How Customer Avatars Help Your Business

In any form of marketing, finding your target demographic is key because they are the people you are speaking to in your marketing campaigns. After actively designing, delivering and developing websites for SMEs and local small businesses since 2011, our team at WebWorksWell know how important it is to find your ideal client. We  also hope that by writing this blog, we are able to provide you with some ideas on how customer avatars can help bring your business success. 

Defining Your Customer Avatar:

It is important to define your target audience because by doing so your message is more precise. The more specific you are, the greater the rapport you can build with the customer as they will feel like they are the one being addressed in your marketing. If you are a SME, local small business or entrepreneur then you are likely looking to target a wider audience. However, as your business develops you can have greater control over the clients you take in therefore, in time you can narrow down your audience and create a far more specific customer avatar to more accurately reflect your target audience.

Aspects of your customer to consider:

Customer avatars should include certain areas that help a business to identify certain attributes that they are looking for in a client. These could be mandatory for example, if your business is targeting SMEs, you are targeting a client with a smaller yearly income. If you were to target a substantial, high profit organisation like Coca Cola, you would no longer be fulfilling your desire to target SMEs. On the other hand, others may help your business to identify clients who you believe would be easier to work with than others, and thus you would be more inclined to work with them, which could save you time in the future where you may have had to deal with a difficult customer. For instance, if your business is selling their digital marketing services to a company who want to set up an e-commerce site for sports equipment, it will help when you find out that your clients are interested in football and play it once a week. This implies that they will not mind working with you as they are enthusiastic about the topic.

Geographic: divides based on location e.g. you could advertise to the whole of the East of England but if your business is looking to target local consumers and you’re based in Norwich then you can.

Demographic: divides population based in variables such as age, occupation, educational background, income, gender and family size.

Age

Generation

Relationship Status

Average Family Size

Hometype

Education

Work

Income

Psychographic: segment based on lifestyle, interests and activities. This takes into account aspects of consumer buying behaviour.

-Entertainment

-Family & Relationships

-Hobbies

-Sports

-Food and drink

-Business and Industry

Behaviour: divides the population based on behaviour, decision making patterns and usage.

-Financial

-Spending

-Buyer Behaviour (what they purchase)

-Travel

-Charitable Donations

-Digital Activities

This all plays an important role in any marketing campaign, examples include the following:

Copywriting: how do you convey the product, service or brand?

Email Writing: who you are targeting? What are you discussing (relevance to audience).

Marketing: What are you doing in order to attract and generate sales/leads>

Product Creation: Identify the problems your avatar is facing and how you can solve them.

Paid Traffic: Where is your avatar spending their time online- i.e. Which social media platform? Which ad platforms should you buy traffic from and which targeting options should you be using?

How An Avatar Can Change Over Time:

Things are changing constantly in life and whether it is the political climate to the latest social media trends, change can affect your products/services, how you market them and who you are marketing them to. For example, recently the animated motion picture Incredibles 2 came out, which is a sequel to the original that was released in 2004, 14 years ago. Pixar thus had 2 marketing campaigns; one campaign was to market to their demographic who grew up and watched the original when they were younger, while the other was about re-introducing these characters to a newer, younger generation, who may or may not have seen the first film. In order to win over an older generation they need to take a different approach whilst maintaining the nostalgia factor that fans of the Incredibles series were looking for.

Subsequently, we would highly recommend that you re-consider your business’ customer avatar on a regular basis for example every 6 months. The needs & requirements of businesses change over time and thus in order to keep up with these changes, your avatar should change too.

We hope that this has given you some ideas on aspects of your marketing like how using a customer avatar can positively affect your business, by finding your ideal client.

We look forward to hearing from you.