Creating a customer avatar is not easy, but it's crucial to your business success. No matter your business, you need to niche down and position your product to serve a particular market segment. That's a bold statement, but it is true for most small businesses unless you operate in a highly regulated market.
Before we dive into the how-to of things, let's explain what a customer avatar is, how a niche is defined, and what brand positioning means.
What Is A Niche?
Whether you pronounce it “nitch” or “neesh,” one thing’s sure: the focus is king. I designed this, printed it out, and it's hanging on my office wall to remind me daily how important, "Focus" is.
A niche, as defined in the Business Dictionary, is a small but profitable market segment suitable for focused attention by a marketer.
It's important to understand that:
Market niches do not exist by themselves but are created by identifying needs or wants that are not being addressed by competitors, and by offering products that satisfy them.
Have you ever considered how difficult it is for business people to say what they do in one sentence? Instead, when you ask them what they're working on, they list five or six things they do.
While, as a small business owner, you might be naturally multi-passionate, knowing precisely what you sell and to whom is of the utmost importance. Building a memorable brand by focusing on the one thing your business does best is part of your success.
By niching down, a solopreneur or small business owner can give a proven valuable solution to a specific group of people with a particular need instead of trying to sell a product that pleases everyone—and we all know you can’t please everyone.
Here are ten popular niches or categories in business, each with a brief description of a typical customer avatar:
- E-commerce Entrepreneurs: This avatar is tech-savvy, likely between the ages of 25-45, and is interested in scaling their online store. They look for tools that help with SEO, inventory management, and customer engagement.
- Small Business Owners: Typically aged 35-60, these are people who own physical stores or offer local services. They are interested in solutions that help them manage their operations, enhance local SEO, and engage their community.
- SaaS Users: These are generally corporate decision-makers or team leads aged 30-50 interested in software solutions that can help automate and streamline business processes.
- Healthcare Providers: Doctors, hospital administrators, or clinic owners make up this avatar. They seek electronic health record systems, patient management solutions, and telemedicine platforms.
- Real Estate Investors: Aged 30-60, they are focused on tools and services that help them identify investment opportunities, manage properties, and understand market trends.
- Freelancers: This young group, generally aged 20-40, is looking for platforms for job opportunities, invoicing tools, and personal brand-building solutions.
- Digital Marketers: Generally in the 25-45 age range, they seek tools for SEO, social media marketing, content creation, and analytics. They are very tech-savvy and always looking for the latest trends and tools.
- Educational Institutions: This comprises administrators or decision-makers in educational settings. They seek e-learning solutions, administrative software, and tools for virtual classrooms.
- Manufacturers: This avatar includes business owners in the manufacturing sector, typically aged 40-60, interested in supply chain management solutions, quality control software, and industrial automation tools.
- Non-Profits: Leaders or decision-makers in charitable organizations make up this avatar. They look for fundraising platforms, donor management systems, and community engagement tools.
By knowing these customer avatars' characteristics, needs, and wants, businesses can tailor their products and marketing strategies for maximum impact and revenue generation.
Your Ideal Customer Avatar Defined
As HubSpot explains, the ideal customer avatar or buyer persona is a fictional character representing your perfect prospect.
When complete, it will help you see the motivation, fears, dreams, and desires that influence your customer's purchase decisions.
Your ideal client avatar will help you streamline your promotional efforts, whether it be through Facebook ads, lead magnets, or landing pages. It will also help you understand why some offers sell better than others and how to do A/B testing correctly. Creating a customer avatar helps to surface critical gaps or inconsistencies in your brand message.
Figuring out your customer avatar involves qualitative and quantitative research, diving into demographic and psychographic factors influencing purchasing decisions. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you determine who your customer avatar is:
Step 1: Identify Your Business Goals
Before diving into customer research, know what you aim to achieve with your product or service. Are you looking to maximize revenue, extend brand reach, or enter a new market? Your goals will guide the characteristics you focus on in your avatar.
Step 2: Examine Existing Data
If you've been in business for a while, you already have a wealth of data. Analyze customer data from sales, surveys, and analytics tools to get initial insights into who your customers might be.
Step 3: Demographic Research
Collect basic demographic information such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income level
- Education
- Occupation
Step 4: Psychographic Analysis
Dig deeper and investigate psychographic traits like:
- Values
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Lifestyle
- Behavior
- Pain points
Step 5: Competitor Analysis
Study your competitors to see who they are targeting. Read their customer reviews, examine their social media, and determine the characteristics of people who engage with them.
Step 6: Conduct Surveys and Interviews
Create and distribute surveys or conduct one-on-one interviews with existing customers to delve deeper into their needs, desires, and pain points.
Step 7: Online Research
Use platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or specialized industry tools to gather data on customer behavior, interests, and interactions with your online content.
Step 8: Create Multiple Avatars
Don't limit yourself to a single avatar, especially if you have multiple products or services. Develop multiple customer avatars to represent various segments of your market.
