Create Your Ideal Customer Avatar

Create Your Ideal Customer Avatar

No brilliant marketing strategy was built on vague assumptions and broad guesses, so what is a customer avatar and how do you create one?

It’s essential for every business to have an effective marketing strategy and it all starts by building the ideal customer avatar. The avatar enables business owners to get to know their customers better, and by doing this are more effectively able to market their products or services. It’s easy to overlook an essential step such as this, especially for smaller businesses, as it can feel like a waste of time. However, it’s quite the opposite and, when done right, will save business owners a lot of time and money.

No brilliant marketing strategy was built on vague assumptions and broad guesses, so what is a customer avatar and how do you create one?

What is a customer avatar?

A customer avatar is a profile and description based on the attributes of your perfect customer for the product or service you’re trying to sell. This will utilise factual information, such as their demographics, their goals and values, challenges and much more. While the information may be factual, you will be building this information around a character you have created.

By focusing on one avatar, it allows you to go into much more depth and really understand the kind of person you’re trying to sell to. The outcome of this is identifying more strategies and tools that will successfully promote your business.

What problem is your business trying to solve?

Before delving into the psyche of your perfect customer, you will need to be very clear on the purpose of your business. What kind of person might face the problem that your business is trying to solve and why? If you already have a customer base you can look closely at your best customers and note any common denominators between them. Note this all down so you may refer to it when creating your avatar.

Don’t worry if you’re a new business and don’t have customers yet as it’s not essential when creating your avatar. However, for those that do, they may provide insight into the perfect customer of an already established business.

The five major components of creating a customer avatar.

When creating your avatar, you should think about the following core components that will be essential when getting to know your perfect customer. When considering these, it will be useful for you to write them down, or draw them out so you can get a better overall picture.

Demographics.

You want to get as personal as possible with your avatar. Consider their age, level of education, employment status, income, where they are from and their background. From this, you will be able to build upon the other essential components of your avatar. Remember to be specific: provide a fixed number that matches the age of your target customer instead of a generalised age range. To help, consider giving your avatar a name.

You may even consider gathering information by using web analytics software or even conducting a survey to aid you when creating your avatar.

Goals and values.

What are the goals and values of your perfect customer? Why? By identifying what your customers want and what they value, you will begin to deepen your understanding of them. From this, you will also be able to identify solutions to their problems or find ways to enrich their experience.

Think about your avatar and what kind of interests or hobbies they might have – what do they enjoy doing? Identifying your customer’s interests will enable you to develop a content marketing strategy that appeals to these, making it much more effective.

Challenges and pain points.

Now, you need to think about what kind of challenges and setbacks are holding your perfect customer back from achieving their goals. What could be concerning them? This helps you to decide how to appeal to your customer when addressing their problem.

For example, if your customer wants your product, but is concerned about the cost of delivery – you can overcome this within your marketing by clearly displaying that there are ‘no shipping fees.’ While this may seem overly simplistic, by solving these challenges within your marketing strategy, you stand a higher chance of converting that interest into a sale.

Where they get their information.

While this might feel like an easy question during this digital age, there is still an incredible variety of ways people obtain their information using the internet alone. Think about how your perfect customer receives their information or where they go to find it. If it’s online, is that by using social media, websites, blogs, or search engines? Will they find it within books, magazines, or by attending conferences? Where will your perfect customer go to obtain the information they need to solve their problems and satisfy their goals?

Finding out where your customers are narrows down which platforms you should be focusing your marketing campaigns on.

Objections during the purchase process.

If you want to successfully convert your avatar’s interest into a sale then you will need to be ready to solve any objections they may have during the purchase process. Think about why this perfect customer may not want to buy your product or enlist your service. Then, think about how you could address this within your marketing strategy.

Using the results.

Ultimately it’s about getting to know your customers as well as possible. By understanding your customers, you will be able to develop your overall business strategy and allow it to influence your future business decisions.

You don’t have to stop with one customer avatar, you may create more avatars to satisfy different areas of your business. However, during this process, it is essential to be as specific as possible. Trying to appeal to too many different people will confuse your message and will attract fewer as a result.

However, by spending time creating your perfect customer avatar you’ll be saving yourself time on every marketing campaign your business releases. Not to mention, you’ll have a much more streamlined way of converting interest into a sale, making your business more money!

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