Customer service has set businesses apart since the beginning of time. Businesses that know what the market wants are better equipped to meet that need and gain more customers.
This is where a customer avatar comes in. With a well-built customer avatar, you can target your ideal customers more effectively, win more sales, and scale your business.
The good news is, creating a customer avatar is fairly simple, especially when you have a free customer avatar template like the one we created for you below. All it takes is answering a few questions, analyzing some data, and doing a bit of market research.
The work you put in today to create a customer avatar will pay dividends down the line, helping you win new customers and retain existing ones.
What is a Customer Avatar?
A customer avatar can also be called a buyer persona, target audience, or ideal customer.
Whatever you call it, it’s a fictional mock-up of the person you want your business to reach. While fictional, your customer avatar should be a realistic representation of the person who would actually purchase your product or service.
This is the person who will use the product or service and promote it to their circle of friends and family.
Naturally, your business may offer products or services that cater to a variety of buyer personas. If so, it’s a good idea to create multiple customer avatars to represent different segments of your market. For instance, you might create software that caters to both big corporations and small businesses. Or, you may sell supplements that serve both high-performance athletes and average people who want to live a healthy lifestyle.
When you get to the customer avatar worksheet below, fill it out for a core segment of your target market, and then create additional customer avatars for other market segments you already serve or want to reach.
Why Create a Customer Avatar
Customer avatars are often used throughout the marketing and sales process to create more relatable content and accurate messaging. As any good salesperson knows, it’s critical to understand who you’re talking to when you’re selling something. When you understand the customer’s pain points and aspirations, you can tailor the message to the features they will find most beneficial.
Say you’re trying to sell a home. If the potential buyer has a family with young kids, you might emphasize the bonus room as a great playroom or game room and the pool as a great place for kids to play outside in the summer. But if you’re selling the home to a bachelor, the bonus room might instead make a great theater or home office, and the pool may be a perfect place to entertain.
Do you see why knowing your customer is integral to your success?
When you follow a customer avatar template, as you will below, you will really get to know your target audience. You’ll explore their interests and goals, their pain points, and how your business solves their problems.
This will not only help you communicate more easily with your target market but also with your internal and external teams. Once you map out your customer avatar, you can share it with other people at your company, as well as contractors, investors, and any external agencies you work with. This will ensure everyone is on the same page and enable you to collaborate seamlessly.
Creating an ideal customer avatar is a critical step in your branding process, and it’s one of the first ones you should take.
When done right, a well-thought-out customer avatar and brand can help you experience more success and eventually scale your business more seamlessly.
4 Key Things Every Good Customer Avatar Needs
As you begin to think about who makes up your target market, there are a few defining attributes it’s important not to miss. Every good customer avatar should include the following things: demographics, interests, challenges, and aspirations.
1. Key Demographics
The key demographics of your customer avatar include things like age, gender, marital status, job title, salary, and location.
You can find this data in the analytics portion of your social media accounts, on Google Analytics, or by analyzing information your existing customers have already given you, i.e. by making a purchase or filling out a form or survey.
Remember, this is a fictional persona, but it should still be based on the real demographic information of your existing customers.
If you’re just starting out and you don’t have hard data to reflect your customers or your followers on social media, use your imagination to envision who needs your product or service.
How old are they? Where do they live? What do they do for work? Do they have a family?
You can always tweak your avatar or create a new customer avatar down the line when you have real data.
2. Behaviors & Interests
It’s also important to know what your ideal customer is like. What are they interested in? What do they like to do for fun? How do they spend their weekends? What are some personality traits that set them apart?
For instance, are they type A? Are they extremely academic and logical? Or are they free-spirited and emotional? Do they thrive in social settings, or are they more introverted? Do they want to travel the world, or do they prefer their hometown?
Outlining behaviors and interests will help you create a detailed customer avatar. This, in turn, will help you really understand your target market, know how to relate to them, and be able to better pitch your products and services to them.
It can also help you realize what other products or services your customers might use. Those brands may become a source of inspiration or even collaboration in the future.
3. Pain Points & Challenges
A great business provides a solution to a problem. And a great marketing team knows how to help people realize their need for such a solution. So, why will your ideal customer purchase your product or service? What problem are you solving for them?
These are important questions to consider when creating your own customer avatar. You need to be aware of the challenges your target market is facing and how your product or service helps relieve those pain points.
When you know what your customer persona needs, you can communicate your solution to those needs more clearly and develop a more effective marketing strategy.
4. Goals & Aspirations
The goals and aspirations of your customer avatar include what they hope to achieve. This could be what they want to achieve personally, professionally, or for their business.
