Customer avatars is a representation of your ideal customer. Forget a wishy-washy average customer profiling, this is the ideal customer that you want to attract, which even looks at their age and role in the purchase process.
Implementing the right strategy for this will dramatically improve your ROI.
This is an important exercise as you cannot try and sell your services to anyone and everyone; this will lead to no sales. You need to niche down your target audience and get to know what they are like to be able to sell to them.
Who Needs It?
Every business needs a customer avatar.
It will save you time and money in your marketing strategy.
Having a customer avatar is also crucial for small businesses. Small and medium businesses need to make sure they have a tight marketing budget and that their staff are productively using their time on specific customers.
A customer avatar will help your ROI because it will improve your:
Product Development
If you are selling a product to customers, having a customer avatar in mind will help your team sell specifically to your ideal customer. This will create more prospects and people will be able to associate your brand with the product more easily.
Content Marketing
The best thing about the customer avatar is that it will help you work out how to write content that resonates with your ideal customer. You can focus on the pain points of your ideal customer and create content that will get your leads. You can send this to your leads over email and this can encourage them to buy from you. It all comes down to relevance. Make sure you are relevant to your customer by using the information you have gained in your customer avatar.
Paid PPC ads/traffic
PPC is an instant way to gain traffic to your site, but it is vital that you have your ideal customer in mind before you start making your ad campaigns. If you don’t have a strategy in place for your marketing, you will waste time and money trying to appeal to all people. You need to make sure you are creating your ads with your ideal customer in mind otherwise people will just ignore your ads as they cannot connect with them.
Experience and Conversion
With your customer avatar, you are able to create a seamless experience for your client or customer from lead to sale. If your content creates a lead, they have then move onto your website and then be encouraged to buy from you. The point of this exercise is to really know your customer. Too many companies we have worked with will try the one-size-fits-all approach and wonder why they aren’t getting any revenue. You need a customer avatar to convert prospects into sales.
So, how do you create one?
Here are the key questions you need to consider to create your customer avatar:
1 ) What Are Their Values and Goals?
This can be anything that your ideal customer values or have set as their goals in their business. For some, the values could be ensuring that their customers needs are met or protecting their own free time. Your customer’s goals can be to increase sales or scale their business.
2 ) Where Do They Get Information From?
This is important as you will be able to create content or marketing that your lead will actually enjoy. For example, if your ideal customer spends her time reading articles on LinkedIn, why not send her an article that encompasses her pain points? If your customer avatar will watch videos on LinkedIn, you should tailor your profile to catch them.
3 ) What Are Their Demographics?
This is the part of the avatar that brings the avatar exercise to life. You are not going to write a vague age range, such as 30-55 yrs old. Make it specific, for example Andy is 40 yrs old and has children aged 8 and 10 years old. Think about questions such as:
- Gender
- Marital status
- Location
- Job Title
- Annual income
- Level of education
- A quote of something they would hold to their values.
Having this level of detail will help you be more persuasive when you talk to them.
4 ) What Are Their Challenges and Pain Points?
Your customer’s pain points and challenges is where you can close the deal. You are in business to solve their pain points.
Knowing your customer’s challenges and pain points will enable you to create new products to solve your customer’s issues and write copy/content that will encourage them to act.
Think about the challenges ‘Andy’ deals with day to day in his company.
So, having a customer avatar is crucial to your marketing as this knowledge will help you throughout your business. Whether it is content marketing or talking to customers, you will be able to be specific in your approach and generate more revenue.
