Start Targeting The Right Audience; Create Your Customer Avatar

Ideal customer profile. Customer avatar. Target market. Buyer persona.

You have probably heard these phrases thrown around in conversation during the one-off meeting you had six months ago to discuss target markets.

If you haven’t spent much time defining an ideal customer avatar, you are certainly not alone — but now might be a good time to start giving this topic some serious consideration.

Now, more than ever, it is vital that you have a deep understanding of your ideal client profile.

Putting aside the time to define your avatar in detail will help you:

• Maximise the time you spend on new business, as any successful outreach campaign needs to be extremely well targeted.

• Position you company's unique value proposition to perfectly align with the problem your audience is facing; so you will be front of mind when they need assistance.

• Understand the social channels they use so you can anticipate where you should be present and active.

How to create a customer avatar

Now that you understand the importance of customer avatars, how do you go about creating one?

The most effective avatars are created with information from market research as well as everything that can be gathered from analysing your current client base.

If you have logged all your activity in a CRM, also spend time analysing your client wins, lost pitches and proposals gone dry to determine which brands and market sectors are bringing you the most success.

Multiple avatars

You may find you have more than one customer avatar, which is no bad thing — this will be especially true if you offer more than one service. We would advise to tackle one avatar at a time in order to maximise your focus.

Through the process of reviewing your data in detail, the market that brings the most value and profit to your agency will become obvious. You may also decide that your focus has been too broad and zero in on developing one particular niche that positions your agency as the absolute best-in-class.

Negative avatars

A useful exercise to safeguard targeting the wrong kind of prospect is to define your negative customer avatar.

We have all had those clients that were a nightmare for one reason or another and you want to document what made those relationships unsuccessful.

You may be inclined to detail why a particular person wasn’t easy to work with, but instead focus solely on the reasons why your services weren’t a good fit for that business or market sector.

What to do now

Now that you have your customer avatars in place, consider re-visiting your messaging to ensure the two are perfectly aligned.

Remember to steer this to the problem your audience is facing and how you offer a unique service that provides a solution.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you begin this process:

• Review existing data, client feedback and market research to create your avatars; don’t make the mistake of basing this exercise on opinion or perception.

• Be thorough in your development of each avatar and approach them one at a time.

• Ensure to complete the negative avatar exercise as this will help you understand who you don’t want to work with.