Every successful marketing plan starts with the knowledge of your customer.
February 2, 2025
If you learn only one thing from this post, it is that your customer avatar should be as specific as possible. Having a good customer avatar is the framework in which your marketing campaign will rely on. Having a specific one that is accurate is what will make it a good one. I repeat; having a good customer avatar is the starting point to a successful marketing campaign. It is your guiding star. It supports the concept that every business is foundationally based on the people that make up the audience for your company's story. Who are you selling to?
(If you are confused about where your customer avatar comes in handy, check out this blog post here regarding the basics of marketing.)
Building a customer avatar
How old are they and what is their gender? Then, you can get more and more specific. How do you get specific, though? How can you narrow down your customer in the digital age? If you have a brick and mortar business, you can see who walks through the door and take an average of every customer who buys a product. (You are looking for successful conversions to sales first and foremost because there are different categories of customer avatars. More on that later.) However, you only have their appearance. A promising customer avatar also includes what they shop and where. You can derive that from understanding their fears, their desires, their beliefs, etc... The aforementioned statement encompasses the big bullet points. A customer avatar is a very, very specific example of a character archetype. You have to imagine you are writing a character for a book. What music do they listen to? What apps do they download? Do they own any animals?
If you are purely a digital business, you have various tools at your disposal to find this information out. For example, you can creep people's social media. That is honestly an excellent way to organically find information out about your customer. Do this a bunch of times with different people. Then, you can develop a profile average. Create your avatar from that average, but with extreme specifics, notating the character traits that may deviate into the realm of a separate avatar. Create two avatars from one. You can see that this is a subtle art. The limits of where one avatar ends and another begins may be best handled by an intelligent marketing professional. If you feel confident and excited by this work, by all means, do it yourself. However, if you feel overwhelmed, leave this job to Ethan FM Marketing.
Customer avatar categories
I promised a look at the categories of customer avatars. This is easy, but it also takes quite a bit of work. It is essentially displayed in every point of the customer journey. Customers who have resulted in a successful sale come first. You understand them, and you understand your business. Then, work backwards. Customers who are intrigued, but need an extra nudge to buy. Then, customers who are akin to intrigued customers. Then, customers who represent a market that is not yet within your grasp. You can break these points of the customer journey into even more specific parts, but you get the gist of what I'm saying. Each category will probably include more than one customer avatar. The more information you have, the better you will do with your marketing strategy because you can be flexible in who you appeal to.
In conclusion
Finally, name your avatar so that you can best communicate a label to your team. The name should be basic and appropriate. For example, a name usually suggests a nationality. Make wise decisions with every aspect of building your customer avatar. Your marketing campaign will depend on it!
This article explains the theory of building customer avatars in detail. However, there are many tools that can be used and protocols that can be instilled to help you gather data. Website building platforms help businesses to understand their character's journey. Email CRM helps. Enlist the help of a marketing professional who understands how to use certain tools. What if your company is B2B? That is a similar, but separate, topic. If you don't have a marketing department set up in your business structure, hire a pro who is a master of many aspects of the process. Hire Ethan FM Marketing.
Written by Ethan Frank Markowitz on February 2nd, 2025.
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