If you’re a small business owner and you don’t have a customer avatar yet you have come to the right place, because you definitely need one. No matter what stage your business is in, the two most important things for any business to know what they are selling and who they are selling to. Most people get the first part of this equation down, but the latter half is where they run into some trouble.
What Is a Customer Avatar?
A customer avatar is your ideal client, fleshed out in complex detail. This goes way beyond a vague target audience of a gender and an age group. Your customer avatar is your imagining of the perfect customer for your business. It may seem somewhat excessive mapping out an imaginary character’s seemingly insignificant details, but having a clear image of who you’re selling to will make marketing easier every step of the way.
How to Create a Customer Avatar
Who Can You Help?
The first step to developing your customer avatar comes with a long hard look at your business. You need to fully understand who your product or service is helping, and build the base of your avatar off that. Start with their goals and values. What is it that they want to achieve, and why? This will lay the foundation for all future decisions and motivations of your avatar.
Where Can You Find Them?
You then have to figure out where your customer avatar, or ideal client, consumes information. This goes hand in hand with their demographics. Figure out their gender, age, occupation, and from there you can determine whether they are a LinkedIn fiend, spend all their time on Facebook, or are still in the dark ages of handwriting letters. This step is extremely important as if you know where your ideal customer gets their news and information, you know which platform to effectively market your business on.
What Are Their Problems?
You then have to dig deeper into the motivations of your customer avatar and pinpoint their pain points. Pain points are problems that, ideally, you have the answer to. Figure out exactly what is going wrong for them that you can fix so that you can effectively incorporate that into your sales strategy.
Once you have your complete customer avatar you will wonder how you went so long without one. Having a clear image of who you are selling to is one of the most valuable things you can do for your business. Make sure you take your time to work through this process or else you’ll run into major problems with your marketing strategy, sales funnels, email sequences and so much more.
Check out my Ideal Customer Checklist to get started on your Customer Avatar.
Have an awesome day,
Angela
