What Does a Customer Avatar Look Like?
A customer avatar is typically based on demographic data about your target market and qualitative information like the types of interests they have, their hobbies and interests, where they live and what kind of lifestyle they lead. A great way to create a customer avatar is by conducting surveys among existing customers or potential customers who are similar to those already in your audience.
Avatars are often used in games and virtual worlds to represent players’ characters. In these contexts, avatars may be considered representations of an individual’s personality or an interpretation of their role in the game world. Multiple user profiles may be stored on one computer server at different times so that each user may have a unique experience.
Why Do I Need a Customer Avatar?
Here are some of the reasons to create a customer avatar:
- To understand their needs better: Customer avatars help you know where your customers are coming from, what they’re looking for and why they need it. This knowledge enables you to create relevant content that resonates with them.
- To create content that resonates with them: If you know what your audience is like, you can start marketing materials that match their expectations. For example, if your avatar has children, creating a blog post about back-to-school shopping may be more relevant than insights into saving money on toiletries.
- To make an emotional connection between them and your brand: Creating a dynamic relationship between you and your avatar helps customers feel like you understand them. Leading to increased brand loyalty, which is important because it costs five times more to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one.
- To help you prioritize efforts in reaching out to them: You want to know who you’re going after so that you can focus on reaching out to those most likely to be interested in what you offer. How can you ever expect to connect with your target audience if you don’t know them?
- To make informed decisions about marketing and product development: Once you know who your target audience is, it becomes much easier for you to make informed decisions about marketing and product development. You can better understand what type of language might appeal to them and how they might respond best to different types of messaging.
Conclusion
Understanding the customer avatar gives you a solid framework for working with your business. It helps you clarify your customer profile, understand their behaviors and needs, and more effectively target them to grow your business. It will take time and effort to flesh out your avatar, so set aside time to get it right. Once you have an avatar in place, you will have the framework to develop an effective marketing strategy that allows you to engage with your customers on a personal level.
