One of the top ways to succeed in the online world is to identify your ideal customer avatar.
Trying to sell to everyone is a surefire way to experience significant setbacks.
Figuring out who your perfect customer or client is isn’t as bad as it may seem.
Once you identify your ideal customer avatar and develop a story around who this individual is, you will know exactly how and where to market yourself.
Steps to Identify Your Ideal Customer Avatar:
Below there are some steps to finding your ideal customers’ avatars and they are impacting In the present time.
1- Demographics and Why They Matter:
Knowing your customer’s demographics can significantly impact your marketing efforts.
Customer demographics include age, gender, race, income, education, employment status, location, children, and homeownership.
When trying to find the demographics for a specific audience, you can use multiple resources such as:
Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Includes demographic categories like age, gender, ethnic origin, and race.
Tax Records:
You can access tax records by searching for the term “tax assessor’s office” in the county you need to research.
Obtaining this data is like gold regarding tax exemptions, mortgage information, and residency length.
Social Security Fact Sheet:
This is where you can access high-level data regarding individuals in various demographic categories.
Census Bureau Data:
A free website with a wealth of demographic information.
You may be wondering why consumer demographics even matter with an online business.
Before the Internet and social media, marketers targeted specific geographical areas and sent flyers based on the demographics they knew.
For example, many target particular subdivisions or find a registered small business to sell business services.
Today is different:
It’s different because while demographic tools are still within reach, there is more potential – especially when you add interests and behaviors to the demographic profile.
For example, once you have your demographics, you can go on Facebook and create an ad.
While creating your ad, you can target your audience – including various interests and behaviors to focus on your ideal customer base.
With Facebook, multiple options exist, including gender, age, location, interests, and much more.
For example, if you sell supplements, you can target people with specific interests in your product and identify those interested in health and wellness.
2- Give Your Avatar a Name and Personalize Him/Her:
To bring this concept home, you can grab an actual human avatar online or even build one yourself, humanizing your ideal customer so you have someone in mind when creating your messaging.
Just search “marketing avatar builders” on Google. Give your avatar a name.
Make it as realistic as possible and even “become” your avatar as you go through the process.
Think about what the avatar might feel, their fears, dreams, goals, and aspirations; what keeps them up at night, and why your product or service can improve their lives.
When creating your avatar, consider the following questions:
- How old is your avatar?
- Male or female?
- How many children, if any?
- Marital status?
- Career or employment status?
- Working environment?
- What’s their community atmosphere?
- Do they belong to any clubs or organizations?
- Do they have pets (if relevant to the product)?
- How does he/she spend their time?
- Are they into healthy eating? Overeating? What other lifestyle factors?
- Any pain points, anxiety, or fears?
What to Do With Your Avatar Characteristics:
Now that you have identified your avatar, you can develop key marketing messages that show how your product or service can help improve aspects of their life.
Does your offer save your avatar time?
Does the product or service help your avatar improve their mindset?
Perhaps your offer helps your avatar lead a healthier life or improves their financial outlook.
Overall Conclusion:
Once you have all of your avatar information, you can create impactful marketing messages and high-performing paid social media marketing campaigns and build your business around a targeted audience.
With that supplement example in mind again, if it was meant to give individuals more energy – you could target both genders between a specific age range (maybe 21-40 or something similar) and even working moms.
You can keep thinking even more outside the box and position your marketing to attract the right audience.
Having a customer avatar can make or break your marketing efforts.
Contact us today if you need help with your avatar or other marketing-related questions!
