Building Your First Customer Avatar

Marketing your business to Customers starts with understanding who those Customers are. Broad strokes research helps with this, but if you’re looking to really home in on who you’re trying to sell to, a Customer Avatar is the way to go.

If you’re wondering what a Customer Avatar is, why you need one, or how to go about building it, you’re in the right place. We’re going to answer all of those questions, so let’s get started.

The Benefits of Customer Avatars

First up, what are we talking about? A Customer Avatar is a portrait of your ideal Customer. We’re not talking just a Customer, but your perfect Customer, someone who embodies everything you’re looking for.

This is who you want to be targeting, who you want to be selling yourself to. Not every Customer you get is going to be perfect, but if you set up your marketing right, they’ll at least be adjacent to your perfect Customer.

As an example, say you run a dog kennel. Your ideal Customer would likely be dog owners who travel regularly, and whose pets are well behaved and easy to care for. If they own a dog but only travel infrequently, or their dog has a lot of special needs, they’re not an ideal Customer, but they are a Customer. If someone doesn’t own a dog, they’re not going to be a Customer at all, and you wouldn’t seek them out.

Knowing your ideal Customer allows you to better focus your efforts on attracting the people who are best for your business, and waste less time on people who will never help you advance.

Researching Demographics

Building your Customer Avatar starts with research. You need to know everything you possibly can about them in order to build the clearest picture. This research can be done via surveys, through web analytics, analysis of your sales data, or anywhere else you happen to find useful insights.

What specifically are you looking for? Common demographics that make up an ideal Customer include:

• Age, Gender, Ethnicity
• Family Status (Single, Married, Parent)
• Where they live (or where their business is located)
• Level of Education
• Occupation
• Level of Income they can spend on your product or service

Remember these are just what is commonly used, it’s up to you to decide what aspects of your Customer are important to you. Once you have the physical details of your ideal Customer determined, it’s time for the next stage of your research.

Identifying Wants & Needs

It’s not enough to just know how old they are and where they work, you need to know what your Customers want out of their relationship with you.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What does your ideal Customer want?
• What does your ideal Customer need?
• What does your ideal Customer value?
• What does your ideal Customer fear?
• What problems is your ideal Customer suffering from?

If you can answer all of these questions, congratulations, you’re now in a fantastic place to market your business to them. If you know your Customer needs someone to look after their dog, and fears that their special needs won’t be met, you can make sure to respond to those in your marketing.

That’s the point of your Customer Avatar, it tells you what you’re responding to.

Understand Their Decisions

Finally, make sure you understand the decision making process your Customer Avatar is going through. Not everyone is going to make their decision to purchase (or not purchase) a product or service in the same way.

Some Customers are going to value a low cost above all else, others are going to demand only the highest quality, and the cost will be largely irrelevant to them.

Some people will be gathering information for a later decision, some will be looking to make a purchase now, and some will be pressed for time and desperate for any solution they can find as long as they can get it immediately.

Consider these needs and objections ahead of time, and make sure you’ve got an answer prepared for each. This knowledge may not factor directly into your Customer Avatar, but it will affect how your Customer responds to your sales pitch, so don’t neglect it.

With all of this information in hand, you should now have a crystal clear picture of who your Customer Avatar is. Congratulations! Now you can put it to work helping you plan your email marketing, social media campaigns, promotions, and more!

Know who your ideal Customer is, and aim for them. The more focused your marketing is, the better the result you’ll get from the target of that focus.