Chapter 5

Defining and Refining Your Customer Avatars

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Finding out what customer avatars are and why you need them

check Getting to know your prospective customers

check Writing a detailed description of your ideal customers

check Reviewing and revamping your customer avatars

check Using customer avatars to drive your brand development and marketing

The ultimate goal of branding is to establish an emotional bond between your brand and consumers. To accomplish that feat, you need to know your prospective customers — their likes and dislikes, where they go for information, where they shop, what they do for a living, what they like to do in their free time, their values and political affiliations, and more. The better you know your prospective customers, the more effectively you’ll be able to reach them via the media channels they use and bond with them via marketing and advertising.

One way to get to know your target customers is to work through the process of creating customer avatars —fictional characters that represents your ideal customer. In this chapter, I lead you through that process.

Remember Customer avatars are useful in marketing/branding, product development, and rebranding. They can inspire new products and help guide product design and development.

Discovering Who Your Target Customers Are

The first step in creating a customer avatar involves identifying who your target customers are and gathering information about them. Think of this process as a reconnaissance mission; you scout the market looking for a niche and then find out all you can about the consumers in that niche. As you gather information, you begin to recognize patterns across the consumer group that you can use to create a customer avatar.

Ultimately, you want to create at least three distinct customer avatars to accommodate a broad enough market. Focusing on only one customer type in a given niche results in missed opportunities. If you try to promote your brand to everyone, however, your messaging will lack impact; it’ll be all over the place and be unlikely to resonate with any group.

Remember If you don’t know the people you’re marketing to, you’ll have more difficulty creating content and campaigns that attract customers.

As you gather data as described in the following sections, complete a form like the one shown in Figure 5-1 to create a record of your customers’ interests and values, where they go for information, and so on.

Schematic illustration of gathering information about your target consumers.

FIGURE 5-1: Gather information about your target consumers.

Identifying your target customers

In the early stages of building and launching a brand, you may need to rely on guesswork or your gut to identify your target customer, at least tentatively, so that you can begin to focus your research efforts on a specific group. Jot down details about who you think your target customer is or will be. Here are a few areas to address:

  • Career or business
  • Demographics (age, gender, income level, education, marital/family status, geographical location)
  • Psychographics (interests, hobbies, lifestyle, opinions, aspirations)
  • Challenges, problems, or pain points
  • Where the person goes for information (news outlets, social media platforms, websites, books, magazines, and so on)
  • Where the person shops (bricks-and-mortar retail stores, websites, specific stores)
  • Reasons why the customer may not buy your brand

Remember The purpose of this general information is to narrow the focus of your research so that you’ll know whom to gather data from and where to find the right people to research and survey. In other words, this general information helps you gather the specific information you need to create a detailed customer avatar.

Gathering and analyzing data about your target customers

Whether you’ve already launched your brand and have customer data to analyze internally or have no internal data source, you can gather data about your target customer.

If you have customers, you can use the following techniques to collect customer information and feedback:

  • Sales and marketing associates and customer service personnel probably have valuable data based on their interactions with customers.
  • Interview or survey existing customers to find out what they think.
  • Examine your website and social media analytics to gain insight into people who visit your online properties. (See Chapter 7 for information about web analytics and Chapter 13 for details on social media analytics.)
  • Examine your email analytics to find out what works and what doesn’t in terms of communications with existing customers. (See Chapter 14 for information about email analytics.)

If you haven’t launched your brand, you have no internal data to draw on, but you can research external data to find out more about your target customer. Here are a few approaches to consider:

  • Survey your friends and followers on social media.
  • Examine your competitors’ blog and social media properties to find out who’s engaging with their brands.
  • Participate in industry blogs and forums to get a general idea of who’s active in those communities.
  • Identify social media influencers (see Chapter 13) in the market you’re pursuing, and check out their followers and fans. You can also follow influencers and engage with them to get a better feel for prospective customers.

Conducting a focus group

A focus group is an assembly of people who gather to answer questions, offer input, and engage in discussion about a product, service, brand, political campaign, television series, and so on. Conducting a focus group to gather feedback about your brand is a great way to obtain information about your target customers.

To set up and conduct a focus group, take the following steps:

  1. Come up with a list of questions to ask members of the focus group, such as the following general questions:

    • What are your favorite TV shows, movies, or podcasts?
    • How do you spend your weekends?
    • Which social media platform are you most active on?
    • What’s your highest level of education?
    • What is your dream vacation?
    • What are your favorite magazines?
    • Where do you do most of your shopping?
    • Currently, what’s the biggest challenge you face or your biggest source of worry?

