How To Create A Customer Avatar: 5 Simple Steps

In business, conversion is the name of the game.

Paying special attention to the kind of work you put in your marketing and sales campaigns tends to pay off dividends.

While at it, it’s of paramount importance that you also have a pretty good idea who you’re talking to. With a well-formulated customer avatar, you’ll be able to truly connect with your audience.

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What is a Customer Avatar?

A customer avatar (also called buying persona), is essentially a profile of the ideal client.

Once you’re able to gain a good comprehension of who the perfect customer is, their mannerisms, what they look like, interests, challenges, their pain points, and aspirations, it becomes easier to market your wares to them.

Sure, on the face of it, you may be tempted to think that everyone qualifies as a potential customer. However, this is nothing more than ambitious thinking.

In marketing, you need to know who you’re conversing with. Else, you may find yourself in a conundrum of sorts, unable to implement a single technique to get them to buy.

To ensure that what you say sticks, you need to identify the key buyer personas. Ideally, they should be people you really want to sell to, loyal, and capable of referring more clients to your business.

If you already have such kind of clients, you should devise a customer avatar based on these qualities. If you don’t, then it’s obvious that you have been targeting the wrong audience all along.

Who Needs a Customer Avatar?

It’s not a stretch to say that every enterprise needs to have a customer avatar.

Small and medium-sized businesses are best served by having a descriptive customer avatar in their hands. This is because such establishments typically need to make the most of the resources available to them. As such, having a customer avatar ensures that they are able to overcome time and budgetary constraints.

At the same time, if you’ve not been making a decent ROI, embracing a customer avatar is the best thing you can do. This is because you’ll have more freedom and spend less time, effort and money to cope.

Why You Need a Customer Avatar

It’s a different time in the marketing world. Gone are the days when marketers simply broadcasted their message to the masses and waited for sales to trickle in.

Since the dawn of the digital age, brands have embraced a targeted approach to ensure that they get maximum conversion rates.

Failure to adapt to the times may actually see you at loss. This is because:

• You may end up appealing to nobody in an attempt to please so many people all at once
• You may find yourself unable to connect with no one
• You may end up splurging the dough without necessarily meeting your targets.

From all this, you can deduce that knowing your target audience has its props. The more in tune you are with what your customers want, the better placed you’ll be.

Forming solid connections and relationships in the long term also becomes easier with such kind of knowledge.

A customer avatar helps you do achieve this at a significantly reduced cost. A detailed one ensures that you are able to streamline your business on all fronts. Here’s just but a brief review of how you can benefit from taking such an initiative:

• Content Marketing: the mantra “Customer is King” still rings true. With a customer avatar in place, you’ll find it easy to discover the challenges your ideal customer faces. Once this is established, you’ll find it easy to develop content that tackles their pain points head-on. Since this kind of content is evergreen, you’re sure to resonate well with your target audience and rank highly on search engines. At the end of the day, creating engaging content does your brand the world of good to future prospects.
• User Experience: knowing all the traits of the perfect customer allows you to come up with a comprehensive experience for your clientele from the word go. Once they are able to feel wanted, appreciated, and respected, they’ll feel compelled to make recurrent purchases. Objectively, you want to convert them from mere fans into loyalists of the brand.
• Paid Traffic: you shouldn’t just run ads for the sake of it. Before you embark on any campaign, you need to clearly map out what your target audience likes. Instead of simply throwing money at the problem, you should invest time in developing a customer avatar to ensure that your ads perform at their best.

How to Leverage the Power of Customer Avatars

1. Be clear on who to say “Yes” to and who to say “No”

During the growth phase of a company, it’s easy to get excited about almost every other prospect. To avoid this, you need to be mindful that no single product or organization appeals to everyone. It’s, therefore, necessary to contemplate which resources to commit to the venture. Once that’s defined, ensure that you only spend on the people that matter.

2. Focus on a common objective

With an elaborate roadmap, every employee will have defined functions when it comes to attracting and retaining the right clients. This kind of layout also helps protect the interests of the organization since there’s minimal overspending. Instead, resources are appropriately managed and you’re able to get real value for the money.

3. Communication

Impactful messaging ensures that you’re able to touch on prospects’ pain points. Without a fitting avatar, your message is likely going to be littered with generalized assertions about how you’ll address their issues.

A well-structured messaging plan tends to give buyers a reason to identify with your brand. Once you earn validation, you can then proceed to showcase how you’ll be able to provide value.

4. Come up with a scalable and repeatable model

Handling several top accounts is no mean feat. This is because most upper-echelon companies tend to have a host of decision-makers. As such, you need to come up with a strategy that really engages them fully.

