If you are thinking about creating and launching a product or have started working as an affiliate, it is crucial to know who your customers are.
Knowing and understanding those who have already bought or will buy your products is essential to optimize your results and create better offers.
If you don’t know your customer, you are creating content that does not connect with potential buyers. And when that happens, they are unlikely to be interested in doing business with you and your brand.
When it comes to working with marketing, an important key to success is to study the best strategies for people to get to know your products or services. And one of the most important concepts is to be able to accurately define who your customer is to create useful content from that.
However, in today’s increasingly competitive market, it is not enough to have simple, general information about your customer. And that’s where the client profile comes in.
It works as a synthesis of the profile of the ideal buyer, defining characteristics, habits, desires, and objections common to your ideal customer.
In this post, we will show you what customer avatars are and how to formulate your own custom profile for your business, so make sure to read on until the end to fully understand it!
Table of Contents:
What is a customer avatar?
The customer avatar can be defined as a representation of your ideal customer. It is the kind of person you want to buy from your business. It is also known as buyer persona or customer profile.
And it’s based on real information about the behavior and demographic characteristics of a brand’s customers.
But what does this mean in practice?
Well, the persona is a kind of character.
One that has an age, personal history, motivations, dreams, goals, challenges, fears, and concerns. Sometimes, avatars even have names! Like Brian or Evelyn.
And the customer picture is generally created based on data from the audience that the company wants to reach.
Why Do You Need to Create a Customer Avatar?
The reason is simple. Every business needs to know its customers.
Every business needs to know who they’re trying to sell to.
When you don’t have a well-defined customer avatar, you run the risk of misdirecting your message, wasting money, and turning away potential customers from your business.
It would be like speaking a completely different language than your client’s language.
Creating a buyer persona allows you to have a clearer and more accurate idea of; who your ideal customers are, what they like, the problems they face, what they seek, and much more.
And with all of this information, you can find the ideal tone to interact with your customers, which tools and language to use, what imagery is most effective, and much more.
With specific data about potential customers, you will be able to understand their pains and fears more accurately. Helping you better create solutions for their problems and to advertise, market, and sell to them more easily.
But don’t think that this tactic is only necessary for large corporations. Entrepreneurs and businesses of every size and industry can benefit from defining a shopper.
And having a customer avatar can help you in many different parts of your business, such as:
- Paid Advertising: Increase your ROI (return-on-investment) by accurately targeting people who are most likely to buy from you and reduce costs with sponsored links and an increased chance of conversions.
- Email Marketing: By speaking the customer’s language and thoroughly understanding who your customer is, you can use language and create copy that makes them more likely to open your emails, use offers from your emails, and increase their engagement with your brand.
- Blogging & Content Marketing: You can’t have a successful blog without knowing your reader. With a customer avatar, you can better understand what your reader likes to read, the right tone to use, the best titles to use, and much more.
- Selling Info Products: By understanding the fears, needs, and wants of your customer, you can increase engagement and design a compelling product for potential customers.
- Product Development: How much is your customer willing to pay for a product in your niche? What does your customer want the most? What does your customer like/dislike? By knowing this and more, you can create products and services that are easy to sell and are likely to be successful from the get-go, without the need for heavy iterations to it.
- Lead Generation: Know your customer and you know who is most likely to get interested in your products. But that’s not all. By targeting the correct people, you’re more likely to get higher-quality leads who are more likely to buy from you.
How to Create the Ideal Customer Avatar
Now that you know why you should have a customer avatar, you might be asking yourself “How do I create one?”
To create an ideal persona, you must answer a series of questions about your customers and have a lot of information on them.
You can also do market research, create forms, and even online surveys to help you segment and better understand your niche.
To create your ideal customer avatar, here are the most important things you need to know about your customer:
Demographic Information
Here it is important to know some basic things about your potential buyer. The information should include:
- Gender
- Age
- Place of residence
- Profession
- Marital Status
- Education
- Social Class
- Does your customer have children?
- Where does your customer work?
- What is the customer’s salary?
Desires & Goals
What is the deepest desire that your audience has?
- Maybe the biggest desire your customer has is not having to worry about money anymore.
- Or maybe it’s spending more time with his or her family.
- Or maybe it’s eating better.
- But desires aren’t the only “wants” of your customer.
- Many also have goals.
- And like desires, goals can come in many different shapes and forms. They can be superficial. They can be clear and well-defined. They can have deadlines or be open-ended.
- Maybe your customer wants to make X amount of money by the end of the year.