    If focus group members are existing customers, ask more targeted questions about your brand, such as the following:

    • How did you find out about us?
    • When, how, and where do you use our products or services?
    • What makes our products stand out from competition?
    • What other brands do you think of when you think about our product?
    • Would you recommend our brand to a friend?

  2. Create an incentive for participants.

    You can choose to pay people to participate (money or a gift card); offer a free product or discount; or offer some swag, such as a branded tote bag, umbrella, T-shirt, or coffee mug.

    Tip If you’re gathering feedback about a specific product or product changes under consideration, gifting your product and getting honest feedback is a great way to find out whether your brand is heading in the right direction.

  3. Choose a location that’s convenient for participants, comfortable, and free of interruptions and distractions.

    If you have a physical location, great. Another option is to conduct a focus group online, allowing people to participate remotely via conferencing platforms.

  4. Implement a way to record your focus group session so that later, you can closely analyze what participants said, how they said it, and how they interacted with one another and with the moderator.

  5. Recruit participants.

    You can recruit via email, phone, text, or social media, or use a recruitment firm such as FieldworkHub (https://fieldworkhub.com) or Focus Insite (https://focusinsite.com), to connect with participants who meet your criteria.

  6. Schedule your focus group, and send out invitations specifying the date, time, and location.

  7. Conduct your focus group.

    Here’s a sample outline:

    • Introduction: Introduce yourself, thank the participants for coming, describe the purpose of the focus group, and explain how the session will be conducted.
    • Icebreaker: Have the participants introduce themselves and say something interesting about themselves, such as what superpower they’d most like to have.
    • Questions/discussion: Pose your questions to the group, and lead the discussion. Be sure that everyone participates and nobody monopolizes the discussion.
    • Wrap-up: Thank everyone for participating in the focus group, and distribute any promised incentives.

Conducting a survey

Surveys enable you to obtain feedback without having to gather people and lead a discussion. All you do is call, email, or present the survey questions online or on location, instructing participants to answer the questions.

You can recruit participants by using the same methods you would use for a focus group and ask the same questions, as explained in the preceding section. Several online platforms facilitate the process of creating and distributing surveys and tabulating the results, including the following:

Evaluating your customers’ interests

Evaluating your customers interests enables you to create products and content they enjoy and value. If you have an athleisure (athletic–leisure) brand, and you know that your brand is popular among yoga enthusiasts, you can incorporate yoga imagery, articles, and tutorials in your content marketing. (See Chapter 8 for more about content marketing.) When doing a photoshoot for your products, you might consider doing it on location in a yoga studio.

Tip Knowing your customers’ interests also enables you to target paid advertising campaigns more effectively. Instead of advertising to everyone, you advertise only to those who are most likely to respond positively to your ads. In addition, you can create ads that are more likely to appeal to your target customers. (See Chapter 15 for more about paid advertising.)

To gather information about a customer’s interests, ask questions in a broad range of categories in your focus group or survey. Categories may include food and drink, entertainment, travel, fashion, home decor, health and fitness, hobbies, and values/causes. Ask specific questions to elicit more details from each participant. For the food and drink category, you might ask the following questions:

  • Do you consider yourself to be a foodie?
  • Do you prefer local restaurants or large franchises?
  • When you’re choosing a restaurant, what’s more important: good taste or good health?
  • Do you have any diet restrictions?
  • What’s your favorite meal?
  • What’s your favorite nonalcoholic beverage?

Tip As you evaluate customer interests, think about how those interests align with your brand’s identity and may influence the brand identity you’re trying to create. In 2013, in response to demand for healthier foods, McDonald’s began working with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to provide customers greater access to fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, and water, especially in Happy Meals, which are marketed to children. Instead of merely changing its marketing, McDonald’s changed its brand.

Remember Tying customer interests to your content marketing and paid advertising demonstrates to your customer base that you’re paying attention to them and are committed to serving their needs and preferences. It can also communicate subtly that your customers are a part of something bigger — a community that’s built around your brand. If you don’t try to appeal to specific customer interests, your efforts may not resonate as much with your target market.

Finding out where customers go and what they do

Where your customers go and what they do, online and off, matters more than what they say, so put some effort into researching consumer behaviors. One way to research behaviors is to ask consumers questions, such as the following:

  • Where are you located?
  • What do you do in your free time?
  • What are your primary sources of news and information?
  • What’s your favorite form of exercise?
  • Where do you socialize online?
  • Where do you socialize offline?

