Is Creating Your Client Avatar Really Worth Your Time?
“Creating my client avatar is a waste of my time.” That’s what I thought about it when I just got started with marketing. Actually, this mindset cost me a lot of money.
Actually, creating your ideal client avatar might be the single most important task that you will do when you are in the beginning phases of your business. It might take you an hour or two to do well, but it can tremendously impact the amount of money you make. It’s also one of the most underrated tasks there are. Most people just want to dive in and start designing landing pages, creating ads, and so forth. But take my word for it – if you spend the time and create a clear client avatar, everything you do will be better and easier. Consider doing your 4Ps marketing mix analysis as well before jumping into any marketing campaigns.
Who are your ideal customers? Where can you reach them online? These are very important questions to answer if you want to grow your business. Before you invest any time, effort, or money into marketing, you should first get a complete understanding of who your customer is. Later, this can help you advertise in the right places, target the right people, and optimize your messaging to resonate with your prospective customers. If you skip this step, you will end up wasting money.
Which Areas Will Benefit From Creating My Client Avatar?
There are many areas that will greatly improve if you take the time and create a quality client avatar. Some of these include:
Landing Pages & Website: Creating a complete client avatar will help you create higher-performing landing pages and websites. First, you can create a design that will better resonate with your target audience. For example, when you are selecting your page colors. Color Psychology shows that different colors evoke different emotions and feelings in people. This is largely subconscious, however very impactful. If you know that your target audience is stressed or looking for medical solutions, you may want to consider incorporating green into your design, as green is known for stress relief and healing. Furthermore, completing the client avatar exercise will help you to write better content on your landing page or website. It will help you understand which value propositions to include (what do your customers find to be valuable?), which objections to address (what will stop your target audience from making a purchase?), and which pain points to focus on (what problems are your target audience trying to solve?)
Email Marketing: First, if you complete your client avatar exercise, you’ll be able to write better subject lines. Subject lines are arguably more important than the actual email itself. That’s because their entire purpose is to get your audience to open the email. Moreover, what good is a great email if it never gets opened? So, if you really know your audience, you will have a much easier time writing a few words that will entice people to open your emails. Furthermore, you’ll be able to create email bodies that are way more enticing to your readers. You’ll be able to produce content that will be interesting, funny, valuable, or entertaining for your readers.
Paid Advertising: There are a whole lot of areas within paid advertising where having completed your client avatar will be a huge help. For example, if you are doing Facebook Ads, you’ll be able to create much more effective audiences. You’ll be able to get your ads in front of your audience in multiple creative ways, including job title, employer, interests, online activity, page likes & follows, incomes, demographics, languages, geographic area, and more. Also, you will be able to write ad copy that will entice your audience much more. If you truly know your client avatar as well as you know yourself, you’ll be able to design creatives (images, carousels, and videos) that will make your audience laugh or otherwise grab their attention. I think you get the idea.
And more…
Creating Your Client Avatar
As a result, creating your client avatar entails answering a few questions about your ideal customer in a very complete way. It’s likely that you won’t be able to answer these questions thoroughly at the top of your mind. Therefore, it’s important that you conduct a lot of research while working on this task. Remember, that you don’t necessarily have to narrow it down completely with every question. For example, if your product or service is targeted equally to men and women, that’s totally fine. However, you will definitely want to narrow down the audience wherever you can.
Demographics
What’s their age?
What’s their gender?
Marital status- are they married? Single?
What’s their geographic location?
Do they have any kids and what are the kids’ ages?
Is there a specific job title or occupation that they have?
Income- can you come to a firm dollar range? Or which percentile of earners do they fall under?
What’s their level of education?
Values & Goals
What do they value? What would they find to be valuable? Pets, kids, etc? This will greatly help you when creating an offer or a value proposition that they will find enticing.
What are their goals? Do they have short term goals? Long term goals? Is there a big picture vision that your audience has, that will be the culmination of all their goals?
Pain Points
What issues do they have? What are they trying to solve?
Objections
What possible objections would they have if presented an opportunity to solve or alleviate their pain points? Is it the price? Is it the effort? What stands in the way of them pulling the trigger?
Where do they get their information?
Do they read magazines or newspapers? Which ones? What sites do they visit? What groups and pages are they members of? What celebrities or influencers do they follow?
Principles
You may not be able to answer this one accurately all of the time, but do your best. Additionally, I’d recommend saving this question for last, because you might just have enough information about your ideal customer by the end of the client avatar exercise to answer this. Most people have a set of guiding principles.
As a result, if you can figure these principles out, you’ll have a much easier time connecting with your audience and gaining their respect. You could try to come up with a core quote for your audience, or what is the bottom-line quote that would describe them? This might come easier if you’re able to identify any religion, political orientation, or set of beliefs they subscribe to.
Repeat This Process
In conclusion, I would highly recommend revisiting this task and repeating it from start to finish every year or so. It is possible that you will have more information and will have realized that your target audience is slightly different than you had originally thought. In that case, it is time to update your client avatar. Moreover, there is a possibility that your audience has evolved in that timeframe, whether it is from your influence or from other events that are happening. If this is the case, you should update your client avatar so that your messaging can evolve with your target audience.
Take my word for it, take your time and create your client avatar – it’s absolutely worth your time and will help you in just about everything you do in marketing. Good luck friend!
