you’d even find the gold nuggets you were looking for.

Luckily, those days are long gone.

Now you can design a winning customer avatar in less than 15 minutes…

That you can use to write laser-targeted content & copy that converts like crazy.

And I’m about to show you how.

Let’s dive in.

What You’ll Need to Complete This Avatar Design Flow

I’ve found ChatGPT delivers the best results.

So we’re going to use ChatGPT-o1 to complete this exercise.

But you can get decent results with ChatGPT-4o too.

On top of that, you’ll need to fill in a few placeholders.

These don’t need to be super in-depth. In fact, I’ve found sometimes that adding more info makes the outputs worse.

Here’s what I wrote for mine:

1) My Offer

The Email Storyselling Playbook - a 66-page book revealing the 4-step formula to convert subscribers into buyers even if you're not a natural writer or storyteller

2) My Customer

Coach, consultant, or online expert

3) Their Problem

Monetizing their newsletter or email list

That’s it.

Start with something similar and complete the exercise. You always circle back later and flesh out the description if you aren’t happy with the results.

📍SIDE NOTE: Once you've got your customer avatar dialed in, the next step is turning those insights into stories that sell. I break down the entire step-by-step process in my book.

Now let’s dive into the first prompt:

Prompt 1: Demographics & Psychographics

Here’s the full prompt:

Today, you're a world-class marketing analyst with an expertise in researching customer avatars. 

I want you to create a customer avatar for [OFFER]. The typical customer is [DESCRIBE CUSTOMER]. Many struggle with [PROBLEM].

Include Demographics, Psychographics, Values, and at least 5 examples of Pains (how their problems manifest in the present), Fears (how their problems manifest in the future), Frustrations, Desires, False Beliefs, Trigger Moments (events in day-to-day life that bring their pains to the forefront) and Painful Questions (questions they ask themselves, but would never say out loud or admit to anyone else), as well as their Core Problem (the root problem causing all of their other symptoms) and their Ultimate Desire (their vision of the future where all their problems have been solved). Give the Core Problem and Ultimate Desire a unique name.

Be as specific, detailed, and emotional as possible. Give the avatar a real name so it's easy for us to refer to going forward.

Now, be warned:

This one prompt spits out a TON of useful intel about your customer avatar.

It’s more than most entrepreneurs know about their audience even if they’ve been in business for years.

Here’s everything I got back:

I recommend regenerating this first answer 2-3 times and choosing the one you like best before moving on.

In my case, this is right on the money.

Before go any further, here’s how to conceptualize and implement some of this intel:

• Demographics: These paint a clearer picture of what our avatar’s life looks like on the surface. Can be helpful for ad targeting, depending on the platform.

• Psychographics: These map the hidden terrain of our avatar’s mind. What’s going on inside their head and driving their day-to-day activities in life and business.

• Values: These reflect what attracts our avatar beyond her #1 goal, which in this case is money. We’ll infuse our ads, emails, and content with these values to dial up their persuasive power even more.

• Pains: This is what our avatar’s struggling with right now. Calling them out in hooks, headlines, subject lines, and leads is how we’ll shift her into a “problem state of mind.”

• Fears: If left unsolved, this is how her Pains will manifest in the future. We’ll use them to create urgency and illustrate the cost of doing nothing.

• Frustrations: This emotion has a strong buying resonance. Frustration implies they’re trying to solve the problem, but not being successful. These also make for great hooks.

• Desires: We all crave the things we don’t have. Appealing to these is how you’ll paint a picture of the future that motivates them to take action.

• False Beliefs: These are misconceptions about the method, the offer, or themselves that prevent our avatar from moving forward. We’ll need to uninstall them towards the end of our sales argument - especially before presenting a high-ticket offer. More on how to do that here.

• Trigger Moments: These are day-to-day events that bring problems to the forefront. The highest-converting stories always revolve around a trigger moment.

• Painful Questions: This is what the little devil on our avatar’s shoulder is whispering into her ear every time she fails. Weaving these questions into any stories we tell will twist the knife even further.

• Core Problem: Most people focus on symptoms and ignore the root cause. By revealing the true source of all our avatar’s problems, we can take a diagnostic frame and differentiate ourselves from the competition.

• Ultimate Desire: This is a snapshot of what life will look like once all our avatar’s problems have been solved. If we can position our offer as the only way to get here, we’ve won the sale.

Okay, now let’s move on.

Prompt 2: Unwanted Solutions

Positioning hack:

Polarizing yourself against unwanted solutions.

You see, there’s more than one way to solve any problem… whether it’s getting matches on Tinder, carving out six-pack abs, or hitting $10,000 per month. And, chances are, your audience is already aware of (or has tried) other ways to solve this problem that don’t work.

So this next prompt reveals what these unwanted solutions are…