Are you struggling to know your customers?A marketer or business owner gets so focused on WHAT they’re selling that they forget to think about WHO they’re selling it to. Who is your ideal customer? Do you know the characteristics of your customers?
I’ll show you a step by step process of creating a customer avatar, how to identify your ideal customer, where they’re hanging out online and what challenges are they facing?
Do you know who you’re exactly selling to?
If you answered something like: women, small business owners, teenagers or mothers…
…then you’re probably not selling to anybody
Truly understanding your target market is one of the most important things when it comes to starting to market and sell products online.
Only by having a clear idea in your mind of who you would like to reach, sell to or help you can tailor and target your messages and have a strong impact on your target audience.
This is the secret to success in the online world.
So how do you get information about your customers and have a deep understanding of what they desire and what they fear the most?
By creating a customer avatar.
What is a customer avatar?
“You can’t hit a target that you haven’t set”
This quote beautifully shows the importance of having a clearly defined customer avatar, also known as (Customer Persona or Customer Biography or Buyer Persona).
A customer avatar is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. It doesn’t make assumptions or categorize people into groups. The avatar focuses on one person and outlines everything about them.
Why Do You Need to Have a Customer Avatar?
“The aim of marketing is to reduce the need for selling”
The importance of a customer avatar cannot be undermined. When you have a clear idea in your mind of who you would like to reach, sell to or help, you can tailor and target your messages,have a strong impact on your target audience without spending more time on marketing because you know exactly who you are selling to. When you target people closer to your ideal buyer persona, you have a higher chance of converting them into customers. The consideration time for them is fairly reduced, and the conversion takes place quite smoothly.
If you’re looking to maximize your marketing ROI , by optimizing your marketing budget in a way that it reaches the maximum people, generates more leads, and more relevant website traffic , you need to have a well designed customer avatar.
Benefits of customer avatar :
1.Attract your target market & sell more
2.Create content, based on ideal customer
3. Understand the market and the customer’s decision-making process.
4. You’ll be able to create messages that are highly targeted.
5. Create your Sales copy, video and funnel.
6. Identifying the best channels to reach your audience and weeding out(negative persona) people who only look like your ideal customer.
How to Create a Customer Avatar?
Before creating a customer avatar you need to choose your micro-niche.
Customer avatar is basically audience research to know our exact target audience. It’s a process of identifying wants,needs,desires,pain points, and everything else you need to know about your customers. To define the target audience we have to collect real-time data. Customer avatar is made of demographics(age,gender,location,income level,…) and psycho-graphics (goals,problems,dreams,pain points,wants,needs,..)
Step 1 :
To create your customer avatar, collect all the real-time data and enter collected data in this tool. To know more about how to effectively create a great buyer persona, read this amazing guide by Hubspot.
How to identify your ideal customer?
Components of ideal customer are as follows
Who are they? (Demographic)
- Age
- Gender
- Location – urban, suburban, rural
- Educational level
- Computer literacy
- Family life and status
- Work life, employment status, and job type
- Financial status
- Income level
What are they interested in?
Next, think about their interests, as relevant to your product or service:
- Work or professional interests
- Their leisure interests, like sports, music, hobbies, or social activities
- The sort of places they like to visit, such as particular shops, events, cultural places
- Their online activities, like websites, social media
- The brands and personalities they follow
- Where they buy products like yours from
- Where they get their news
- The magazines they read
- The type of books they like
What will grab their attention?
How will you hook their interest?
- Pain points and challenges in their personal or working lives
- Values and personal preferences
- Wants, desires, and aspirations
- Needs and requirements from the work or lifestyle they follow
- Frustrations, problems and fears.
How can You Convert them to Buyers?
Now you need to understand their buying choices and how they make their decisions
- How do they make a buying decision?
- What objections might they make?
- Who influences their decisions?
- What decision-making values drive them?
- Speed and getting things quickly
- Safety and doing things right
- Cost and getting a bargain
- Features and getting the best
- Quality and having reliability
- Prestige and fitting in
- What outcomes do they want?
- How do they like to feel, when they buy?
Data Collection methods for customer avatar :
Method 1 : Use Existing Customer Data
Take a moment to think about your business,and who you would really love to see walking in the door.Can we make assumptions of our own?A simple guessing game won’t work here, we cannot make a blind guess on our customer’s thinking and his needs. So use your existing customer data and find your ideal customer.Don’t wait for surveys or interviews to be conducted to prepare a draft customer avatar by using the other methods.
