If everyone is your audience, no one is your audience. I recently learned this from DigitalDeepak.
If you are running a business or blog, you must define your customer avatar. It helps you understand your target audience and you can create your content or marketing strategy based on that.
I have seen many businesses don’t create a customer avatar. However, successful businesses are doing their activities based on what their customer needs but creating actual customer avatar will give you the edge over the competition.
What is a customer avatar?
Customer avatar a.k.a buyer’s persona is nothing but a perfect person who represents your ideal customer.
To create a customer avatar, you need to ask your customers about their demographics and psychographic. Demographic questions include name, email, age, birthday, etc. Psychographic questions include goals, interests, opinions, challenges, etc.
Why customer avatar is important?
- You get to know who you are marketing to.
- You can create content for your right customer.
- You won’t sell your product to the wrong people and avoid getting complaints.
- You can create better offers specific to their needs.
- You can do email marketing, social media marketing based on their needs.
- You can even define your product features according to your audience.
- Overall, you’ll see the high conversion from your marketing activities.
Customer avatar questions
The first task is to create a list of questions that you need to ask your customers or subscribers. As I mentioned earlier in this post, you need to ask demographic and psychographic questions.
Industry-wise or product-wise these questions might be different. You need to come up with the questions which are important for your business need.
To help you with the list of questions, I’ve compiled the list of questions for my ideal customer profile. This will help you get started.
- What is your name?
- What is your age?
- What is your gender?
- Where do you live?
- What is your annual income?
- What is your highest level of education?
- What is your marital status?
- What is your industry?
- What is your job title?
- What is the size of your company?
- What is your annual income?
- What are your goals or objectives?
- What are your biggest challenges?
- Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
- What social media sites do you use?
- What sites do you usually shop on?
How to create a customer avatar?
You can create a customer avatar by surveying your existing customers. If you are new and don’t have existing customers, you can survey your subscribers.
You can even create it by answering all the questions by yourself. Imagine your ideal customer and answer the list of questions.
Let’s go step by step:
Step1: Customer/subscribers survey
Prepare a list of questions. Create a google form or use any other utility like Typeform to create a survey. Send out an email to your customers or subscribers.
However, don’t rely completely on email. If you are in touch with your customers. Find out by talking to your customers over 10-15 minutes call.
Here’s my survey form
Step 2: Online Research
You may have many responses from the earlier step. You can research about your customer or subscribers online to find out the profile which matches the highest percentage.
LinkedIn and Facebook are ideal platforms to get to know about your ideal customer’s profile. If you have customers already, it would be easier for you to do this research. And if you don’t have customers, you can imagine ideal customer profiles and research.
As you do research, document everything.
Step 3: Finalizing your customer avatar
Now that you’ve gathered all the information, you are now ready to finalize your customer avatar.
From an online survey, see what is the highest number of the respondent are responding. For example, check-in which age group you have the highest responses.
Based on this, Start writing down the average profile of your customer.
Customer avatar examples
Based on the above steps, I come up with my customer avatar. I’ve included it in the example below. I would recommend naming your avatar. Name must be specific which helps you identify what is it for? For example, I named it as “SEO SAM”.
My customer avatar
I am creating my customer avatar based on subscribers as I don’t have any product to sell at this moment. This will help me understand what kind of content I should be creating rather than generalizing the content on my blog.
Based on the subscriber’s survey and a few other audiences from the Facebook group, I have created my customer avatar.
My agenda is to sell SEO courses in the future so accordingly, I prepared my questions and created this customer avatar(buyer’s persona).
Find out more example in Hubspot blog post.
Create your own buyer’s persona using Hubspot’s tool.
Conclusion
That’s it.
I have shown you what is customer avatar and how to create one for your business or blog. I have also shared an example link along with my own persona which I created based on my ideal future customer.
Remember to keep your survey targeted to your customers. Don’t try to copy others. You may get it few things wrong first time but you can always take help from mentors or repeat the process after a few months.
Don’t worry if you are not getting enough survey responses. You can give a small incentive to your audience which motivates them to fill your survey.
Now it’s your turn. Go ahead and create a customer avatar for your business. Be very clear on whom you are targeting and accordingly plan your marketing strategy.
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Leave a comment if you have any other suggestions while creating a customer avatar.