Ideas for uncovering the perfect avatar for your business

 

Often the easiest way to find your ideal customer is right in front of you. Simply search through your current database of clients and niche it down to your ideal customers. You possibly already know their basic demographic information, such as gender, location and age, which should assist with this process.

Interviewing your current customers

Once you have a selection of clients that you’d love to clone, next comes the research. If you feel you can, reach out to them and ask questions to learn more about who they are. These questions could include:

• How do you spend your spare time? 
• What do you do for work?
• Where do you shop? 
• What celebrities and brands do you follow?
• What are your most pressing challenges in day-to-day living?
• What frustrates you the most?
• What turns you away from purchasing a product or service? 
• Who or what influences your buying decisions?
• How does purchasing your product or service make you feel? 
• What is your ultimate purchasing goal?

One way to ask these questions might be to simply pick up the phone and give the customer a call, although you might find an online survey could work better for your customers.

Either way, ensure you tailor the above questions to suit your business. For example, if you run a hair salon, ask the customer what they find frustrating about visiting a hair salon. Is it a long wait time? Or maybe it is having their hair cut by a different stylist each time?

You could ask them how getting their hair styled makes them feel and what hair treatment they enjoy the most.

The more specific you allow these questions to be, the better an idea you will glean from your existing customers on who your ideal customer is.

Check out your customers’ online presence

Another way to research your ideal avatar is by looking up your current customers on social media. By scrolling through an Instagram feed, you will get a good idea about your customers’ interests and the other products and services they use.

At this point, it would also be worthwhile to look into your competitors on social media and see what it is they are doing. 

You don’t want to copy them, but by examining what it is they do, you will be able to get an idea of their avatars. This research can often assist in helping you to create your own avatar.

Join Facebook groups and online forums

If you want a better understanding of your customers’ habits, it’s worth exploring the spaces they spend their time in. This includes online forums and Facebook groups. 

For example, if you sell baby products or services, you might want to join some parenting-related Facebook groups to see what common questions are being asked by customers who could be the ideal avatar persona for your business. This will give you a better understanding of both your ideal customer and their pain points.

However, don’t take this as an opportunity to market to mums and dads directly. Often, this isn’t the appropriate place to sell – rather it’s a space to learn. Only give advice or promote your business if asked to do so.

Research your industry

It has never been easier to research your industry to discover what kind of client would buy from you.

For example, if you are a real estate agent, you could research what houses are selling in your area and use ABS data to better understand who is interested in buying the houses you sell. For example, is it young families or retirees? 

Once you have an idea of who is in your market, you will be able to better define your ideal avatar. 

Understanding the psychographic profile of your audience

Once you have conducted all of the above research into your ideal customer persona, you will begin to see a complete psychographic profile develop.

What is a psychographic profile? Unlike typical demographics, such as age and gender, psychographics delve deeper into why exactly your audience is buying and what drives them.

For example, the demographics of your ideal persona might be that they are female, aged 40, have a household income of more than $100,000 and are a stay-at-home mum.

However, their psychographics could show they are worried about their appearance but don’t have time to workout. They love using Instagram and enjoy spending time with their young children. They are more likely to shop at Myer over Kmart and they spend money on weekends away.

As you can see from the above example, psychographics assists in creating a more complete avatar profile.

Psychographics dig deeper into the personality, lifestyle, attitudes and beliefs, interests and social class of your ideal customer.

What to do with your avatars

Once you begin to understand your avatar, it’s time to create a mood board to help you form a visual representation. Use slides and stock images, and give your avatar a name to create a complete picture. 

For different areas of your business, you might like to create different avatars. For example, if you sell courses online, you might want to develop a different avatar for each course so that you can perfectly target your sales to the right persona. 

Name each avatar to make them personable yet easy to remember. Names such as ‘Fitness Fiona’, ‘Stay-at-home Stacey’ or ‘Tradie Tim’ can work well. 

Underneath each avatar, make sure to list an accurate description of who they are and what they are like.

When you next go to communicate with them through social media, blogs, advertising or any other channel, remember who you’re talking to and what they want to know from you – this is how you develop interest and engagement!