Remember that movie, Avatar, with all of the blue people? Yeah, that was a pretty great movie. But that isn’t the kind of avatar we’re talking about. We’re talking about client avatars! If you’re wondering what a client avatar is, it’s what you consider to be your “ideal client.” You’ve probably been shaping a lot of your business efforts towards catering to your client avatar without really knowing it.

Here’s a definition from Laura Kinoshita:

“A customer avatar is a fictional character that represents your ideal prospect… Your customer avatar will help you fine tune your marketing efforts and help you understand why some products sell better than others. It also helps expose important gaps or conflicts in your marketing messages of which you may be unaware…”

And no, this isn’t to say that what you’ve been doing is bad or needs to be flipped on its head. Rather, creating a client avatar is an effective, transformative way to expand your marketing efforts to reach your ideal clientele.

There are two sections that you’ll need to walk your entire team through in order to create your client avatar.

1. For you and your business:

What

• What are your business goals by creating a client avatar?
• What are your current challenges in reaching your target demographic or client?
• What do you expect or hope to come out of creating a client avatar?
• What are you offering to your ideal client and how can you help them?

Where

• Where are you willing to allocate resources within your budget to hit your client avatar?

When

• When should you create your client avatar? Right now. Right this very second. Just kidding! But don’t wait for any surveys to come back, schedule a meeting with your entire team as soon as possible.
• When will you begin to put this into action? While you might want to get the ball rolling right away, you’ll have to allocate some resources before you do so. This involves both time and money to tweak your messages where necessary, and shift the money to where it needs to go.

How

• How will you roll this new or updated material out? Guess what, you can have more than one client avatar! Depending on how many you have (even if it’s one), you might want to consider sending out your new material in a series of multiple phases, rather than all at once. For instance, phase 1 could be sending out material related to problems that your ideal client might be facing, and phase 2 could be general or in-depth information regarding the services you offer, while phase 3 could be calls to action, or material that would draw them to converting

2. For building your client avatar

Who is your perfect client?

• Gender: Determining your client avatar’s gender is more important than you might think. For instance, if you sell makeup products, you’re customer base is going to be overwhelmingly female. No matter what gender your ideal client is, you’ll want to have this kind of information so that you can create marketing content that caters towards them.

• Age: Do you offer services to people of all ages? Or maybe you only offer services to senior citizens? Whatever the case, age will come into play when figuring out exactly how to market to your age demographic. Here is an example… A business offers their services to senior citizens, and has been allocating resources towards Facebook Ads. However, the paid Ads aren’t seeing the kinds of returns the business expected from the investment. Why might that be? For one, seniors aren’t always going to have Facebook accounts. In this sort of situation, traditional marketing, such as postal mail, would be a better choice based on the age range of the businesses clientele.

• Income Level: It could be the case that your ideal client makes $10 million. Well… this really isn’t most people, so if that’s your ideal client, you should probably re-think your strategy. But in all reality, some services are tailored to a specific type of income range and level. If you’re a B2B, you might have an idea of how much revenue a business who you want to work with earns per year, etc. Knowing this will help to target specific people or businesses.

What are you trying to get them to do?

You can only answer this question if your business have a goal in mind, like selling clothes or offering legal services. Either way, you’ll want to see conversions, sales, and returns on investments. Knowing what YOU want THEM to do will help you create the process in order to reach your business objectives.

Where is your ideal client located?

Depending on what you sell or the services you offer, you’ll need to know where (like actually, what locations) you should be focusing on. Consider the following when building your client avatar…

• Local
• Regional
• National
• Global

When will you begin to make the necessary charges in your process to reach your client avatar?

As we mentioned previously, the sooner the better. However, if you’re a business that provides HVAC services, you might want to wait until the spring or fall to start marketing towards your potential clients, as they will need to have their HVAC units serviced or installed to prepare for the upcoming seasons.

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