One question most business owners fail to answer is, “Who is your ideal customer?” A majority of marketing-savvy businesses don’t give serious consideration to this question and hardly know how to answer it. So, here’s the real problem: without knowing who your ideal customer is, how can you market a product or service successfully?
What Is a Customer Avatar?
Also referred to as a buying persona, customer avatars are basically profiles that describe a business’s perfect customer. Determining your ideal customer avatar involves understanding who they are and what their interests, habits, aspirations, challenges are like. By having a better understanding of these traits, you will find it easier to formulate an effective marketing strategy.
Customer avatars are every successful marketers’ trump card and they don’t necessarily describe an existing person. However, by describing them, you can really understand things like their aspirations, objection to purchasing, source of information, etc. By having access to this information, you will have a better idea of how they think and perceive marketing messages.
What If Your Business Sells to Everyone?
If you cater to the mass market, you might think you don’t need to create a customer avatar. But if you don’t know who you’re communicating with, it can be very difficult to implement an effective marketing campaign. This is why so many marketers end up using a ‘scattergun’ marketing strategy in hopes of making random conversions.
Instead, it is highly recommended that you identify your ideal customers’ buyers’ journey. For some brands, this could entail drawing up multiple buyer personas, and a great place to start would be to identify existing clients or customers.
Are you still wondering why drawing up an ideal customer profile is worth your time and resources? Well, we’ve compiled a few reasons that will help you change your mind:
Why Do You Need An Ideal Customer Avatar?
1. You Can’t Focus On E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E
Most businesses owners argue that they haven’t created a customer avatar because they don’t want to miss out on sales by targeting just one market segment. However, what they don’t realize is that no business has the capacity to work with every customer unless their brand is already a huge success.
By focusing on a specific type of customer, you will not only be able to make marketing efforts more efficient but will also be able to handle inquiries more effectively. Remember, it isn’t necessary for you to create just one avatar. You can create several – which, by the way, is a lot more efficient than focusing on the entire consumer market.
2. You Will Choose Target Market Before Media
One of the fundamental principles of marketing is that businesses should focus on their target market before determining media and message. Unfortunately, in today’s world, it is easier for marketers to focus on media before even considering their target audience. A prime example of this is when businesses advertise their products and services on Facebook or other social media. But what if a particular social media platform isn’t suitable for your business?
Again, if you don’t know who you are targeting, you wouldn’t know what their social media interests are. As a result, you will end up focusing on the wrong area.
3. You Will Know Exactly What to Say
You should know exactly what to say to convert consumers into taking a particular action. If no one seems to be subscribing to your newsletter or purchasing your products, then what’s the point? How is your business relevant to your target audience?
A customer avatar helps solve this problem by helping businesses understand who they are speaking to so that they may motivate them to take necessary action.
4. You’ll Save a Lot of Money
Whether your business is operating on a tight budget or not, every business needs to be efficient in its budgeting. Wasting valuable resources on ineffective marketing campaigns is a route to ruin.
The great thing about customer avatars is that they make sure you are spending money on very effective campaigns and are making the best of your marketing efforts. If you’re wasting thousands of dollars on an email marketing campaign, your customer avatar can help determine whether your target audience responds to them extensively.
5. You’ll Save Time
Most successful businesses value time as a resource, and developing marketing campaigns takes a lot of time. An ideal customer avatar helps save time by guiding struggling marketers into crafting the perfect message that focuses on all the right areas. You can think of customer avatars as the marketing variant of a north-star.
6. They’re Pretty Easy to Design
Some businesses avoid going through the process of designing a customer profile because they find it difficult to do. All you need to do is learn how to break a customer avatar into specific categories and you will find it easier to focus on a specific consumer profile.
Don’t let your lack of experience with customer avatars hold you back. To learn more about how to design the ideal customer avatars, we recommend reading our guide ‘The Secret to Converting More Prospects into Customers’.
Final Thoughts
You can’t sell your products and services to everyone; it just doesn’t work that way. By drawing up an ideal customer avatar, you will be able to target your customers more efficiently instead of addressing anyone that stumbles upon your marketing messages.
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Article by Keystone Ad Agency
I write on various topics, ranging from social to financial, technological to fiction and much more. I have an experience of 5 years into the field of writing.