Step 9: Develop the Avatar Profiles
Compile the demographic and psychographic information to create detailed profiles for your avatars. This should be a straightforward document that anyone in your company can refer to when making product development, marketing, and customer service decisions.
Step 10: Test and Revise
Your customer avatar is not set in stone. As you get more data and insights or release new products, revisit and adjust your avatars as needed.
By following these steps, you'll build a well-rounded understanding of your customer avatar, which will guide your marketing strategies, product development, and customer engagement activities.
The Offer Framework
One of the things I teach our clients is the Offer Framework, which involves creating a customer-a-customer avatar by asking a straightforward question...
Here's a workshop livestream that you might enjoy!
What Is Brand Positioning
Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the mind of the customer and how it is distinguished from products from competitors.
(Source: Wikipedia)
In other words, brand positioning describes how a brand differs from its competitors and where or how exactly it sits in a particular market. The differences might be tangible, but they do have no motivating qualities.
Niche, buyer avatar, positioning... they all tie up
All three concepts, calling, customer avatar, and brand positioning, are interrelated and affect each other. Let's see how it all works together and how you can define your ideal customer avatar.
How To Find Your Niche
Start with this question: What valuable services can you offer your desired audience?
Think of services and products as solutions to problems; think of them as experiences that create a transformation from the present state to the desired shape. Understanding your industry and niche is the first step before painting the picture of your ideal buyer persona.
Here are a few prompts to help you through the process of determining your niche:
- What one word describes me?
- What do I want to be known for?
- What role do I imagine myself in 5 years? What are my natural-born traits?
- What are my learned skills?
- What would other people in my circle say are my superpowers?
- What am I not as good at?
- What do I hate doing?
- What is in demand now and seems to have a good outlook for the years to come?
Your answers can help you solve the puzzle of finding your niche.
When determining your niche, you want to find the sweet spot: the convergence of talent, interests, skills, and market demand. And you want to become an expert in that niche.
Creating A Target Avatar
After you have defined your niche, you need to know who your ideal customer is.
Defining your buyer persona will help you to understand their situation, feelings, and needs, thus creating better products and marketing material with your ideal customer's needs in mind.
The better defined your customer avatar is, the easier it is to create a marketing strategy that establishes you as an expert in your niche.
Why exactly are customer avatars so crucial to your business?
Buyer personas make it easier for you to tailor your blog and marketing content, messaging, product features, and services to match different consumer groups' particular needs, behaviors, and concerns.
You may feel you understand your target audience, but with buyer personas, get to know their specific needs, interests, and purchase drives.
How To Define Perfect Buyers As Your Target Avatar
If you're starting with your business or want to launch a new product, you can search on social media and find people who match your perfect customer. See what questions they're asking, what problems they're facing, what's important to them, and what makes them happy. It may also help to think about people already in your network who may fit your ideal customer profile.
But wait! Is every customer the ideal customer? Naturally, not every new customer you get will exactly fit your perfect customer avatar, but keeping your marketing focused will help you attract more of your ideal customers.
How To Position Your Brand For Success
Now that we've explained what a niche is and how to create the ideal customer avatar, let's briefly discuss positioning and how all these notions—place, customer avatar, and positioning—fit together.
You have your niche, the part of the specific market that you want to serve.
You know your ideal customer, their needs and wants.
Now, you're setting off to create a product or solution for that ideal customer avatar in the specific niche. But what features will you attach to that product, and how will you market it so it attracts your perfect customer?
This is where positioning comes in place; frankly, it's essential to your business to get this part right.
As we previously explained in this post, brand positioning is the process of putting your brand in the minds of your customers. Brand positioning is also referred to as brand strategy or positioning strategy. It's all about the image that people hold of your brand. How valuable is it to them? What feelings does your brand create?
To create a strong brand positioning, you must find your brand’s uniqueness and determine what differentiates your product from your competitors.
Take a minute or two to contemplate the following brand positioning questions, and remember always to keep your ideal customer avatar in mind.
- How do I differentiate my brand?
- Does the experience match my ideal customer perceptions of the brand?
- Is my core message believable and credible?
- What's the unique value to my customers?
- What's a clear picture that describes my brands? How is it from my competitors?
- Is my brand streamlined for my core customer's profile?
- Is it memorable? Inspiring? Motivating? Fun?
- Is it consistent in all areas of my marketing?
- Are the value and benefits accessible to grasp?
- Is my brand challenging to replicate?
- Is it designed for long-term growth?
- Does my brand have a unique voice?
- How are my products priced compared to the competition?
The answers to those questions will most likely help you solve the mystery of positioning your brand better to serve your ideal audience in a specific niche.
Consistency Wins The Race In Brand Building And Customer Avatars
Next, you need to impress your brand positioning upon your ideal customers. To do that, you must start from within your business.
Everything in your marketing needs to be consistent. This includes every member of your business that touches the customer. Each customer touchpoint needs to be the perfect expression of your branding.
Remember always to come back and revisit your ideal customer avatar when new prospects and sales data are available. And if it's something you want help with, we're happy to work you through it. Just schedule an Action Plan call with us here!
