Customer Avatar: Your Ideal Customer

“You can say all the right things for all the right reasons, but if you are talking it to the wrong person, it will never matter. ”

The above quote very well describes the big challenge marketers face i.e. reaching the right audience with the right message. Customers mostly come up with great solutions but they do not know the biggest challenge their customers are facing. Without knowing your customers well how can you come with the right solution for them?

So if you are a marketer facing the same kind of problem, then you are in the right place. In this article, I will be giving you the best solution to your problem and that too without breaking a sweat. I will be telling you a step by step approach to help you understand your ideal customer and what are the problems they face and how to provide them with the ideal solutions.

How to find your Ideal Customer?

The biggest question the marketers face is how to understand their ideal customers for their products or services. The answer to this question lies in making your customer avatar. Now you must be wondering what is a customer avatar? So let us discuss this first.

What is Customer Avatar?

A customer avatar is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. In other words, Customer avatar is about knowing in-depth about your ideal customer like what he likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests, etc and then creating its profile based on the above knowledge.

Creating your customer avatar helps you understand your ideal customer so that you as a marketer can create better solutions for that person.

Importance of Customer Avatar

Now, the next question that must be wondering in your mind is what is the need of customer avatar or why to build a customer avatar?

So let us try and answer this query. Customer avatar helps you know your customers better. Thus helping in understanding what will be the ideal product according to your needs and help you save a lot of time and money by targeting them with the right product. Let me explain with this an example.

Suppose you are trying to sell a mobile phone of 25K to your customers but the target audience that you are targeting is having an average monthly salary of 15K a month. So they don’t have a purchasing power to buy such an expensive phone. So what is the fun of targeting such an audience with your ads and content as it will never be able to convert no matter how good the strategy is?

Here Customer avatar comes into play. It helps you understand your ideal customer better. So you don’t make such mistakes again and spent your time and money on converting the right customer.

Now that you have understood what is customer avatar and importance. So let’s go to the next important question that must be wondering about i.e. How to create a Customer avatar?

How to Create a Customer Avatar?

To come up with a customer avatar, here are the five easy steps you need to follow :

1. Find a Customer avatar template :

A Customer Avatar Template is a document with blank spaces for you to fill in the defining characteristics of your ideal client. These templates are very useful, and I recommend you try a few different ones. You might end up like one, but then find that another has better questions or a better layout.

Here are three places to find Customer Avatar Templates:
http://www.digitalmarketer.com/customer-avatar-worksheet/
https://offers.hubspot.com/persona-templates
https://learn.infusionsoft.com/customer-service/customer-experience/how-to-create-your-customer-avatar

2. Prepare your Questions :

Once you get your template ready, write down the question you would like to ask from your ideal customers. Keep in mind what kind of information you want to know about your ideal customer like their preferences, likes, dislikes, income, age, etc.

I would suggest you make a list of questions and then review it as you will find a lot of redundant questions. So remove them and ask only relevant questions. Something clear. Something definitive. That’s what you’re looking for with these questions, which are tiny little characteristics that define this type of person.

This may take time, but it is one of the most important steps in this process.

3. Answer the Questions :

Now that you have made a list of questions that you want to ask your ideal customer.

Think about your best customers. Why they came to you? What was the problem statement you were able to solve for them? Think of their characteristics and which type would you fit them in. Don’t define these people in your work, define the group to which these people belong.

4. Review it with your friends and analyze:

Now that your Customer avatar is ready, review it with your friends and colleagues. You will see some contrast replies and viewpoints. You will think about why I never came up with that point?

Feedback is just as important as the work itself and being open to feedback will help you grow your business better in a long way.

Also, don’t forget to revise your customer avatar regularly as your business will evolve over time so will your ideal customers.

I recently made a Customer avatar for my e-learning platform.

Here is my ideal customer looks like.

My Customer Avatar

My customer avatar is a guy in an age group of 18 to 24 and has completed it's postgraduate and currently working and has a CTC of 1 to 2 lakh. He is looking for a career change and improving his current skill sets. He is comfortable with online learning as a tool to enhance his skills. His biggest challenge he faces while studying online is long and boring lectures and prefers English as a mode of language for online lectures. His favorite platform for pursuing an online education is Youtube as he prefers free platform over paid ones.

Conclusion:

I hope you would have been able to understand what is Customer avatar and also how to build one. So make sure while you design a marketing campaign, your first step should be to create a customer avatar.