Customer Avatar
Sometimes, business owners and marketers concentrate so much on the product or service they’re promoting that they fail to consider WHO it is they are selling to.
Your product or service could be the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you’re promoting it to an irrelevant audience, the sales numbers you’re striving for will never be hit.
Understanding buyer personas (a.k.a. customer avatars) is vital.
Before anything can be sold effectively, you must understand the following:
After a customer avatar is completed, you will have a clear picture of your target market, where to find them, and how to connect with them. Best of all, you’ll drastically reduce any guesswork involved.
Most businesses have more than one customer avatar, and their target market might be segmented. The terms “target audience” or “buyer persona” may be terms you have heard before. Both of these terms have the same meaning, but in this article, rather than using those two terms, we will be using “customer avatar” instead.
In addition to having more than one customer avatar, each service or product your business sells will have numerous customer avatars, too. Different products or services appeal to various customer avatars.
Targeting these people as part of your marketing endeavors would be best. However, every customer avatar has goals, objections, and motivations that could discourage them from conducting business with you. As such, you cannot use the same messaging approach for everyone.
This is where a customer avatar worksheet comes into play. This sheet, which is a single page, will allow you to develop ads that appeal to specific customers. You’ll be able to create a personalized campaign that speaks to your audience directly, stimulating conversions.
Is There a Specific Amount of Customer Avatars I Should Create?
This article will help you create a customer avatar worksheet. In this exercise, select your ideal customer segment or type for your product/service or your company.
Be mindful that if numerous types of people purchase your offering, your customer avatars should be narrowed down to the ones you intend to reach. More than three will prove challenging to maintain and can result in a lack of focus, inhibiting your marketing endeavors.
Try to create between one and three avatars for the company and between one and three per product/service you sell.
The Importance of Customer Avatars
Many different disciplines are involved in digital marketing.
Some include analytics, copywriting, social media, product creation, paid traffic, email marketing, and content marketing.
Each of these disciplines comes with unique skill sets you must master.
Understanding ways to identify customer avatar skills applicable to all marketing disciplines.
For instance:
Email Marketing:
Having an understanding of your avatar can optimize email conversion rates, as well as segment-specific campaigns of your email marketing endeavors.
Copywriting:
Understanding your avatar can help you articulate your offering to address the problems experienced by your avatar, encouraging them to purchase from you.
Product Creation:
Having an understanding of your avatar can help with the creation of a product/service that accommodates a customer’s needs.
Paid Traffic:
Understanding your avatar can help you determine the ad platforms you should purchase traffic from and which targeting options to use.
Content Marketing:
Understanding your avatar can help you determine what lead magnets, podcasts, videos, and blog posts you should create to keep attracting customers and leads.
Any aspect of the sales and marketing process that connects with a customer (which, funny enough, is just about everything) will get better once you have established customer avatar particulars.
Once you understand the specific characteristics of those purchasing your services or products, it will become much easier to seek them out and present a message capable of stimulating them into action.
It doesn’t matter if you’re creating content, building landing pages and funnels, or developing ads – nor does it matter whether you have a team handling these tasks are doing them on your own – a customer avatar allows you to be creative and consistent with your message throughout each campaign.
What Should Be Included in Your Customer Avatar?
Your customer avatar worksheet should be filled out with qualities your target market has. It should focus on those you intend to sell a product or service to. How a customer avatar is built will essentially serve as a self-fulfilling business prophecy.
Here is why:
When customer avatars are created, you are essentially hand-picking who you prefer to do business with.
As such, your description should pertain to those you want to do business with, not just your existing customers.
SUGGESTION: think about one of your existing and loyal customers. They probably do business with you because you can provide them with things others can’t. The customer avatar you build should revolve around this type of individual.
When customer avatars are created, five key components should be kept in mind:
1. Values and Goals:
Write down all the things a customer avatar desires and the things they don’t yet have. Is there something specific they’re attempting to accomplish? These goals should be specified.
The things you write down should pertain to whatever your offering is. Don’t let unrelated goals distract you.
Many people’s values limit their decisions despite their desires. As such, when you are thinking about what their goals may be, attempt to think from their perspective. What values do they have? How are their desires affected by their values? How are their goals affected by such values?
Write down the values that a customer avatar may revolve their decisions around.
2. Information Sources:
Determine their source of information. What blogs or books do they read? What events do they attend? Are there any thought leaders that they listen to? These aspects can apply to the people your ads target, so don’t rush through this process.
Here are a few different ways you can gather a customer avatar’s information sources:
Interact with those who fall under this avatar group:
A practical approach for completing this section involves engaging with those who fall under this avatar profile. Determine what their information resources are and move forward from there.
Communities and forums are worthwhile places to begin.
Use personal experience:
Primarily, you serve as an embodiment of a customer avatar based on past or present experiences. Complete the profile based on those personal experiences.
Use search engines:
Another approach to obtaining this kind of information involves conducting Google searches. The following queries can help get you going:
“Best books for [customer avatar]”
“Best conferences for [customer avatar]”
“Best groups for [customer avatar]”
“Top blogs for [customer avatar]”
This template can be used to identify information sources that match specific customer avatars (while excluding others):
Nobody except my avatar reads [magazine or book].
Nobody except my avatar visits [forum or blog name].
Nobody except my avatar would attend [event or conference].
3. Information About Demographics:
This section will include particulars about your avatar, such as their job title, income, marital status, gender, age, etc.
4. Pain Points and Challenges
List some unpleasant or negative aspects this avatar wants to pull away from. What pain points and challenges do they experience regularly?
Don’t forget – the only things you should be listing are items relevant to the product or service you specialize in.
Roles and Objections
Are there potential objections this avatar may have that could stop them from buying whatever you offer?
You must be mindful of any hot buttons your avatar has. That way, you’ll be ready to handle any objections they have.
From here, you will need to identify the role of your avatar when it comes to buying decisions.
Champion:
These individuals either support an advocate or are end-users, which will stimulate decision-makers toward approving a purchase.
Advocate:
These individuals will lobby for your service/product to convince a decision-maker to approve a purchase.
Decision-makers:
These individuals have the last say regarding where money is spent or what it is spent on.
In several instances, you will need to engage with existing customers and survey them. Doing so can help you determine who your avatar is, as well as what they require.
In other situations, you’ll be already familiar with your target audiences’ characteristics.
Whatever the case is, move forward.
Refrain from waiting for interviews or surveys to be completed before creating your initial customer avatar draft.
You’ll need to make some assumptions when you lack feedback or data. Follow up with obtaining this research as soon as an opportunity presents itself.
Meanwhile, you will benefit from a prebuilt avatar, though you may have to verify some assumptions made.
Where do you go from here?
Begin by creating a single customer avatar, then progress from there. Your company will unquestionably have more than a single buyer. Therefore, you should be building avatars based on the characteristics of each one.
Once this becomes second nature, you can begin churning out several avatars representing various audience segments.
