Why you need to create a customer Avatar

Are You Playing a Marketing Guessing Game?  

How much do you REALLY know about your ideal customer; the kind of customer who is guaranteed to buy your product? While you may be able to pinpoint a particular age range and understand their common pain points, do you know what they look like? Which television shows they watch? Their political persuasion? If not, then you need to develop your customer avatar.

Successful marketing has moved beyond demographics and is now digging deeper than ever before to understand consumer behaviour. This is allowing smart marketers to build a detailed profile of a brand’s ideal consumer, which has become a critical step in delivering a product or service with high market demand. 

As a small business owner, creating your own  customer avatar will allow you to view your prospects as real people, rather than a faceless compilation of various broad demographics. It will enable you to look beyond your customer’s relationship with your product or service and think more about their behaviour, such as what social media platform they use the most, where they get their news, and if they work out or not. These seemingly insignificant questions will build a layered character profile and help you to narrow your target market and understand how best to reach and engage with prospects. 

How Deep do You Go?

The short answer? As deep as you can! As mentioned above, even the most insignificant factors can be essential in understanding your ideal consumers. Often, businesses barely scratch the surface when building a customer avatar and get stuck using vague terms and corporate language. Start by giving your avatar a name, ideally your avatar will be based on a real customer of yours. Now think about where they work, how old they are, their level of education, and how they spend their free time. Once you begin to think about your avatar as a real person you’ll find it easier to flesh out their behaviour and characteristics. 

Why is an Avatar More effective than Statistics?

The problem with using statistics is it causes businesses to focus on too broad an audience, meaning they waste time and money trying to be all things to all people. Creating a customer avatar helps you to find more specific solutions to customer problems by thinking in terms of what your avatar would want or how they would behave. For example, if you’re thinking about launching a social media campaign, looking at statistics might help to find out which social media platform is most popular with your audience. Whereas, using a customer avatar of your typical consumer will allow you to be far more specific. You'll be able to evaluate how long on average they spend on that platform, the time of day they are most active, and the likelihood of them interacting with content; saving you both time and money while simultaneously boosting the impact of your campaign.

How Do I Create an Avatar? 

Step 1 – Give your Avatar a name and occupation.

It can also help to put a face to the name. try scoping out a stock profile picture online, or create your own cartoon avatar on sites such as Avachara or Cartoonify. 

Step 2 – Refer to existing research and information

From any research you have done up to this point, flesh out your customer’s likes, dislikes, behaviour, habits, hobbies etc. 

Step 3 – Think about your Avatar’s goals and values.

What does your avatar want to achieve? What do they care most about? How will your service or product assist them in reaching this goal, while also respecting and supporting their values? 

Step 4 – Create a Narrative

Imagine you are your avatar and write down every aspect of their journey with your product or service. How did they discover your brand? What about it appealed to them and hooked them in? What could be improved? Creating a narrative will help you to understand how your product or service will fit into your consumers’ lives. 

Download a customer Avatar worksheet from the resources section on our website: https://www.brandlective.com/resources/