Your marketing strategy is not complete without the development of a customer avatar. Knowing who an ideal member of your audience might be, as well as where to reach him or her and with what messaging, is incredibly important to know.
Why? It helps to ensure that your marketing dollars are spent wisely. It also helps to ensure that you are reaching the right people in the right places with the right messaging.
Beginning the development of your marketing strategy by completing an exercise to create your customer avatar, will go a long way in helping your marketing efforts to be effective.
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Here’s what you need to know about walking through the process of developing a customer avatar.
What Is A Customer Avatar?
Basically, a customer avatar is a fictional character that is created as a way to illustrate and describe what a member of your target audience might look like.
Give your customer avatar a name. List his or her likes, dislikes, preferences, family circumstances, life situation, career or job, etc.
The Importance of Developing Your Customer Avatar
The customer avatar is a way to begin to visualize who a typical member of your ideal audience may be. This is important so that when a marketing strategy is created, you can ensure that your messaging is something that will resonate with your target audience.
Among the benefits of developing a customer avatar are:
- determining where and how to reach your ideal customer
- to give you a concrete example of the person you are trying to reach
- customizing a description of your ideal customer’s preferences so that you know if your efforts will be effective in reaching them
- keeping your marketing strategy focused and realistic
- personalizing your marketing efforts
- helping you tailor your marketing messaging for the best possible results
How To Develop A Customer Avatar
Developing a customer avatar begins with putting forth a series of questions to answer to help you come up with a description of a typical member of your target audience.
It also helps you to put a face with your audience; to help you realize the real, not imagined, people that you are trying to reach with your product, service or message.
Reaching real people with real solutions to their real problems is what marketing sets out to do. Starting with creating a description will get you on the path to reaching people to whom your business matters.
As an exercise to help you get started, here are some questions to ask or things to list:
- Is your ideal customer male or female?
- What is their age?
- What is their ethnicity?
- What is their marital status?
- Do they have children?
- What is their household income?
- What social media platforms are they on and when?
- Where do they work?
- Where do they shop?
- What do they watch, read or listen to?
- What do they do in their free time?
- What is the condition of their health?
- What is their degree of education?
- What problems are they trying to solve in their life?
Lastly, give your avatar a name to make this personal. You can even put a face to your customer avatar when complete.
How A Customer Avatar Impacts Your Marketing Efforts
Marketing is and should be strategic. It is a well planned out, well thought out strategy to drive certain desired results. Taking the time to develop your customer avatar will be a great first step towards effective marketing for your business.
Ready to get started? Contact us to schedule a free strategy session today.
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