It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is if no one will buy your product. And to effectively market it, you need to know who you’re marketing to. If you don’t define an audience, you’ll spread yourself too thin and end up creating digital marketing material that resonates with no one. And you don’t want that.
But never fear! Creating an effective client avatar (also known as a customer avatar, buyer persona, marketing persona, or a customer profile) will help you define your audience, have a solid foundation to stand on for marketing strategy and will increase sales, conversions and traffic to your site. Read along for these essential tips!
Creating a client avatar can be boiled down to a few easy steps:
- Who your ideal customer is.
- What their goals and values are.
- What their challenges are.
- And how you fit into all of the above.
But before we get into how to design the perfect customer avatar, let’s define it.
What is a client avatar?
A client avatar is an essential part of your marketing strategy. It’s a fictional character, a profile of a specific person representing your ideal customer. Every company or organization, no matter the size or industry, should have a customer/client avatar. But it’s especially beneficial for start-ups and small to medium sized businesses who are still in the process of defining their audience.
But you can’t just make up your customer avatars. You need to use available research and data to define your target market. Otherwise you risk targeting anyone and everyone in hopes of reaching an audience that may not exist.
So how do you research? You can set up a poll or Google form for customers who purchased your product, review your business’s social media conversations, look at 3rd party reports or talk to your marketing and sales team to get a better idea of who your customer data
Consider creating multiple avatars.
Depending on the size of your business, you may have more than one ideal customer.
A well considered client avatar allows you to improve across many areas, including: email marketing, product development, content marketing, paid advertising and overall user experience. By understanding the needs and wants of your ideal customer, you can better tailor your marketing and sales, refine your targeting options and see a greater ROI on Facebook ads and Google ads.
Creating a Client Avatar
You want your client avatar to be as fleshed out as possible. Give them a name, maybe even use a stock photo to represent them. Getting it into your head that this is a real person is essential for your decisionmaking process. With this in mind, give them a backstory:
- How old are they?
- Where do they live?
- What’s their marital status?
- What’s their job? Their income?
- What’s their education?
Questions like these will help you to design personalized marketing materials and ensure you’re reaching your target audience.
What are your client’s goals and values?
What are your client’s needs? What problem are they looking to solve? And how can you be the one they trust to meet those goals?
Think in terms of “want” statements. What do they want to achieve? How can they meet these needs if they buy your product?
But more than that, you also need to consider the values of your client. What are they hoping to achieve? What do they believe? Understanding their values is what will allow you to creating compelling marketing resources, that enhance the customer experience.
Where do they go online?
Successful marketing strategy ensures that your message reaches the right person, in the right place, at the right time. When creating a client avatar, you need to think about where and how they spend their time.
What books or magazines do they read? What websites or social media do they use?
The easiest way to answer these questions is to think of what your client, but no one else, would do. As in:
“My ideal client would visit __ website, but no one else would.”
This helps you to narrow down your audience and think of what makes them unique.
Identify their challenges and pain points
Now that you’ve established a buyer persona and what they want to achieve, you need to figure out what’s standing in the way of them achieving this goal.
Be as concrete as possible when defining their challenges and pain points. Not just ‘ is interested in scaling their business’ But instead, define their business, where it is now and where they hope to be. This will help you to recognize the role you can fill in meeting these needs.
And then you just need to apply it.
With this done, you can tailor your content marketing to resonate with them. Ultimately, you want to seem like the go-to source of answers for your client – an authority – and if you follow the above steps you can be confident that they will be confident in you!
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