What is an Avatar?
AVATAR IS A COMPUTING TERM MEANING “AN ICON OR FIGURE REPRESENTING A PARTICULAR PERSON IN VIDEO GAMES, INTERNET FORUMS, ETC.” -GOOGLE DICTIONARY
In our context, where we’re talking about an avatar to represent your ideal customer. The representation we make goes deeper than the flat iconic picture in an internet forum, and is more like the avatars in video games: it has a background story, strengths and weaknesses, things that power it up and things that drain it. It has goals, and takes a journey.
With avatars, we focus on your ideal customer, because even your less-than ideal customers will all have something in common with your ideal customer. If you tailor content to this “ideal customer” all your customers will find some, most, or all of it relevant.
Why is an Ideal Customer Avatar Useful?
Your customers have characteristics. They be a certain age, income bracket, gender, career stage, they may be homeowners, or live in the same geography. If you’re advertising to your customer, writing blogs for them, tweeting to them, you’ll need to know these things.
For instance: your business is roofing, specifically you re-roof homes. You can talk to your audience about roofs all day long, but you’ll get boring fast, and sound a bit self-centered. If your customer base is almost completely parents of children ages 8-12 in a specific grouping of cities, would it make sense to post about happenings in that school district? Would your potential customers find you interesting? They would. They might feel like they have things in common with you, or that you’re interested in their needs.
Once you define your ideal customer, you can expand by creating avatars for other categories of customer that you have. Then speak directly to each of those audiences. Say, your travel company’s customer base is split between retirees and students taking a leap year. You can start targeting each of them with more relevant content after creating detailed avatars of each.
How Do You Make a Customer Avatar?
Creating the avatar involves getting into the head of your customer. What is their life like? How do they feel? Why? Where are they in their career? Look into a few different tools or exercises for avatar making, and take the advice that fits the way you work.
“A CUSTOMER AVATAR IS THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE OF MARKETING” – DIGITALMARKETER.COM
There are lots of tools available to make customer avatars, like this explanation of the process: How to Create Your Customer Avatar. Also this great article about defining your avatar well: Defining Customer Avatars. And these customer avatar worksheets (links at the end of the article).
There’s no one right way to do it, as long as you get a clear picture of who your customer is, including outside of their need for your goods or services. Once you’re done, use this knowledge to improve all your marketing, content, and communications.
If you need help reaching your customer, contact D-Kode Tech today.
