Do I need a customer avatar?

I get asked this question a lot so, to help you answer it, here are some questions for you:

• Do you want to invest time and money selling your products or services to people who are not the right match for your business?
• Do you want to have to regularly change and develop your products and services to suit new customers who are not your main focus?
• Do you want to spend time and effort selling to customers who are not going to be very profitable?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then you don’t need a customer avatar. For everyone else, keep reading…

What is a customer avatar?

A customer avatar (sometimes called an ideal customer persona or audience profile) is a highly specific description of the person who would be a perfect match for your business, its products and services.

Why create a customer Avatar?

Your business needs customers who are going to:

• Need your product
• Have the budget to spend on your product
• Be profitable for you
• Be enjoyable and energising to work with
• Benefit from everything your product or service has to offer

People who will end up being a good match for your business will follow a rough profile like this:

People on the left of this graph are a perfect match for your business: they’re desperate to solve the problem that you solve and they’ve got the money to pay for it – you’ve got a really good chance of selling to these people.

As you go further out people have less of a need or they have less money or both.

The temptation is always to try and get your message out to anyone who might ever conceivably buy from you because you don’t want to exclude people on the right of the curve since they might turn out to be a good client. It’s just less likely.

This is the classic “scatter-gun” approach to marketing and if you have a vast budget and a collossal market presence (e.g. if you’re Google or Apple) then go ahead – you will probably reach the right people amongst the clutter.

But if you have a limited budget, like the small businesses I work with, then you need to focus your resources, which means being ultra specific about who you’re selling to.

Let me put it another way…

If you have £20k to spend on marketing and you target it at a small, specific audience...

... then you’re going to get a much better return on your investment than if you spread it out.

Be Specific

When you market specifically to a target audience you will inevitably catch people just outside that demographic.

If you tighten your focus specifically to one avatar,

• It’ll force you to clearly understand the problem
• It’ll help you decide what you need to say about your product and how you need to say it
• It’ll be easier to decide which features to include in your product and which to leave out

And when you start planning your promotional activities, you’ll know where to spend your money and where not to bother.

To get started creating your customer avatar, download my customer avatar checklist.

Let me know how you get on in the comments below.