What to include in your customer avatar? Great Ideas

The customer avatar possesses five major components:

» Goals and values: Determine what the avatar is trying to achieve. What values does he or she hold dear? 

» Sources of information: Figure out what books, magazines, blogs, news stations, and other resources the avatar references for information. 

» Demographics: Establish the age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, employment status, nationality, and political preference of the avatar. 

» Challenges and pain points: What is holding the avatar back from achieving his or her goals? » Objections: Why would the avatar choose not to buy your product or service?

In some cases, you need to survey or have conversations with existing customers to accurately flesh out your customer avatar. In other cases, you may already be intimately familiar with the characteristics of your ideal customer. In any case, move forward. Don’t wait for surveys or interviews to be conducted to create your first draft of an avatar. Instead, go ahead and make assumptions despite having no data or feedback, and put completing your research on your short list of todo’s. In the meantime, you can begin benefiting from the avatar you’ve created.

Giving a customer avatar an actual name assists in bringing this fictional character to life. In addition, your team members have a way to refer to each avatar among themselves.

Using the five elements described in this section, we created a worksheet that we complete each time we create a new customer avatar. The worksheet helps you hone in on the ideal customer and pair him or her with the right message. In the following sections, we go into more detail about this worksheet so that you can use it in your own business.