- Maybe they want to lose a specific amount of weight.
- Or find a loved one.
Desires and goals are closely connected, and understanding them can be a big difference in knowing your customer.
Pain Points
Pain points are problems your customers experience, often on a daily basis.
So, ask yourself: What difficulty is your customer going through right now?
- Does your customer feel uncomfortable riding the train to work every day?
- Or maybe they’re finding it difficult to find healthy food near them;
- Perhaps they aren’t getting quality sleep because of their pillow;
- Maybe they’re finding it difficult to find a job position that fits them;
- Or maybe, it’s something else entirely.
Pain points vary widely, from person to person, from region to region, from business to business.
If you know what interferes with their lives, both in personal and professional matters, it becomes much easier to be able to use the right words to sell them your product.
By understanding their pain points, you can also avoid products and wording that may offend them or make the pain point even worse
Personal Tastes & Personality
Some useful information regarding personal tastes and personality include:
- Idols and people they look up to;
- Favorite TV shows, such as are sports, cooking, soap operas, films, documentaries, etc;
- What kind of music they listen to;
- What brands do they buy from?
- What are their personality traits? Are they outgoing? Serious? Funny?
Learn what they like.
Give it to them.
Profit.
It’s that simple.
Purchasing Habits
- Does the individual buy expensive products? cheap services? both?
- Do they purchase online? physically?
- Before purchasing, do they thoroughly research different products/services?
- Is the customer the one to make the purchases, or is the purchasing power in someone else’s hands?
This information can be of great use in determining the pricing of your product/service, where to place them, and much more.
Sources of Information
Where does the customer get most of their information?
This is an important question to make to fully understand your customer.
What are their gurus?
Do they get information from magazines? Websites? Books? If so, which ones?
Sample Customer Avatar
Brian, a 29-year-old man, middle-class American, lives in Miami, Florida. He has a law degree and works at a law firm, but is looking for a new job. He likes to cook and wants to dedicate more time to it. On weekends, he always invites friends and prepares dinner for everyone. Being middle class, he doesn’t buy very expensive products but has no problem spending extra money if the product or service is high-quality. He’s fun and is always surrounded by people.
As you can see, the profile is quite a precise representation of a customer.
Thinking about business and marketing strategies for individuals that you have more information about makes them a lot more likely to succeed.
How do You Create a Customer Avatar Without Having Customers?
So, what to do when you don’t have a product or service on the market yet and you don’t know exactly who the people you’ll sell to are? Is it still possible to create a customer avatar?
Yes, no need to freak out!
And this section was made just for you. You can definitely create your own customer avatar, even if you don’t have customers yet. That way, you’ll be able to start a business with a focus on your consumers and what they need.
1. Interact With People
To better understand what your potential customers need and what their unresolved pains are, you need to talk to them.
It’s that simple.
So, instead of presenting your product right away, how about interacting with potential customers first?
A simple way to start this can be by searching for discussion forums and online groups that are related to your product’s niche.
Facebook is a great social media for that. There, you will find groups focused on several specific niches. Take advantage of these groups to interact and analyze the profile of the people who are there, so you can define who your persona would be.
Other social media like Twitter and Instagram can also prove useful sources of information and see first-hand how people in your niche act and react.
Another useful social media can is Reddit, which can provide very specific forums for different interests and topics.
You can also search for events related to the product or niche you’re serving, and interact with people face-to-face.
And, of course, you can always do some Google research to better understand your audience.
2. Use Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook has a great tool that can help you a lot if you don’t have a well-defined customer avatar yet.
Facebook’s Audience Insights is a tool that can show you which kinds of people are looking for products/services similar to what you want to sell.
And you might be asking yourself “How can I do it?”
Don’t worry, it’s quite easy.
Suppose you want to sell ebooks. If this is your niche, you know that Amazon Kindle is one of the biggest brands in the industry. So, to better understand the audience you can reach, you can use Audience Insights to gather information on Amazon Kindle’s Facebook page followers and generate important information from them, such as age, gender, and areas of interest.
And from that information, on a customer that is likely to be similar to yours, you can gather important information for the creation of your own prospect.
3. Create Survey Forms
Another way to create a persona is to make survey forms for people to respond to. In these forms, you need to ask not only socio-demographic questions, but you must also not forget behavioral and psychographic information.
Make your forms available in forums about your niche, on your social media, blogs, or any other medium you have for sharing the survey. After a while and with a good number of responses, analyze the responses to understand the profile of your ideal buyer.
