Laser-Focused Marketing: Get Creepy Familiar with Your Client Avatar.

One of the best pieces of marketing advice I'd ever received was to define my client avatar. It was great advice. Defining your avatar is one of the first steps you should take once you decide you’d like to start your own business. But to take things up a notch, I say defining your avatar isn't quite enough. Don't just stop at basic parameters. You need to get creepy familiar with him (or her) to be laser-focused in your marketing efforts. You can’t start or continue to grow a successful business if you don’t know who you’re doing it all for.

In short, your “client avatar” is essentially your ideal client. Your avatar is a profile you create who is representative of your perfect client or customer for your goods or services, and it is vitally important to know who that person is before embarking on any marketing campaign. All of your marketing activities, content creation, advertising decisions, social media strategies, etc., need to be designed with that avatar in mind in order to have a laser-focused, targeted campaign that is going have maximum effectiveness.

Let me reiterate why it’s important to have an avatar. Having an avatar answers questions that you need the answers to before you can design a truly effective marketing strategy. Having an avatar tells you exactly where you should be focusing your marketing efforts, because once you know who he or she is, you’ll know where your avatar spends most of his or her time. Your avatar tells you what tone to use for content and advertising, because you know his or her personality. And he or she tells you what kind of content is truly important to them. It helps define the story your marketing is telling. This is how you reach your target market in the most effective and efficient way possible.

Okay, so first thing’s first; if you don’t already have an avatar, it’s time to create one. Start brainstorming and think about who your ideal client or customer is. Okay, now be specific. Write down their profile. Get super specific. CREEPY specific. Name him or her. Imagine what their likes are. What does he or she do for fun? What do they do for a living? What are their shopping habits? Think about their favorite pastimes, or what they worry about in their daily lives. The more specific you get with your avatar, the more focused your marketing campaign can get, and this is key. (And just as a side note, it’s okay to have more than one avatar, but you need to have at least one. If your business has a few different targets, design an avatar that represents each category of customer you serve).

Okay, to make things a little simpler, here I’ve provided a quick little template for you to start creating your avatar. Fill in the blanks and your avatar will start to come together. If you have more than one target for your business, do this exercise for each one.

Name:

Gender:

Age:

Marital Status: 

Occupation:

Education level:

Where does this person live?:

What is their annual household income?:

Does this person have children? How many?:

How does this person stay informed?:

Do they use the computer?:

Do they read the newspaper?:

Do they watch TV?:

What are their hobbies?

What do they do for fun?:

What do they worry about? What keeps them up at night?:

These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself to really start to shape your avatar and to hone in on your target audience, so start here and feel free to expand on it. It’s important to clearly identify who your target audience is not only by demographic, but also by psychographic (personality, attitudes, lifestyle, and emotional motivators) to help craft the perfect messages and then identify the best channels to reach them.

Julia is the Director of Marketing for The Rock Brook Consulting Group, PA, a multi-discipline engineering design firm providing effective and innovative solutions for clients in the Education, Corporate & Commercial, Science & Technology, Data Centers, Pharmaceutical, and Hospitality & Entertainment markets, both nationally and internationally. Julia has over a decade of experience in the fields of marketing, public relations, and technical writing, and is also experienced in business development. Follow her on Twitter @juliamoroney.