With the importance of marketing growing every single day, marketers have to make sure that they and their staff are ready for anything that comes their way. This includes knowing every single detail about their potential customers and target demographics. It’s basically essential for any marketing/sales team of any company.
Knowledge Is Power
When it comes down to knowing your potential customers, you want to really know your customers. Formulating a Customer Avatar (also known as a Buyer Persona) will allow you to break down essential and intricate details of your potential customer so that you know how to respond to each and every single one of their concerns.
This also allows you to tailor your ads in a way that will appeal to your specific customer base and make more effective impacts instead of reaching out in the hopes of obtaining something that they will like.
What Does This Knowledge Look Like?
Building your customer avatars will definitely take some effort on your hand. This can be done through surveys and interviews, but of course, talking to your existing customers is a great way to start.
This helps you evaluate how you will respond to every single situation based off of what you know about your potential fictitious customer. If you have already started exploring the world of marketing automation, then buyer personas become even more important as you move people through the funnel with the various messaging and offers you may give them.
Below, you can read and learn more about customer avatar, how to build them, and some examples of what they can look like.
How To Get Started
When creating a customer avatar, you want to make sure you are as thorough as possible. In order to get started building a customer avatar, there are a few factors you will want to consider.
Demographics
Formulating in-depth and detailed demographics of your target audience will prove to be one of the most helpful things you will do. This will allow your customer avatar to have an entire background story. In other words, you will have definable information that will describe your average customer.
You will want to consider information such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Marital status
- Where they live
- What they do for a living
- Annual income
- Level of education
Once you are finished customizing and defining the above, your customer avatar will really begin to take shape.
Psychographics
Similar to demographics, psychographics work to help you define who your customer is as a person. Exploring the psychographics of your target customer will allow you to really get in your customer’s head. Going through this step will be more psychological, you will begin to formulate an idea as to what makes your target customer tick.
You will want to consider information such as:
- Potential hobbies
- Potential habits
- Potential values
- Potential interests
- Potential attitudes
- Potential interests
Once both your psychographics and demographics are complete, you will begin to see you have practically created a real-life person. Both of these practices are of paramount importance when it comes to crafting your customer avatar.
Customer’s Sources of Information
How exactly does your customer get his or her news? Determining how your customer gets their information and what that information actually looks like will prove to be very useful when developing customer avatars. Identifying sources of information will give you insight as to where you and your company should be advertising. Maybe your customer avatar hates social media but loves to shop on Amazon, where do you think you will be advertising?
What to consider:
- What books/magazines do they read in their spare time?
- Which websites do they frequent?
- Do they attend conferences and meetings based on their interests?
- Do they spend time on social media?
- Do they listen to specific Gurus or Content Creators?
Going through this practice will only help you better understand who and where your target customer gets their information.
Purchase Objections
Although you may think there will be no objections, it is always in your best interest to be prepared. Going through why a customer may not want to complete a purchase is a good method in fleshing out some problems and difficulties your company may face in the future. Figuring these out these setbacks now will help you save time and money in future.
What to consider:
- Will it fit their business?
- Who are your competitors?
- Are there cheaper alternatives?
- Will it really help your customer?
As annoying as this may seem, your future self will be thanking you!
What Do You Do After Establishing Your Customer Avatar?
Once you establish your ideal customer, you need to develop some insight about that fictitious person in order to garner more information for marketing/product development.
Priority Initiatives – Ask why yourself why that customer wants to buy YOUR product.
Success Factors – What will that customer get from buying your product instead of another competitor’s?
Perceived Barriers – What’s stopping that customer from believing your product isn’t their best option?
Buyer’s Journey – A basic run-through of what details that customer might be focusing on while he or she is deciding on your product.
Decision Criteria – What aspects of the product does your customer deem most critical? What expectations do they have?
Once you have all of this put together, you’ll be on your way to making more effective marketing and sales decisions. What are some best practices you learned when building your customer avatar? Would love to hear more in the comments!
