Marketing Strategies Today: Creating your customer avatar – who’s your ideal prospect?

By Mitch Carson From Caribbean News Now

One of the most essential elements of a solid marketing strategy is developing a proper customer avatar. When you truly understand who makes an ideal customer, it will be much easier for you to develop your business, set the message, add the product description, put in the service details and finally develop a support group for your target customer base. Always remember that your company avatar is the persona that will lead to the development of your basic demographics and overall market in the specific industry.

Your company avatar is not merely the statistics of a customer group. It is undeniably true that statistics are imperative when you want to understand your customers as a unit. But when you form an individual avatar it will prevent your statistics becoming stale in the process of making decisions. An avatar can truly be conceptualized; so even when you ask a couple of rhetorical questions, it is your avatar that will help you in the process of decision making.

When you rely excessively on statistics and bullet points for a group of target audience, it also happens to come to a situation where you are tempted to get a relatively broader audience. Almost every unsuccessful company has tried to attract everyone as their potential audience because when you target everyone, you end up attracting no one.

A proper customer avatar will help you to answer the questions associated with your product or service. With this avatar you will have a complete point of reference about the work you are doing. Finding and addressing the requirements of a target customer group is highly important for both startups and established businesses.

When you establish and focus on a target customer group from the very start, it will save you from months of wandering aimlessly looking out for what exactly works for everyone. For creating your customer avatar, you first need to develop a proper framework for addressing the issue. This framework is listed below.

Describe your ideal prospect in detail

This is the first thing that you need to do when you plan on developing a customer avatar. You have to carefully asses your key demographic – an average customer whose issues are going to be addressed by your company. You need to asses this potential customer who will actually respond well to the kind of services and products you offer them. Before anything else, you will need to have a proper picture about this customer base in your mind.

As per the kind of product or service you offer, what exactly does your customer base appear to be like? Have you ended up identifying the priorities that are truly imperative to them? When you assess the regular list of their problems issues, anxieties and worries, which is the biggest one that you can sort right away? When you answer these questions, you are actually a step ahead to define a solid customer avatar.

As you are working to develop a customer avatar, you need to note their psychographic and demographic traits. Try to put in as much information, you have found from the research that you have conducted to date. You can also use human avatar by using an avatar builder. As soon as you do that, give them a name and use a relevant photo. Brainstorm, research and figure out as much of information as you can about the relevant avatar.

Once you do that, you will be a step ahead to creating your much coveted customer group. When you have finally visualized your potential customer your avatar is automatically developed. So make it a point to devote enough time into visualizing the target customer group.

What problems do you solve for your prospect?

You will only be able to retain your customer base successfully when you identify their problems and understand how exactly you can solve those problems. After developing the avatar, etch the hypothetical scenarios that you are likely to experience when you work with them. Attempt to sell these individuals the kind of services and products you offer as a part of this hypothesis.

For instance, your potential customer is a single parent who has to spend a significant chunk of their time working to make their ends meet. In the process, their children are left unattended. In such a situation what kind of service can you provide to address their needs and meet their requirements? Brainstorm as much as you can to come up with an answer and understand how exactly you can help your customers.

Once you think of a hypothetical scenario, it will be easier for you to understand the sales pitch and the methods that can be incorporated to solve your customer’s issues. For example, you can always stress on the fact that your business opportunity, product and service can help your customer get monetary support in a proper and flexible schedule.

Describe your ideal prospects’ pain points

This is the final step of defining and setting up an ideal customer avatar. It is not an easy job to find the target audience who truly require your products and services. But if you end up nailing down the pain points of your customers, it will be much easier for you to attract the core mass who crave what you sell. These are the people who had being looking out for your products as the lack of it had been affecting their daily lives.

There are many people like this, and it is your job to help them and assist them as much as you can. In order to do this, you have to first understand what your audience is experience and what is it that they are struggling with. After this, you have to prove them that you truly understand their problem and that you are lending a helping hand to support. In an attempt to do this, talk to your customers about their problems as much as you can.

If you do not already have customers, then either Google their issues or run market surveys. Once you do this, not only will you be able to attract potential customers, but you will also end up converting them into proper leads. It will help your business thrive like never before.

Mitch Carson has been a pitchman on Home Shopping Network, CBS Radio host, and is the CEO of Impact Products Marketing in Los Angeles, CA. Reach him at [email protected] or http://www.mitchcarson.com

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