Creating a customer avatar is an important step in any digital marketing and sales plan. If you don’t know who your customer is, how can you market them?
When you collect demographic data, wants, needs, pain points, and all the general characteristics about your potential customers, your marketing and sales efforts will have a bigger impact.
What Is a Customer Avatar
A customer avatar is a fictional character that represents your ideal buyer in the market.
In order to create a customer avatar, take the following elements in consideration:
- Detailed information and background about their profile
- Wants, needs and pain points
- Why and how you can help them
Almost always, you’ll have more than one avatar. One or two main avatars, and secondary avatars.
For each one, you’ll need to know what they need, and what solution you are selling.
Benefits Of a Customer Avatar Creation
Creating a customer avatar will improve your marketing practices, and especially:
- Improve your targeting
- Enhance your product or service personalization
- Determine who’s not your customer
- Scale your business
How To Create a Customer Avatar in 4 Steps
Here are the 4 steps to creating a customer avatar:
Step #1 – Research demographics
The first thing you must understand is that creating a customer avatar is an ongoing process. You’ll start by doing research on your ideal customer and implementing characteristics that you are collecting along the way.
Start by knowing the following traits:
- Age, gender, and family status
- Education
- Profession and income
- Business location
- Short background
Remember: Give them a name to make it more real.
Step #2 – List out their wants, needs and pain points
Your job is to help your customer, so a crucial point is to get to know their wants, needs and pain points. Then you can offer them a solution.
- What does your customer want?
- What does your customer need?
- What’s your customer pain points?
Once you answer the above questions, you have to link each one with a solution (product or service) you are selling.
Step #3 – Identify the decision-making process
Along the way, you’ll see the decision-making process of your customer, and all the objections that come up.
This information is very valuable. You cannot look the other way. You have to get all the data (from the time they need to purchase to the payment options, for instance), and make the needed improvements, so you can deliver your best product or service with the best conditions.
Step #4 – Fill in a template with all the information
Use a customer avatar template to fill in all the information. This document is going to be very useful to have it in handy.
Hubspot has a free online software tool that you can use. Have fun!
How To Create Automations According To Your Different Avatars
As we’ve learned that we have to create different customer avatars, now we are going to show you how to automate the actions. Which means we can rely on some automation tools that work 24/7 for us.
Example: Create automations with email marketing
- First we are going to create a lead magnet, an e-book about how to sell on Instagram.
- We are going to write a blog post about mistakes companies do when trying to sell their products or services through Instagram.
- Within the blog post, you’ll find a link to a landing page where you can download a freemium in exchange for their email address. In that case, the e-book “How to sell on Instagram”.
- Before we would have scheduled on the email service provider that everyone who downloads that e-book, they will tag them with #Instagram.
- So we will know that that customer avatar is interested about social media selling, especially on Instagram.
- Through some follow-up emails, we can offer them a complete Instagram course that can satisfy their needs.
Related Content: How To Automate Your Marketing In 4 Simple Steps
Conclusion
In sum up, in order to build up your customer avatar, you need to:
- Research demographics
- List out their wants, needs and pain points
- Identify the decision-making process
- Fill in a template with all the information
Remember: Your first customer avatar draft will be that: a draft. Do not worry! You’ll get closer to the ideal customer as long as you keep listening and understanding your customers.
Our recommendation is to often review the customer avatar template.