Ideal Customer Avatar who should you be talking to?

We always ask our clients to tell us what type of person, if they can choose only 1 or 2, would be their ideal customer.

Usually, the answer boils down to: “our bestest, favoritest customer in the whole wide world is the next person who walks in the door & buys something…”

Thing is, there are lots of people out there to talk to and getting your message out to those people costs money.

When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.

Meredith Hill

Demographics like gender, age-range and household income have been used for generations to segment target markets. For better or worse, the Internet and modern digital marketing allows us to dig a lot deeper to find out people’s interests, motivations, beliefs, fears and other information that helps us “personalize” the message in advertising copy.

It also helps decide who should not be targeted.

Do you fill a particular niche?

Shoes are for everybody… high heels are (generally) for women.

Who makes the calls?

Are you a business that serves children or families? Is it mom or dad who says “honey, we should do this”?

Healthcare is for everyone but moms tend to make these decisions for the family.

Which way do the percentages fall?

Women use power tools all the time but those products scream to men from the shelves.

Take a walk and start counting up people with handbags. Are most of them women or men?

Got a yoga studio? Sure, there are men yogis too, but betcha most of your clients are women.

The most fundamental questions are often the hardest to answer. Who is coming to the website? Why do they choose to become customers and why do they stick around?

The avatar is a fictitious, idealized customer constructed from what we know about your current customers, the type of customers you’ve told us you would like to attract, recent activity on your website and social media pages, reviews, comments and interactions with digital ads. This is a personalized representation that helps to better understand the motivating beliefs, fears, interests and desires of the people who are most profitable for you to reach. Having a fundamental understanding of our customers will allow us to target the right people in the right locations, using imagery and language that is interesting, engaging and ultimately encourages them to take the actions we want them to take.

this is not guesswork!

Data for the avatar is obtained from multiple sources (as available). We collect demographic and audience data as well as personalized interests from these sources and use this information to develop your avatar(s):

your current customers
website traffic (Google Analytics, site metrics)
Google Search Console
specialized tracking and analysis software
Google Ads
social media (paid and organic)
programmatic display
online reviews

All this data is used as part of a continuous cycle to further clarify who your best customers are and what messages and tactics resonate with those people.