You can use: Google forms, Survey Monkey, or Thrive quiz builder for WordPress to do so.
Depending on your budget, you can also hire survey and market research companies to gather extra info on your potential customers.
In this type of strategy, you need to take 2 very important precautions:
- Don’t ask too many questions. If your form becomes too large, people may not feel like responding. In addition, the more questions, the more data you will have to analyze.
- Think carefully about your sample size. You need to balance the number of survey forms you will be analyzing well. Do not take very small samples (for example, 20 people) as set-in-stone information. But you also have to be careful to not get too many responses and overload the analysis process. You can start small, say 100 people, and if you feel the need, you can increase that number later.
What is the Difference Between a Customer Avatar and a Target Audience?
Okay, if you made it this far, you must be wondering what the difference is between persona and target audience, right?
Don’t worry, this is a very common question, as the two concepts are quite similar. However, they are not synonymous!
Knowing who the target audience of your business is is important. But there are differences between persona and target audience that are crucial to better understand the needs of those looking for your business. Check them out:
Target Audience
The target audience is a broader and more general representation of the customers you want to reach. That is, it is composed of a segment of society that shares common, broad characteristics.
When defining a target audience, it is common to use socio-demographic criteria, such as:
- Education
- Social class
- Gender
- Age
- Nationality
- Profession
- Location (country/rural/urban/coastal/inland)
So, an example of a target audience would be:
Male, between 25-35 years old, middle class, American, lives in Florida, graduated in law, works at a law firm but seeks to change jobs.
Do you see how different this is from our previous avatar example?
Target audiences are broader and more generic, while avatars are more specific and detailed.
As such, it is easy to see why customer avatars are so powerful.
After all, within the target audience, there are people with totally different tastes, behaviors, histories, and needs to the point that it is practically impossible to do something that speaks deeply and directly to all men between 15 and 35 years old.
On the other hand, focusing on a specific profile, like the previous example, makes marketing processes much simpler and increases their chances of success.
Customer Avatar
The Avatar, in addition to the geographic and sociodemographic data that are present in target audiences, also contains other criteria aimed at psychographic information.
We’ve already gone over the most important factors for creating a customer avatar, but here’s a quick reminder…
First, it will contain the socio-demographic information also present in target audiences, like:
- Name
- Sex
- Age
- Social class
- Nationality
- Location
- Education
- Profession
But customer avatars will also have behavioral characteristics, such as:
· Personal tastes (Hobbies/Preferences/etc)
· Sensitivity to prices of services and products (High-ticket buyer/tends to be conservative with purchase decisions/etc)
· Desired quality in a product or service (Durable/Pretty/Colorful/etc)
And psychographic criteria, like:
· Personality (Serious/Funny/Social/Extroverted/etc)
· Lifestyle (Fitness/Materialistic/etc)
· Moral values (Honesty/Respect/Empathy/etc)
Quite different from target audiences, right?
𝟯 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 ( 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗶𝘂𝗺 𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 )
If you are selling premium or luxuries products then of course you don’t want to waste your marketing budget on the wrong audience, showing your ads to the right audience (rich people) is very crucial for you to generate sales.
1. Where rich people live or hang out. Do some research about cities or states: where mostly rich people live? ( California, Texas, Florida ), which clubs do they join or they are a member of? ( city Golf club, horse riding, 5-star hotels, etc). You can even target residential housing communities as well…
2. Target those people, who already use premium products like Apple iPhone users, who wear branded watches on the wrist, drive luxury cars. If the product is for women, then target those who like jewelry items (Gold fans). Follow luxury brands on Facebook like ( Gucci, Rolex, Lamborghini, etc). Those are more likely to spend money on premium products.
3. Target high-income Job titles like Founders, Entrepreneurs, CEO Chief executive officers, the rest of C-suite. Also, you can target employees of big companies ( make a list of top 100 fortune companies and target their employees).
Final tip: Target Premium credit card users- online buyers ( they are not rich, but they hold great purchasing power).
Create Your Own Customer Avatar!
Thinking of a marketing strategy based on customer avatars can greatly help you better identify with your customers and provide a wide variety of benefits for your business.
Through it, you can perceive pain, solve customer problems more efficiently, provide a better user experience and a more engaged buyer for your business.
So, remember to always create a consumer profile so that your marketing actions and product development decisions reach even greater results.
And whether you already have customers or not, creating avatars is not just recommended, it is essential. So be sure to apply this strategy to your business going forward and crush it in your industry!
