It is all about Customer Avatar.
Updated: Nov 22, 2020
Class 2 of Digital Deepak’s Internship program started with some basics and then it further went into more in-depth details of Customer Avatar such as what is a customer avatar? how will you know your ideal customer? Why is customer avatar so important and so on.
I will first explain my understanding of the Customer Avatar from what I learnt in Class 2 followed by a survey conducted to understand this customer avatar but first let’s begin with the basics
Introduction - what is Marketing all about?
In a simple term Marketing means having a good conversation. A conversation that you would have with your best friend. A conversation that is smooth, free-flowing, and effortless.
So, how does this smooth conversation happen? Does it happen overnight? No. It happens over a while. You trust your friend because you know him or her for quite a long time. There is a comfort level that has been established over some time. You can confide anything to your friend only because you know that you can trust him or her well. It is all about “Trust”.
Trust that is built between you and your friend and hence the communication between you and your friend is real. It is authentic. Effortless. There is nothing hidden. You don’t need to wear a mask and pretend when you are with your friend. You are yourself and you know that he or she will never judge you.
It is the same in Marketing. As a Marketer, you need to be able to have a good conversation with your customers and potential customers. Only when you can strike the chord with your customers smoothly, only when you can converse with them on 1:1 basis, only when you are your real self, your personality will reflect in your conversation with them of who you are. This will build trust between you and your customers which will eventually lead to “MassTrust”. I.e. Building Mass Trust through your personality.
So, who is a better marketer then? A better marketer is the one who from his or her life experiences has learned a lot over some time and is still learning. Someone who has observed, learned and experienced various life situations, maybe even failed at times but all those life experiences have helped him grow as a person, developed his personality and taste. Thus, when the marketer converses with anyone it shows in his communication, conversation with them. It reflects his personality and style. when you are your authentic self you become a good marketer and can gain the trust of the masses with your honest communication with them.
Similarly, just like how we have defined who a marketer is we also need to define who our customer is.
Now let’s dig deep into my understanding of the Customer Avatar.
Here’s how it goes –
The question is how well do you really know your Ideal customers? Who is your ideal customer? Is everyone your customer? If the answer is YES then, the reality is No one is your customer. You need to focus on the centre ie the targeted customer. This is where targeting comes into the picture.
In marketing, you need to first, define your target audience. Who they are in terms of Demographics, Psychographics to try to understand them better. You won't be able to position what you are selling to meet customers' (and potential customers') needs without knowing them, who they are.
To know your, Ideal customer, you need to know your ideal customers' backgrounds, their goals, and their challenges? How well do you understand their interests and needs? Do you know how old they are? Which school did they go to? Whether they have kids? What a day-in-the-life looks like?
These questions may sound very specific but they are very important in creating a very specific customer avatar. This will help you improve your business results. In gist, you need to understand your ideal customers inside and out.
Customer Avatar is fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. It is understanding your customer in terms of demographic and psychographic. This helps you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor your communication to their specific needs, behaviors, and concerns. By grouping people into persona or avatar, it is much easier for marketers to cater to their products or services to different groups of people.
Why do you need to understand your Customer Avatar?
Knowing your customer avatar is not just useful for marketing but also useful in communicating with them. A single one on one communication with them is very important and personal even if you have a huge customer base. You communicate one on one with them through emails. You have a mental conversation with them and this is more important than social media. When you write to your customers you are connecting with them at an emotional and mental level and this is possible because of the customer avatar.
How does Customer Avatar matter in Marketing?
It helps us to target our marketing efforts to different segments of our customers. E.g. Instead of sending an email to all the customers you can send to specifically targeted customers by tailoring your message according to the customer avatar.
Conclusion – Thus, we can gain knowledge about customer avatar through market research surveys, interviews with our customers either in person or by filling up survey form, to discover more about them.
My Customer Avatar as per the survey conducted by me during Digital Deepak’s Internship Assignment 2.
I was always curious to find out about how many people are into online shopping. This holds especially true in today’s time with lockdown when nothing is available across the store.
Luckily, I am fortunate that I got this opportunity in the Internship Program so as soon as I came to know that we also have to create a customer avatar without any doubt in mind I decided that I am going to do a survey on how often do people do online shopping. What is the age group? Which are the sites they use for online shopping? and so on.
I created a simple questionnaire with some basic information such as age, education, occupation, Industry, income to understand the demographic. Then I created some specific questions such as how often do people indulge in online shopping, which are the sites they use for online shopping, how often do they do online shopping, what are their interests to understand their behaviour pattern. As we learned we need to understand our target customer in-depth and customer avatar helps us in doing so as it is nothing but fictional, generalized representations of our ideal customers. The audience that I was targeting was very specific the ones who are into online shopping whether it is buying groceries or books or clothes or any other things.
Here’s a link below to an example of survey form for Online Shopping - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ifaa9q65kSTS_8r3OtCyZJGXj_KG-uyr6IPsRWTlxRc/edit
After I conducted this survey, I was able to reach my customer avatar. Here are the details -
My customer Avatar 1 - seeing the survey that I inferred that my 1st Customer Avatar is a Male. I call him Amit. He has a master’s degree. He is from Mumbai, 35yrs. Married with kids. He is a working professional with a full-time job. He is into online shopping once a month. The site that he mainly goes for online shopping is Amazon. His interest is that he loves to read, travel all over India, and is a foodie, goes out to eat once a week.
My customer Avatar 2 – Is a Female with a master's degree. I name her pooja. she is a Proprietor who has a business. She is from Bangalore. She loves to read in her free time. She is into online shopping once a week. The sites that she uses are Amazon and Myntra. Has travelled all across India.
Deepali.
Want help with your Brand's Digital Marketing Services? Get FREE Digital Marketing Consultation for your Brand. Email - deepali@creativepassion.net