How to Design Your Customer Avatar or Buyer Persona
Customer avatar. Target market. Marketing persona. Buyer persona.
These are the expressions that are used interchangeably to define the fictional, generalized descriptions of the type of person most likely to buy from you.
It is critically significant to the success of your marketing, sales, product development, and service delivery that you have a broad knowledge of who your customer avatar is. What is a customer avatar? You’ve probably heard the expression, “You can’t hit a target you haven’t set.” This fits perfectly to the significance of having a distinctly defined customer avatar, which will help you:
- Decide which social platforms they spend time on so you understand where your business should be present and active
- Be more efficient in your advertising. Your marketing dollars will be well spent when you identify where to advertise and who to target for the highest visibility.
- Producing content that will connect with your target market will give you a better perception of their pain points, goals, and achievements
- Deliver and provide more dependable products and services because you can predict your markets’ needs, behaviors, and interests.
HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER AVATAR
Having a distinctly defined avatar is essential; the question is, “How do I design one?” Good news: it’s not complicated if you ask the correct questions.
“What are the right questions?” you ask. You’re in luck because I’ve built a comprehensive client avatar template to help you out. This template makes it simple to organize all of your information, experience, knowledge, and analysis into one attractive and presentable format.
Download your customer avatar template now and start on the path of thriving marketing, sales, product development, and service delivery that will knock the socks off your ideal customers.
Now, you could get the template and start filling it out straight away, but the most potent client avatars are created with knowledge based on market research and information that you collect from your current customer base.
I recommend you take the time needed to collect the most accurate information possible to design your customer avatar. Here are a few ways:
- Use surveys to gather feedback from your current clients
- Asking Your Target Market is an excellent way for examining a more extensive audience base
- Adding a Custom Audience Pixel to your website is a powerful way to track and discover more about people who have visited your site
- Interviews gain valuable data, and let you dive deeper into the replies that are given by asking, “why?” This enables you to reveal the behaviors that motivate them.
HAVING MULTIPLE AVATARS
By now, you may be thinking, “What if I have more than one ideal customer?” Having multiple avatars is fine. Most companies will have more than one perfect customer, particularly if they have more than one product or service. The best method to determine your ideal customer is to take them one at a time. I would recommend that you begin with the market that delivers the most profit to your company (a great idea, right?). Using this method, you may even find yourself recognizing that your business is too general. You might choose to tighten up your product or service offering to develop your niche and position yourself to give your best to that market.
THE VALUE OF NEGATIVE AVATARS
Developing a negative avatar can be as useful as building your customer avatar. A negative avatar is a generalized description of the persona that you do not want as a customer. Understanding who you don’t want as a customer can sometimes make it easier to identify who you do want to serve. If you’re going to start here, which is a great idea, I’d recommend you think of that one customer who was a total nightmare to work with. Record all of the stuff that made the relationship unsuccessful. Don’t focus on the personal characteristics of why the individual wasn’t easy to work with. Instead, concentrate on the reasons why they weren’t a good fit for your offer — high prices, the chance of increased churn, not being suitably equipped for long-term success.
DEFINE YOUR CUSTOMER AVATAR
Demographic features:
- List out your avatar’s demographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, education, income level, marital status, job, religion, and average family size). This area is usually easy to figure out.
- Psychographic features: These are a little more complex and need a more profound knowledge of your client’s avatar. They’re based on values, attitudes, interests, and their lifestyle. Some examples are: desiring a healthy lifestyle, valuing family time, using Pinterest to do do-it-yourself home projects.
- Give your avatar a name: Giving your avatar a name humanizes the profile. If your target includes both men and women, create a name for both.
- Put a face to their name: Find a photo online that best simulates what your avatar looks like visually.
- Design a dossier: A dossier is a one-page compilation of data about your avatar that includes its name, picture, information, and back-story.
- Speaking of story: Write one about your ideal customer. Picture yourself as your avatar and are writing about the discovery of your product or service. What did they think before they purchased your product? How were they feeling? Why were they feeling that way? What were they searching for? What were they expecting to solve or achieve? How did they locate you or learn about you? How did they feel once they bought your product or service?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
At the most fundamental level, creating a buyer persona will help you become more powerful in your messaging. It will also help you slice through all the marketing noise in the world today. Using it in combination with a stable lifecycle marketing strategy is a sure way to explode your business growth. Here are a few ideas to consider as you start creating your customer avatar:
Design a negative avatar first to get clear about who you don’t want as a client and who isn’t a good fit.
Give your avatar a name, face, and a personal back-story to bring him or her to life. Be as precise as possible — the more detailed you are, the more you and your ideal customer will connect.
Take on a single customer avatar at a time.
Design your avatar based on market research and customer feedback instead of your feelings, opinions, and judgments.
