Creating Your Customer Avatar

In Part 1 (this article) I’m going to help you:

• Define what a Customer Avatar is
• Help you determine your competitive advantage
• Start drafting your Customer Avatar

What is a Customer Avatar? And Why do I need one?

A Customer Avatar is defined as figuring out who your ideal customer/client is. This is the client that spends the most money with you, who is easy to work with, that decides quickly and tells everyone about your services/product and gets even more clients like him to your business.

When described like above it makes it clear why you’d want to know who your Customer Avatar is, right? 

You’ll want to do this as early as possible to help your marketing and sales teams (or even just yourself) to focus their attention and effort on gathering as many of these clients as possible.

Action Item: Decide if you want more of your ideal clients

Where do I start?

The first step is to define your competitive advantage and what sets you apart.

Why?

Because we’ll use that in building out which niche you’re going to be going after.

So what qualifies as a competitive advantage?

I’ll give you some examples for a small business offering printing services. Now, while you may think that a bigger printer with huge economies of scale may crush this business there are some distinct advantages for the local business such as:

• It’s local (a lot of companies want to support local businesses)
• Shorter runs (a lot of big companies don’t want the small orders)
• Personalized service
• You can go and pick it up (no shipping charges)

Sometimes it can be based on the knowledge or technology you have. While other companies may be using older marketing techniques, if you can drive traffic through Instagram, TikTok or Clubhouse, that can provide value, that a big agency that doesn’t utilize those platforms, doesn’t have.

Action Item: List out your competitive advantages or differences

Starting to Define your Ideal Customer Avatar

Now that you know that you want your ideal customer and what sets you apart it’s time to define your niche.

Your niche is where you can provide the greatest value with hopefully the least amount of effort.

Just as we should not judge how well a fish climbs a tree or how a monkey breathes underwater, we should figure out where you can provide the greatest value to your ideal client.

The way to determine your niche is to look at the following:

Demographics:

•  Male? Female? Both?
•  Age?
•  Location? Within a certain radius?
•  Income?
•  Profession/Job/Title?
•  Married? Kids?
•  Level of Education?

If you’ve defined your niche with the above data this allows you to start your journey of targeting your marketing, sales and delivery towards your ideal client.

Let me give you a couple of examples to think with:

1. A recruiting company targeting men and women in the healthcare industry. They go after professionals who are usually between the ages of 35-45 anywhere in the U.S. but mainly focused on Metropolitan areas. The income of the healthcare professionals is between 60-80k. Their titles range from Medical Assistant to Billing & Coding but all are in the healthcare industry. They are usually married with 2 kids.
2. A local restaurant targets mainly men between the ages of20-45 who are within 3 miles of the restaurant that make between 20k-80k that either work professionally or are married and have 2+ children.
3. An e-commerce company selling high-end kitchen products.This would target mainly women between the ages of 25-50 within the U.S. making at least 50k a year. No particular profession, other than one that allows them to make meals that they enjoy cooking. Both married and single. Can have kids.

You’ll notice in the above examples that I have not gotten particularly deep on every single demographic category. At times, especially when starting out you either won’t have the information, or you’re still figuring out your best customers. 

Action Item: Put together the demographics that best describe your niche!