Having highlighted this, you need not reinvent the wheel whenever you land a new prospect. Not at all. Instead, you should focus on delineating common qualities and trends. Once you have this on lock, you can now focus on providing personalized outreach.

How to Create a Customer Avatar

A detailed avatar can be your best friend.

To device one, you need to draw up a lengthy list of questions to figure out your customers’ frame of mind. Once you’re able to really get where they’re coming from, you’ll be better prepared to answer the queries they raise.

So, what exactly should you ask them about? Well, anything goes!

The key thing here is to source as much information from your prospects as possible. With an in-depth understanding of their wants, it’s relatively easy for you to come up with a sales pitch.

Step 1: Find a template

If you find yourself unable to come up with one, you can seek avatar templates from the web. Since most templates are usually easy to work with, you can get up and running in little to no time.

Using them, you can get up and running in little to no time. Before deciding on a single one, it’s essential that you first sample a couple of different templates. You might just discover some that have appealing layouts while others have a better sequence of questions.

Step 2: Prepare your questions

After you get a good idea from the templates on how to work, you can advance to preparing your questions.

While at it, you should not be afraid to sound redundant. This is because even tiny tweaks in the questions can help you get a better understanding of what’s really happening. As you continue to dig deep, you’ll discover more things with your imploration. At the end of the day, you’ll have something definitive about the buyer persona.

To formulate questions with a real kicker, you need to look at the kind of clients who frequent your premises. If you run an online store, you can review the analytics to your website and then determine the right kind of questions to implore.

Step 3: Set the space to work

A roomy setting wouldn’t hurt your chances of attracting prospects. While it’s true that closing down deals is the ultimate end goal, you shouldn’t make it so obvious. Setting the scene means committing some space to do nothing else but work.

You want to figure out:

• Where’s the location where this work will be done? Does the office desk cut it, or would you rather somewhere else?
• What time of day is conducive for work activities?
• What kind of music, beverages and/or snack do you desire to have?
• Do you need a partner to tango or would you rather have a solo mission?
• When it comes to templates, would you rather print them out, type in a soft copy, or fill them in by hand yourself?
• Which date works for you?

Before you attempt to answer the highlighted questions, you need to make a commitment to answer them truthfully. Once you process the queries properly, you’ll be mentally ready for the task at hand and a step closer towards achieving success.

Step 4: Answer the questions

The stage is set.

It’s D-day and you’re ready to execute your duties at your place of work with the necessary materials. When the moment comes, you have to put the rest of the world on pause and do the work.

To properly formulate a customer avatar, you need to visualize your ideal customers. Perceiving who they are, and why they decided to join your bandwagon in the first place gives you the clarity to forge ahead.

Since you’re just thinking, you don’t have to limit yourself. Thinking big is totally allowed.

Who are the famous names you’d love to work with? List them out without really focusing on particular names, rather, define the group in which these people belong.

Step 5: Edit and review with close associates

First drafts are essential. While they are not the finished article, they provide the perfect Launchpad for you to come up with the finished product.

Before arriving at the final document, make sure your peers take a look at the drafts you’ve created. Importantly, jot down the reactions and responses they provide you. With an open mind, you’ll be able to really note what’s really going on. Taking a positive approach will expose you to so many different views that will ultimately improve your final presentation.

As a rule of thumb, ensure that you regularly revise your customer avatars. Doing so ensure that you don’t lose touch with some factions of your clientele during the growth process. With intel flowing to feed your system, the more informed you’ll be about avenues to improve.

Keep Growing

You should hold on to the customer avatar templates in your possession.

Retaining them gives you insights on how to diversify your business into multiple market segments. To really forge your path forward, you can opt to print out the templates after every iteration or simply modify on your computer.

Remarkably, once the first customer avatar is ready, the rest will be relatively easy to develop. Once you’ve formulated who you’re looking to target in every market segment, you need to list them out in order of priority. When this is done, you’ll be able to approach the movers and shakers first.

Conclusion

Having divulged aplenty on customer avatars, it’s quite evident that you need to embrace them in your strategy. Using them, you can effectively springboard yourself to target specific audiences for your businesses.

With a clear map of how to proceed, you’ll find out that you don’t have to have expensive budgets to run your operations. At the same time, you’ll realize massive time savings since you’ll only be dealing with interested prospects. All these elements translate into enhanced ROI.

Now that we’ve covered some brilliant tips on how to proceed, it’s time for you to sound out. Do you think you’re ready to start working on your customer avatar?

Let us know in the comments section below!