Method 2 : Take Survey
Prepare a list of questions to ask your customers.Frame the questions in such a way that you qualify leads of your customer based on their responses.Don’t go beyond 20 questions.Test your draft customer avatar.We can collect leads using surveys.It’s important to survey your audience every 90 days to find out THREE important things:
- Who they are?(demographics)
- What problems do they currently have?
- What solutions they are looking to buy.
Method 3 : Engage and Interact
Talk to ideal customers by calling(personal interactions) or interviewing them.Regular interaction by audience engagement will help people to remember your brand,build relationships,understand the problems,get testimonials,expand your business and increase your customers. This method you can provide real value to customers,build awareness,nurture your leads and can take them down to your funnel.
Method 4: Create Readers persona
By identifying them, you’ll be able to find your target audience better when the time comes. An audience persona is the first step to visualizing your audience as you write. When you picture an individual, you can properly tailor your content to them.
When you follow this type of writing process, the person reading your content will often feel like you are speaking directly to them. A great audience persona covers these details:who,what,when,where,why.
Method 5 : Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics has a ton of data about your audience if you know how to find it.
Method 6 : Find Your Target Audience On Facebook With Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook is a great medium to know about customers better. Facebook Audience Insights helps you understand the demographics and interests of the audience who has already visited your website, and based on this data, it creates an interesting pool of its own.
Method 7: Find Your Target Audience On Twitter Audience insights
A real-time look at the people that are most relevant to you, such as your followers or people who have engaged with your Tweets. Gain insights about your audience’s demographics, interests, lifestyle, and purchase behaviors.
Method 8 : Use Google Ads Audience insights and keyword planner
Create Google Tag Manager Account.Create Container In Google Tag ManagerAdd Container Code To Web Pages .Create GTM Tag For Google Analytics.Create GTM Tag For Facebook Pixels.Publish (Activate) Both GTM Tags. Create Google AdWords Account.Link AdWords Target Marketing is identifying the group of prospects that would most likely buy/need your products & services. This includes demographics (age, gender, location, income, occupation, etc.) as well as interests & hobbies.
Method 9: Use LinkedIn website demographics
You can better understand your audience — what companies they work for, their job titles, where they live, and how they found your post. With nearly 3 million people publishing long-form articles and millions of more sharing updates, LinkedIn is the leading platform for professionals like you to build your voice.
Method 10: Follow and analyze your competitors.
Monitor up-and-coming keywords with Google Trends. Setup Google Alerts on all competitors. Monitor Social Media tags for your market. Monitor freelance sites for new projects in your market. Monitor blogs for Content Marketing ideas. Monitor press releases in your market. Monitor discussion forums in your market. Like All Competitor Facebook Pages Monitor your Facebook timeline for competitor ads. Monitor the latest news for your market.
What next?
After you have figured out who your audience is, you can tweak your campaigns to target them specifically. You will know what kind of message will resonate with your audience, and in turn, result in higher engagement and conversions for your brand.
Conclusion:
Learning about your ideal customer – their challenges,their goals,their demographics traits and so on, helps you set a strategy aimed at attracting the most valuable visitors,leads and customers to your business.Build multiple customer avatars to represent different ideal segments.
Here is my Financial Freedom survey form (Fill it and get free training course): https://forms.gle/7JZYvaZnor4qrGBe7
(Avinash is my ideal customer, data collected from survey forms).
Avinash is a B.E graduate, a 25-year young man working in Chennai. He wanted to be financially Free and escape out of rat race. He was been offered many ways to achieve freedom but he was confused about what to choose like the stock market, mutual fund, gold, real estate, and online business. He is an introvert and his hobbies are reading books, listening to music and traveling with their friends. Every weekend they play cricket or plan for an outing. He spends most of the time on Whatsapp, YouTube, and Instagram. Avinash has a monthly expense of 7000 and he wanted to earn more money because of the family situation. Then he figured out the way to make money online by affiliate marketing. But he was facing problems to drive traffic, create bonus stack, and email marketing. To solve the problem he wishes to buy an online course worth 5000 and searching for a perfect course. His life goals are to be financially free and live the life he wants instead of working for less salary. Finally, he supports his family and maintains a girlfriend with the dream of an entrepreneur.
Author – Vijay Kaarthigeyan
Diploma in mechatronics, Upcoming blogger.
Editor: Anuradha Ravi
SEO: Monisha.P