How to create a customer avatar to promote on social media

What is a customer avatar?

The customer avatar is a portrait of a perfect representative belonging to a certain segment of your target audience. You can use this portrait in different situations, for example, when preparing an advertisement.

You can prepare an ad only according to what you consider interesting for a customer, but this approach is not correct. Always plan your social media strategy wisely. The right way is to create a document and describe a typical representative of your specific audience in detail. Based on that, you can see their needs and goals and create appropriate content. In other words, if you know the audience’s concerns and objections when cooperating with you, you can better create targeted content.

What tasks does a customer avatar help you to solve?

Using the avatar, you can:

• Adjust adds to make them bring you much bigger results;
• Choose more accurate behavioral and other targeting settings;
• Create engaging and interesting content, and even more important – more effective selling content, as long as it is fully based on the needs, goals, and concerns of a certain member of your target audience.

What should a customer avatar include?

Avatar’s format

Usually, it is a document: Word file, PowerPoint presentation, Excel table. However, the most common format is a simple Word-file.

Avatar development algorithm

Divide your audience into parts.

For example, here are some audience segments of a travel agency: family tourists, individual tourists, B2B customers, VIP customers.

Describe a typical member of each segment:

• Name the customer avatar (Let’s imagine a regular customer who is a pronounced member of family travelers. Considering that he comes to your agency once a year, you can call him by name – for example, Boris);
• State gender, age, and family status;
• Note the existence or absence of children;
• Describe a soul mate, if there is one;
• Comment on occupation and hobbies;
• Mention personal and family income;
• Include educational background;
• The customer’s biggest dissatisfaction (his pains, desires, and wishes). The idea of creating an avatar is to understand what he is missing in life and what you can do to solve his problem, satisfy him and help him;
• Describe the steps he is taking to satisfy his needs. You should describe his typical steps. Talk to your customers, ask them about what they have, what they do to avoid it. Ask at least ten people to reveal a pattern;
• Note a typical pain for this segment;
• Suggest your customer’s biggest goal or dream;
• Define the customer’s biggest fear appearing when he thinks about purchasing your product. Typical fears are defined as objections. Classical objections are: too expensive, a fear of meeting a non-professional person, a fear of making a wrong agreement, time delays, etc. If you know all of them, you will create a better promotion, content, targeting;
• Figure out what annoys your customers, what makes them feel angry or unhappy;
• Analyze the sources your customers use to get information. This will help you choose a platform for your promotion.

These are the main elements to include in your customer avatar. If you think that there is something else important to note – remember to include it, too.

How to develop customer avatars

Your monitoring

There are several options, and the first one is general monitoring. It means that you have been regularly monitoring your activities, you have been developing your business for many years, communicating with customers a lot.

If you have a rich experience, it might be enough for you. You understand your customers’ lives and their needs.

In-depth customer interviews

Choose a typical customer, preferably a loyal customer you are in warm relation with. The other option is to give an additional bonus, a discount, a gift, or a certificate to your customers for interviewing them. Talk to your customers, ask them questions. Include all the elements mentioned above. It’s one of the best ways to create a customer avatar.

Staff survey

The third option is to communicate with your employees dealing with customer support services: sellers, account managers, product managers. There is no guarantee that they will give you information about customers’ children or their educational background, but they can surely tell you about customers’ fears, concerns, and goals.

Platform analyzing

For example, if your audience includes lawyers, find lawyer forums, lawyer groups on VKontakte. Read their discussions on Facebook, choose the most popular discussions, and the most frequently mentioned topics.