Customer Avatars and Why You Need One
Who is your ideal customer? What are her goals, dreams, fears, and weaknesses? What are the brands she is loyal to, and why? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, then you aren’t marketing your brand to its fullest potential.
Contrary to popular belief, the worst thing you can do in your business is to try and sell to everyone. If you don’t know who exactly you’re speaking to, you won’t get the results you’re looking for. Using customer avatars for your business will help you to hone in on exactly who you serve. They’ll also help you speak directly to your ideal customer through social media, email marketing, and your advertising efforts. Here’s why and how to create your own customer avatar and get your brand on the path to success.
Step 1: Understand the benefits of your avatar.
Deciding on a customer avatar will help you hone in on who you’re talking to and better understand what matters to them. Is your main audience new moms with young children? Is it overworked parents looking for financial freedom? When you know the stresses and fears your avatar is facing, it allows you to speak directly to them and offer your product, brand, or service as the solution. With your ideal customer in mind, you can focus your content and copy to speak straight to their needs. Understanding and having a face for this person will also help you know where to find them. Hang out in the Facebook groups that they’re a part of. Follow the brands they engage with. Do what you can to get into their mindset so you’re able to speak their language throughout your marketing.
Step 2: Don’t be afraid to get specific!
We know it can be a little scary deciding to serve one specific customer or audience. What about the other thousands of people out there who might be interested too? But if you’re talking to everyone, you’re really talking to no one. Take our word for it – now is the time to start getting specific with your marketing. The more specific, the better. Your audience is out there! And you want the people opening your emails or following you on socials to feel like you’re speaking straight to them. If they feel connected to you, they’ll be more likely to become a loyal reader, buyer, or subscriber.
Action time: Start by jotting down what you know about the people you serve. Look for commonalities in interest, age, gender, and geographic location. Circle those things, and take them with you into the next step.
Step 3: It’s time to define your avatar.
Ready to target your messaging and hone in on the people who need what you offer? Let’s build your avatar.
You’ll want to build out the profile of your ideal customer in great detail. The deeper you can go, the easier it will be to get inside their minds as you create content and plan for future launches or releases. Below we’ve included some questions to work through as you get started. As you answer them, take a look at your current customers, or the people who are actively connecting with similar brands on social media. Browse through their profiles, read their responses on posts, and use those as your starting point. You can also use someone you know in real life if they are your ideal customer! The sky’s the limit.
Action time: Answer the following questions to get you started.
- Who are they? Give them a name, age, location, and other background information, including the makeup of their family.
- What do they like and dislike?
- What do they read and consume? (Books, magazines, blogs, movies, etc.)
- What authors and public figures do they follow and admire? (Make sure you’re following these people as well!)
- What are their biggest values and goals?
- What keeps them up at night?
A few tools we like for laying out your avatar’s information are Digital Marketer’s Customer Avatar Worksheet and Hubspot’s “MakeMyPersona” Generator. These templates let you design an attractive, easy to read persona that you can refer to as you build out your marketing plans and future content.
So what are you waiting for? There’s no better time to get started on your customer avatar than right now. It’s time to nail down your customer, clarify your messaging, and watch your brand soar.
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Looking for even more great tips to successfully market to your ideal customers online? Download our FREE resource The 11 Social Media Myths & The Truths You Need to Grow Your Brand.