What is Customer Avatar and why is it needed?

Imagine.

You need to get some information on health supplements.

Scenario 1 –

You drop a message on your friends group on WhatsApp. What do you get? Some emojis. Some anecdotal responses. And, if you are lucky, the information you were looking for.

Scenario 2 –

You drop the same message to a friend or group of friends who are all into health and fitness. Voila, you will get not one but several relevant bits of information back!

What happened here? 

When you try to connect with everybody in ‘general’ you don’t get to speak to anyone BUT if you connect with someone ‘specific’ then you get to speak to many relevant people especially in today’s world of digital marketing where reaching out to the masses is easy!

The same goes for connecting with customers. If you can identify common needs and pains, you can identify a typical profile of people you are trying to address.

This profile of people with whom you can establish a connection is a Customer Avatar or Persona.

When you create a customer avatar, you prepare a list of common attributes based on demographics & psychographics and hence a profile of a typical person who most likely has a need for your services or product.

Another way to look at this is, basis the most prominent avatar’s that you discover, you can fine-tune or customize your product or offerings.

Creating a customer avatar helps you to focus on the right set of people to whom you can market successfully and increase your penetration rate.

For example, 

A professional with 8-10 years of work experience, married to a  working spouse with 1-2 small children, living in rented accommodation, with no housing loans would be a typical avatar for affordable luxury apartments coming up in the area he/she has their office/ residence. 

An avatar is that imaginary person whom you would keep in mind when you market your product!

 

How to build a Customer Avatar?

Now that we know what a Customer Avatar is, let me share the process of creating one. Still better, I shall illustrate this with a live example as we go.

 

Step 1: Define attributes of  your Avatar 

You need to create a comprehensive profile of your avatar so you know what makes them tick. Knowing the following attributes would help you design powerful and customized communication, a marketing pitch, and more importantly the right product! 

Checklist of attributes –

Demographics – 

• Personal – information like name, contact, age, gender,  marital /relations, location, etc.
• Professional – education, Job role, Career aspirations, Goals, income, challenges, etc

Psychographics – 

Hobbies, interests, life aspirations, social media behavior, internet/ media habits, personal values  & attributes, buying habits & patterns, etc. 

Live Example 

I wanted to create customer Avatar(s) of readers/followers for this new Blog that I am launching. That would map the right profile of people and the blogs that would interest them.

 

Step 2: Collect data for your Avatar

Once you have identified the key attributes, the next step is to collect data to substantiate your hypothesis that the attributes you have identified for an ideal customer avatar are actually so.

Where do I collect data?

You can collect data from your own systems and sources like –

1. Website & email  analytics
2. Profile of your past or repeat clients
3. Various social media sites where people raise queries or provide comments
4. Various keyword & competition research sites and tools to identify needs

If you do not have the above data or you want to further substantiate –

1. Prepare a survey based on the attributes identified in step 1 and use an online survey tool. The challenge here would be to get the right sample, so you may leverage your social and email connections.
2. Follow up with a one-on-one call with few respondents to the survey to get in-depth clarity on the actual problems and issues.

Live Example

As my blog is new, I launched a survey on google forms (click here). I designed the survey based on the attributes mentioned in Step 1. I followed up with a call to 3 people to further understand their challenges, goals, and expectations.

 

Step 3: Create the Customer Avatar

Basis step 2 you are ready to identify what are the critical attributes that will drive the right customer behavior. 

Refer to the example above. Now,  you know the ideal age-group, kind of job role, family status, etc that would drive the customer to buy your product or services. 

You may find that there are more than one customer avatar’s that address the same need or solution. Again, for the above example on real- state, there could be another avatar of 35-45 years middle management level individual, with all loans paid up, is a potential buyer for a 2nd apartment.

Step 4: How to use the Customer Avatar

Once you have built the customer avatar, you can focus on those profiles of people and your product/ offering should be designed to solve for their pains and requirements.

 Live Example

• Points 1 to 7 Points help me understand their background and expected level of content (basis their age and experience)
•  8 to 11 give me an opportunity to better understand what topics should I be writing on, problems those articles should help address and preferable mode of communication

 

Some pointers on effective deployment of the avatar

• Make the Avatar(s) Real-life i.e. print it out on a card and give it face (from the stock images or avatar images) and a name too! 
• An avatar with a face and name would help you create a powerful mental conversation and therefore the customer would immediately relate to the message.
• One-on-one communication helps build trust and rapport
• Be authentic in your communication
• Simple and effective communication with good content keeps the client interest right from the Headline to the last line. Remember, the chain is as strong as the weakest link and the same goes for the weakest line in the message.
• You should prefer email or personalized messages as compared to social media posts as that gives the customer a sense of one-on-one connection.

Needless to say, refining the customer avatar is a continuous process so basis your penetration rate, ROI, etc. you should revisit the customer avatar and fine-tune the same.

Some takeaway thoughts. A better marketer is –

• A person who can connect well with people
• People with good life experiences
• Someone who keeps learning has active hobbies, travels a lot, etc.

 

I hope you find this article useful.  I would appreciate if you could take out a few moments to provide your comments/ suggestions.