Introduction:

If you are a business owner or a marketing professional, then you already know that the very base for your marketing efforts is to define your customer avatar.

Most businesses feel that they have a detailed customer avatar defined, but in reality most businesses have just a basic demographic understanding of their customer.

If you ask who their audience is, most businesses would reply with just the age and gender of their audience. They don't have any other information about their audience.

With that said, here's how to craft a perfect customer avatar! 👊

1. Why do you need a detailed customer avatar ?

The main aim of the customer avatar is to narrow down the entire universe of audience to a specific set, who are most likely to benefit from our offer and pay the right price for it. Now you would understand when we say that only demographic definition is not the best way to go ahead. The more layers you have to your customer avatar, the better your marketing efforts would be, thus getting you great returns on your marketing spends.

A well defined customer avatar helps you with the following

• Prevent from reaching out to everyone and channel resources specifically

• Know what content will resonate with your audience

• Write well defined communication message

• Know whom to target when running ads

So if it can help your business with the above tasks, then why is it not given necessary importance ?

The answer to this lies in the fact that to define your customer audience in detail requires time and a lot of careful thought, followed by in-depth research.

2. Demographic Definition

This is indeed the most basic layer of your customer avatar definition. Most businesses have part of these, already defined. This sets the stage for narrowing the entire universe to a certain extent. The different elements of the demographic definition are as follows:

• Gender

• Age

• Marital Status

• Location

• Job description

• Language

• Education

• Annual Income

• Political Affiliation

You may not define all the elements for your business, but just define those that are relevant to your business.

3. User Personality

The next layer is to understand your users personality in detail. To do this you begin with understanding the likes and dislikes of your dream audience. When doing this, you don't restrict to just the problem your offer solves but you try to understand from a broader perspective. Further to that you try and understand their challenges owing to which they are turning to your solution. And also understand their pain points in detail. When doing this you'll have to note down all of this in their own words - meaning you capture the exact vocabulary they are using.

4. User Awareness

The above couple of layers form the core or base of your customer avatar definition. But you don't stop there. You go ahead and add the next layer, which is the user awareness layer. In this layer you understand in what stage of awareness your user is in. This helps you in finetuning your messaging and choosing the right vocabulary for your messages.

5. Competitor Analysis

The next layer is the competitor analysis. Understanding your competitor is a key step as this helps in multiple ways. It helps to validate your offer as well as set as a benchmark for your offer. Understand what the competitor is doing and also how your audience is perceiving your competitor's products.

6. Audience Perception

The next layer is to understand your audience's perception of your product. You need to understand how they are viewing your product and what they are thinking of your product. This is critical as this plays a huge role in how you are targeting your audience as well as how you are messaging.

7. How to research information for your customer avatar ?

The easiest way to research for your customer avatar is to go to where your audience is hanging out. The best place is Facebook groups. Find groups where your audience is hanging out and join them. You'll find that they are talking about the different elements of your customer avatar in the group. The next best thing is to ask open ended questions if you already have a captive audience following you on your social profiles.

8. Conclusion

Though seemingly simple, defining your customer avatar in a much more deeper manner helps you to finetune your marketing efforts as you know who you are going after. Also your conversions are much better as you are messaging to the right set of people and talking to them in a language they understand.