Define Your Ideal Customer Avatar
Updated: Oct 29, 2020
Are you lacking clarity with your online store and finding it hard to get traffic, let alone sales in your business? Then you might need to update or create your Ideal Customer Avatar.
Thinking that the whole world is your customer is a recipe for disaster when it comes to starting an online store. Many beginner online store and business owners begin thinking that everyone is a potential customer, and perhaps they could be, but having a too wide of a target audience can make your marketing efforts fall flat and leave you without any sales.
By focusing on a particular target market you can create a strong brand and become the ‘go-to' for products in your field.
In this post, I'll be going through tips on how to create your 'Ideal Customer Avatar' or what I like to call an I.C.A.
Without your customer avatar or a target market nailed down, you’ll most likely fall into the trap of using all your time and energy creating a brand and business that might attract the wrong customer or even worse, no one at all.
So what is an Ideal Customer Avatar?
An ideal customer avatar is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. It focuses on one person and outlines everything about them. Rather than being general or broad about the details of your customer, your I.C.A. goes into great depth providing you with the necessary information to create a business and brand that will have your customers eager to purchase.
Your I.C.A. includes demographic and psychographic information that you can use to "speak" to them which makes it feel as though you’ve almost read their mind.
By creating an ideal customer avatar, you’ll be able to determine exactly who you want to attract. You’ll also know what motivates them, what they’re passionate about, and figure out the most effective way to connect with them.
And you might even be surprised to discover that the first avatar you create might sound like yourself as generally people open up online stores to scratch their own itch or solve their own problems.
So now that you know what ICA means, how can you create one for your own online store?
THE KEY IS TO BE DETAILED AND SPECIFIC.
Here’s an example:
So most people start off with...
"My ICA is anyone who wants to purchase a planner."
This is WAY too broad, you need to go deeper...
“My ICA is 30-40 years of age, is married with a one-year-old, has just started her own business and is looking to plan her business and personal life."
This is getting there, but still too brief.
You want your ICA to sound a little like this:
“My avatar is 35-year-old mum. Her name is Jessica and she started her own business as a freelancer, serving other female entrepreneurs by helping them to create graphic design templates works.
She currently works part-time around 25 hours per week in her business. It’s important for her to be able to provide an additional income for their family whilst still having the flexibility to raise their 1-year-old daughter at home.
She has big dreams and goals for her business but is struggling to get herself organised. She feels as if she is time-poor and seeks fast and efficient solutions.
On the weekends she enjoys going down to the beach with her family but lately has been frustrated by the extra time she needs to be spending on her business during her weekends and family time.
Deep down she feels it makes her feel like she doesn't have enough time to split between her family life and business life, which is making her feel anxious. She dreams of creating more time during the week to focus on the business so that she can have more time on the weekends.”
See what I mean? When you’ve created your I.C.A, you want to feel as if you know them personally and understand what makes them tick!
And think that being too specific will mean that you drive potential customers away? Well, think again. People are bombarded with marketing hype and are “sold to” all day, every day. To really connect with your ideal customers, you need to be able to relate and identify with them on a more personal level.
You can never have too much information about your target market either. Get even deeper by asking questions like how much money they make, where do they live, what’s their age, what kind of cars they drive, do they have pets, what kind of health they are in, how do they make a living…. you can really go on and on.
So let’s go through three easy steps to help you define your ICA...
Step 1: Get to Know Your Ideal Customer Avatar.
You don't just want to create your I.C.A. from nowhere. You want to use some actual facts and analytics. Your business and products are available to serve an audience so you need to figure out what they need and work your business around that.
So it’s time to forget what you think you know and start researching who your ideal clients actually IS.
Here is a brief list of some information you need to collect in order to nail down your ICA.
Let's start with demographics:
Age and Gender
Location
Workplace and Job title
Income and educational level
Are they married?
Do they have children?
Next, we want to research their psychographics. Ask questions like:
What are their biggest challenges?
What are the defining characteristics of their personality?
What’s stopping them from solving their problem?
What worries and fears keep them up at night?
What do they value most in life?
What do they enjoy doing in their spare time?
What do they secretly want more than anything else?
What websites, blogs do they visit
What’s their favourite social media platform
Who do they follow online?
These are just some basic prompt examples. If you want to dig deeper why not get a copy of the FREE 'Define Your Ideal Customer Avatar' workbook and work on creating the ideal customer avatar for your online store:
Step 2: Dig Deep Into Their Pain Points.
The reason you’re in business is that your product solves a problem. That’s really it. Without a problem, your potential customers won’t be motivated to buy.
So when you’re thinking about the finer details of your avatar, dig below the surface to the real, raw emotions underneath.
Remember that buying decisions are driven by emotion, and justified by logic. People buy things because it makes them feel better, it fills their need.
As an example, let's say in your online store you sell physical planners. If you ask someone why they don’t invest money in a yearly planner, they might say it’s too expensive or I won’t ever use it. But that might not really be the truth. It could be that they are putting off organising their time because they don’t feel like they’ll get a return on the investment.
Maybe they’re actually not motivated because they don’t have a clear vision and/or goals. Maybe they’ve tried other planners before and they didn’t work for them, so they gave up trying altogether.
Really take the time to think about these pain points and see how you can alleviate them.
Step 3: Create Your Ideal Customer Avatar Character
Now that you have all the hard work done, now comes the fun part… bringing your I.C.A. to life.
Create a mental profile of your I.C.A. What colour hair do they have? How tall are they? How are they dressed?
Give them a name. This helps you to identify and imagine them when you’re working on your business and products. This also helps with separating them when you decide to create more customer avatars as you expand or focus on different products.
Write up your customer avatar summary. Make sure it’s easily accessible so you can reference it whenever you need. Use the 'Define Your Ideal Customer Avatar' workbook to help you out with this process.
By going through these steps, you’ll be miles ahead of your fellow competitors and you can start attracting your dream customers that are ready to buy!
Okay, so there's a breakdown on how you can create or update your Ideal Customer Avatar to help you narrow down your audience and start attracting the perfect customers to your online store.
Get started with your own Ideal Customer Avatar by downloading the FREE workbook:
