Creating Customer Avatars for Your Organization

Your Organization's Primary Target Audience

Every organization and business has an ideal target audience they would like to reach. Whether that target audience is a specific sector of the market, or whether it is more broad. A useful idea is to create a generalization of your ideal client or potential buyer. Then you can organize the generalizations into customer segment a, b, and c. This is also known as creating your ideal customer avatar.

Market Segmentation and Building Your Ideal Customer Avatar

Your ideal customer avatar should include general metrics such as: goals, frustrations, biography, age, work, family, location, character, and education. You can add other metrics if you so desire. It would be helpful to include a photo of the person to make the persona more believable and relatable. The photo will humanize the experience of creating a customer persona.

Helpful Tools for Creating your Customer Profiles

You can use a tool such as Xtensio to create your ideal customer avatars. Xtensio provides a useful editor to create and change your customer avatar. They have sliding bars and everything in the editor can be modified and changed. It is a good tool to use for market research.

Magazine Media Kits and Facebook Audience Insights

One strategy I would recommend for researching your customer avatar is to look at magazines they may be interested in reading. Identify the magazines your audience reads, and then you can research the magazine's free media kit. This will provide some market research the magazines have done for you to let you know more about your target demographic. You can study what your audience likes by speaking with people, conducting surveys, or doing some manual outreach. Better yet, you can use a powerful data research tool from Facebook. The way you can leverage Facebook for your research is to use Facebook Audience Insights. You can target specific people on Facebook and see what are the top pages they like. From this information you can make an educated guess what magazines they enjoy reading as well. Then look at the magazine's media kits. A good website to research magazines and their media kits is called magazines.com.

Once you gather some information on potentially who it is you are serving, you can make a note of this information in your customer avatars.

The Market Research Organization Tool We Use – Xtensio

What is nice about Xtensio is that you can include tabs that summarize your findings of your customer profiles. This way you can see at a glance what you have learned and what are the key takeaways to have in your marketing.

The better you understand you your ideal target audience is, the more effective you can tailor your messaging to them.