Wondering about the benefits of creating a customer avatar for your business? Let’s discuss what a customer avatar is, why you need one, and how you can create yours today.
Many failed businesses have one thing in common – they do not know who their potential customer is. [Tweet that]
These companies believe they can cater to the needs of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. As such, they are unable to define who their ideal customer is.
However, every business is established to meet the needs of a particular group of people. It is only by proper identification of who exactly this group of people is that the business can become successful.
By creating a customer avatar for your business, you can craft effective marketing strategies that will place your products and services in front of the right audience in the right manner.
Defining The Customer Avatar
A customer avatar is a fictional representation of the person you believe needs and can afford your product or service.
It is a buyer’s persona that accurately profiles who your target market is, what they look like, their needs, income, age, aspirations, location, and other relevant psychographic and demographic details.
Take, for instance, a Nigerian company that operates a physical brick-and-mortar store where it sells and produces expensive sports gear. The ideal customer for such an organization would be wealthy athletes and sport-inclined individuals based in Nigeria.
It may be tempting for this company to believe it caters to the needs of every athlete on planet Earth. However, poor athletes who cannot readily afford the sports gear or wealthy sport-savvy persons located in faraway countries are not its ideal clients.
Why Creating A Customer Avatar Is Essential
- It will help you identify your market
- You can craft the right marketing strategies
- It will help you create the right content
Having a customer avatar enables you to identify who your clients are, their needs, and how your products or services can be of help.
How to craft your customer avatar
Creating a customer avatar is a lot of work, but it is worth it.
For your customer avatar to be a true representation of your ideal client, it cannot be an offshoot of guesswork or maybes.
It must be based on data collected via research on your market.
Here is a list of things you need to do when creating a customer avatar.
1. Conducting your market research is key
To validly represent your ideal customer, your customer avatar should be derived from thorough research of your market.
This will provide you with the information you need to correctly define your potential buyer.
With such data, it becomes easy to attract and retain customers as you will know what clients want and how your business can meet their needs.
One way to start this research is by conducting a survey, interview, or poll on customers who have patronized your business.
If your business is new and has no customers, you can check out social media and online forums to get in on conversations surrounding similar products.
Doing this will help you know who your potential clients are and what they want.
2. Creating a customer avatar demands an ability to identify the goals and values of your customers
It is easy to project your company’s values onto your customer avatar. But it is crucial to remember that those are yours and no one else’s.
Take, for instance, a luxury brand that runs an environmentally friendly fashion line primarily because it seeks to promote awareness of climate change and the ecosystem among its customers.
Market research may show that its ideal client will patronize the brand because they want to show off to friends and family, not because they care about the environment.
In such a case, it would be erroneous for the brand to impose its goal of protecting the environment as one of the values of its ideal customer during the process of creating a customer avatar.
In the same vein, a company that seeks to sell to a customer base of evangelical Christians or devout Muslims would most likely fail if it markets its products or services to them using nude men or women, thus disregarding their religious values.
3. Understanding the decision-making process is essential when creating a customer avatar
As you are fleshing out your customer avatar, another thing you need to understand is their decision-making process.
A potential customer will consider several things when deciding whether to do business with you.
They might, for instance, set a cap on the amount they are willing to pay for your service. Others may be willing to overlook the cost if the product’s value justifies it.
Understanding the decision-making process of your potential clients will help you understand what will endear them to your products and what will be a deal-breaker for them.
4. It is crucial to identify the fears and pain points of your ideal client
Identifying the fears and needs your product solves for your market is another vital factor to consider.
For one, if you cannot identify the market’s needs that your goods/services address, you will be unable to convince your market that they need what you are offering them.
5. Be able to pinpoint their source of information
Creating your customer avatar also requires knowing about their lifestyle.
What do they read to stay informed? Are they TV watchers? Or do they spend all their time on the internet?
Knowing this will enable you to identify the perfect advertising strategies to adopt and the language to use.
6. Start creating a customer avatar for your business
With the information already gathered, the next step is to start filling out your avatar worksheet.
Your avatar worksheet contains questions that will help you define your avatar based on the factors we have discussed.
Feel free to take things a step further by giving your avatar a name and a face.
7. Do it again.
Like many businesses, you may have different types of potential clients.
Hence, you may need to craft different customer avatars for your various product or service offerings.
Nevertheless, it is best practice to avoid creating too many avatars, so that it does not become too generalized thereby defeating the purpose of creating an avatar in the first place.
Question: Does your business have a customer avatar? If not, how will the above tips help you to create one? Share your answers with us in the comment section below!