You can also gain insight into customer behaviors by buying and analyzing location and transactional data from data vendors, such as Exact Data (https://www.exactdata.com) and Complementics (https://www.complementics.com). To extract insight from the data, however, you need to have data analytics software and know how to use it.

Remember Actions speak louder than words. Near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the media led people to believe that consumers were divided into two camps: the safety-conscious and the scofflaws (those who repeatedly and knowingly violated the rules). Location data collected from smartphones, however, painted a far different picture. Early in the pandemic, most people headed to the grocery store, came home, and voluntarily or otherwise sheltered in place. In short, you may get totally different answers to your research questions if you study the data instead of asking people.

Describing Your Customer Avatars in Your Own Words

After gathering customer data, you’re ready to describe your customer avatars in your own words. Write them as you would write a short biography of someone you know and love, including as much detail as possible from the data you gathered. Here’s an example:

  • Jenae Greene is 30 years old and lives in Los Angeles, California. She graduated from San Diego State University, where she majored in marketing. She’s an entrepreneur and a project director for a company that develops products to enhance meditation. Her goal is to serve others while having the financial stability to travel in her free time. When she’s not working, she enjoys practicing yoga, spending time outdoors, and hanging out near the ocean.
  • Jenae’s favorite TV shows and movies are comedies. She also loves listening to thriller podcasts.
  • She enjoys reading when she has the time and finding ways to optimize her time so that she can make more room for what she enjoys. Jenae is a big fan of standup comedy, having lightly explored it as a career herself.
  • Her favorite restaurant is Jones Italian Food and Veggie Grill.
  • She listens to Alabama Shakes.
  • Whenever she has time off work, she heads to the beach or buys a plane ticket to somewhere in the world she’s never been.
  • She posts regularly on Instagram, where she has 2,500 followers.
  • She loves to shop at Nordstrom.

Fill in as much detail as you can about your customer avatar; then use this avatar whenever you’re putting together branding campaigns, developing new products or services, and creating content.

Redefining Your Customer Avatars As They Evolve

In a way, your initial customer avatars are preliminary snapshots of your target customers. As you begin to sell to and to engage with customers, your customer avatars should evolve, becoming increasingly fleshed out with detail. The more data you gather from real consumers, the more you can fine-tune your avatars. In addition, times change, and people change with the times. The customer avatars you create today may no longer be relevant 12 to 18 months in the future. Keep revisiting your customer avatars as your business and the world in general evolve to ensure that you’re speaking to the needs and preferences of your current customers.

The online job board Girlboss (https://www.girlboss.com), for example, has evolved considerably over the years, both in terms of the brand and its customer avatar. Originally, Girlboss sold tickets to events that helped aspiring female entrepreneurs obtain the tools and resources to succeed. Its marketing targeted millennial women, and the brand was known for creating a hue of pink later coined “millennial pink.” Although the brand still appeals to female entrepreneurs, it has expanded to women who excel in their side hustles and pivot their careers. Now the brand is for women of various ages at various stages of their careers. As the brand’s customer avatar changed, so did its voice and content, expanding beyond its initial demographic, enabling Girlboss to connect with new customer groups that were previously overlooked and underserved.

Remember If you’re going through a rebrand or getting ready to launch a new product, conduct additional focus groups and surveys, and make any adjustments necessary to remain relevant in the current market. Keep in mind that the speed of change is constantly accelerating.

Putting Your Customer Avatars to Work

Now that you have fully fleshed out customer avatars, you’re ready to put them to work for your brand. Imagine that your avatars are real customers whom you consult whenever you do anything related to your brand, such as the following:

  • Developing a new product or service or improving an existing one
  • Rebranding (changing the brand’s image in some way)
  • Developing content such as blog posts, social media posts, articles, podcasts, images, and videos
  • Developing a paid advertising campaign
  • Prioritizing your marketing focus (such as deciding whether to put more effort and money marketing on Instagram or Facebook)
  • Identifying potential partnership opportunities with other brands

Remember Your customer avatars enable you to connect with customers more effectively. The customer avatar for Jenae Greene in “Describing Your Customer Avatars in Your Own Words” earlier in this chapter tells me that funny ads would probably appeal to my target customers, as would beach scenes and music by Alabama Shakes. And because my customer avatar loves to shop at Nordstrom, getting my brand into Nordstrom’s stores is a priority.

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