Consider the aspect of their life you aim to affect. How does your product or service help them achieve their goals in that area?
In other words, what are they hoping to gain by coming to you? How do they want to feel after using your product or service? Asking these questions will help you discover your customer avatar’s goals and aspirations.
How To Create A Customer Marketing Avatar Using a Template
Now that you know why you need a buyer persona and what key elements to include, you can start to create your own customer avatar. Use this marketing avatar template and follow the following five steps to complete the buyer persona for your brand.
1. Do Your Research
Before you start penciling in your avatar, you’ll need to do a little research.
Dive into your customer analytics to find the information you’ll need to draft your customer avatar.
You might find this on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Google Analytics, or your email marketing software. You might also have collected valuable data through surveys, subscription forms, or accounts on your site.
Any information that helps you get to know your customers better is useful when creating your buyer persona.
2. Define Your Avatar
Armed with your research, you can now start filling out your customer avatar template. Start with the basic information: Name, age, gender, occupation, income level, marital status, number of kids, education level, salary range, location, or general area where they live.
All of these little facts will help piece together a very real representation of your ideal customer. To tie it all together, add a photo to the top of your customer avatar worksheet. This visual image will help you begin to think of your customer avatar as a real person.
3. Explore Interests + Behaviors
Next, move on to the section for interests and behaviors.
Fill in this section with what your perfect customer likes to do and how they spend their time– i.e., certain hobbies, passions, priorities, etc.
You can use a bulleted list or write it out in paragraph form — it’s up to you.
4. List Key Challenges
Next, consider the challenges your ideal customer is facing would face in real life. Try to be as specific as possible.
For instance, if your business rents a photo booth and your ideal customer is an event planner, her key challenges might include:
- Struggling to find a way to entertain guests throughout the course of her events that is both memorable and timeless.
- Needing an affordable activity that is fun and engaging.
Or, perhaps you’re a digital marketing agency and your customer struggles to find enough hours in their busy schedule to dedicate time to digital marketing strategy.
If you’re having trouble coming up with your customer avatar’s pain points, revisit the solution your product or service provides. You can also refer to customer testimonials or reviews, or reach out to your existing customers asking for testimonials about how your business helped them.
5. Fill Out Goals
Finally, fill out the section for “Goals & Aspirations.”
Here, highlight the end state your customers hope to achieve. What is it that they want to walk away with after using your product or service? How will they feel once they have addressed their challenges?
If we go back to our example of a photo booth business, the event planner wants to feel like she planned a successful event that represented her business well and where guests thoroughly enjoyed themselves, so much so that they couldn’t stop sharing photos from the night.
How To Use Your Customer Marketing Avatar
Now that you have done the work to create your ideal customer avatar, it’s time to put it to use!
Here are some ways you can start using your avatar or multiple avatars to benefit your business.
Build Your Brand Identity
If you haven’t yet, now is a good time to solidify your brand identity.
Your brand identity allows your customers to relate to your business and the products or services you offer, which, in turn, enables them to remember you and develop loyalty to your brand.
Your customer avatar will help you reach your target audience, but your brand identity will help you attain and retain their business; it’s at the core of all successful businesses.
Create Great Copy
Copy is a critical component of successfully marketing to your target audience. Your customers are real people with real ambitions and challenges, so you need to be talking to them like they are.
Now that you have developed a better understanding of who your customer is, you can more effectively market to them with great copy that resonates with their unique pain points and aspirations. Use these aspects of your avatars when creating content to ensure your messaging strikes the right tone.
Communicate Your Brand
While you need to be able to communicate your brand to your audience, it’s also important that you can communicate it to your employees and partners.
Once you have a clear picture of your avatar, you can distribute it across company teams. This will help you develop a consistent voice and message across all branches of your business.
Run Ads
Running ads on social media requires you to target a specific audience, something that can be difficult and yield poor results before you know who your audience is. With an avatar, or multiple avatars representing multiple market segments, you can run more successful ads.
To do so, use your avatars to not only craft your audience but also to help direct the imagery and copy you choose for the ads. Then, test your ads on various ad platforms to learn what resonates.
Expand Your Reach
Ultimately, this simple customer avatar template can help you reach more customers and grow your business. But creating a customer avatar is just the first step. If you need help implementing a successful marketing strategy that puts your avatar to use, we can help.
We can even assist you in creating your customer avatar from the start. Sign up for a free digital marketing audit and one of our digital marketing experts will highlight what your business needs to help you reach the right customers and experience even more success.