The Customer Avatar Guide

Understand The Purpose & Role of the customer Avatar

When creating a customer avatar, a very common mistake made by directory owners is that they focus too much of their attention on what they’re selling but forget to worry about who they are selling it to.

You can have the best product or offer the best service in the world but if you are selling it to the wrong person you will not be able to generate sales.

Each customer avatar has different motivations, goals, objectives, along with others, on why to buy a certain service or product. You must know how to make this distinction since different products appeal to different customer avatars, and each directory has multiple customer avatars.

How many avatar clients should you create?

Ideally, you should create 1-3 customer avatars for your directory and 1-3 for each service or product.

When you’re clear on the characteristics of the people who are going to buy from you, it is a lot easier to find and present the correct message.

Define Your Avatar

When you create a customer avatar you are choosing who you want to work with. This is why the description needs to be from people you want to attract for your directory, not just the type of people you worked with in the past. An easy way to do this, is by thinking of a client who would fit perfectly in your directory and create the custom avatar around this person.

Name Your Customer Avatar

First, choose a name to identify each customer avatar.

For example, if you have freelancer members, you could make them a group since it is a distinctive group that has common goals, needs, difficulties, or suchlike, that are very similar to each other.

What to Include in Customer Avatar

Here is a list of the main components that you have to include to make a good customer avatar.

1. Demographics/Interests

This section is where you must enter the demographic information about your avatar. The goal is to make your avatar feel as human as possible. In this part, you must add all the basic information about who that person is. Here is a list with all the details that you should add:

• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Number/age of children
• Location
• Occupation / job title
• Annual income
• Level of education
• Quote that sums up their feelings related to the problem/goal related to your product
• Brands or influencers they follow or engage with
• Where they get information (books, blogs, forums, conferences & events, etc.)

None of these points will be the definitive description of the customer avatar, it is to only make the avatar real.

How do you choose what details to use?

Think of a client that you already have and that fits perfectly the profile that you are looking for. Introduce the details you know about them and it will let you know your future customers. Try to get into the heads of the people who fit in this profile and think about what information they might add.

Remember you seek to represent all the people who can fit in this avatar, do not be too specific in the details because not all could fit.

2. Frustrations & Fears

In this part, focus on the negative and the problems that these people face that they want to get away from them. They can be things that frustrates or scares them.

Some questions you can ask yourself to fill this part are:

• What keeps them up at night?
• What annoys and/or frustrates them?
• What challenges do they face daily?
• Who or what is standing in the way of their success and happiness?
• What are some key systems in their life/job that frequently fail?
• What’s something they’re forced to interact with that’s difficult to manage or to understand?
• What feature (or lack of features) do they regularly complain about in related products or services?

3. Wants & Aspirations

You already took care of the negative, now you have to focus your attention on the positive. What are good things your avatar wants and strives to include in their lives. Here is a list of things they don't have yet and are still looking for.

Here are some questions to get you started the right way:

• What do they want for themselves?
• What do they want for the people around them (family, friends, employees, etc.)? 
• What do they aspire to be?
• What goals have they set for themselves?
• What values do they hold dear?
• What are their “secret” desires?

4. Key Purchase Drivers

In other words, this section means, why should the avatar buy?

At this point you must connect what the avatar is looking for (Wants & Aspirations) and what it's trying to run away from (Frustrations & Fears), closely related to the previous points. With this, you can conclude that it is the most important thing for the avatar and your directory.

Here are some points you might think about:

• Must-have Features.
• Expectations of service.
• Quality expectations.
• Are there any known deal-killers?
• What are some common objections that must be overcome?
• Any additional stakeholders or decision-makers?

People are going to have a lot of different objections, that is why it is very important to think about the reasons why they would not want to buy and come with an early solution.

Remember, make sure that the type of people who fit in the customer avatar are those directly responsible for making purchases, those in charge of money. If they’re not, this would generate many problems of misinformation.

5. Before & After States

At this point you already know very well who and how are the people that fit better in your avatar. The last step is to complete and define the before and after states of your customers that joins your directory or uses your services or products.

This is about the experiences that people have before using your directory, such as feelings of being scared, bored, tired or unhappy because they do not have a solution for their problems.

However, you now give them a solution for their problems, now they have your directory at their fingertips. Which you will also write about the feelings they can get after using your directory, such as:  happiness, healthiness, successiveness, stressless, etc.

You have to take several concepts into account for this step, some of them are:

• The “Have” Before/After.
• The “Feel” Before/After .
• The “Regular day” Before/After.
• The “Status” Before/After.
• The “Good vs Evil” Before/After.

We explain these concepts in detail in our article "5-Points: Script To Write Copy That Converts" which you can read on our page.

You now know how to create a customer avatar and have already created one, but the work is not done here. Remember that you need different avatars for different types of clients, you can make a different avatar for each membership in your directory or for each end user who will use your directory.

So now go on to create all the necessary avatars for your business and thus, you will have more possibilities of getting them to use your directory.