customer avatar Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Use this customer avatar worksheet pdf to help you define who your “perfect” customer is.

Your customer “avatar” is your ideal customer. That is, someone who will love you and your products/services and become a life long fan. You can get an idea of who this type of person is by looking at your existing customers. What do they have in common? Chances are good that there is a thread running through many of your customers. Perhaps they are of similar age, or they have certain beliefs. Depending on your product or service, you can find common threads connecting your customers which include things such as:

Age
Location
Interests
Hobbies
Marital status
Income bracket
Information sources
Job title
Level of education
etc.

Customer Avatar Worksheet PDF

But suppose you don’t have any customers yet? You can work on defining your customer avatar using the customer avatar worksheet pdf. The worksheet below will give you some ideas of what to think of when defining how to approach your potential customers through your marketing methods. It can be very easy to get caught up in focusing on your product or service – WHAT you’re selling.

But this can be a huge mistake. Even with the best product in the world, you’re not going to sell anything if you put your marketing message in front of the wrong people. This is why WHO you are selling to is so important and often overlooked by marketers.

To learn more about your perfect customer, it’s important to do some research. Without actual data, some of your information might only be guess work! Still, the more you learn about who would be the best fit for your products and who they would serve the most, the more you can understand them, and find them with your marketing.

Using the form below, fill out as much as you can about your perfect customer avatar. What are their goals and ambitions? What holds them where they are and what challenges do they face in their daily lives?

Customer Avatar Worksheet PDF

Goals & Values:

Goals:

Values:

Your typical customer will have goals and values which are aligned with your products in some way. Try and think of goals and values which your products can help with. How does your service tie in with this? What do you offer which meets their needs?

Challenges & Pain Points:

Challenges:

Pain Points:

When you can understand the challenges and pain points of your avatar, you can tailor your marketing messages to speak directly to their needs. No body wants to buy a product unless it offers a solution to a problem. By addressing their problem and presenting the product as a solution, you can meet their needs. This is much more powerful than simply showcasing your product, whatever it is.

Sources Of Information:

Books:

Magazines:

Blogs/Websites:

Gurus:

Other:

Use this section to define your target avatar carefully by finding things they would know about, but other people would not. For example, avoid Gurus who are well known, because everyone would know about them, therefore, you’ll pay more for your marketing and include a broader audience. This idea here is to narrow your audience down and get specific.

Objections (To The Sale/Product) & Role In Purchase Process:

Objections to the sale:

Role in the purchase process:

This is an important section because you can talk directly to these objections in your marketing messages. When you address them in emails and sales copy, you’ll answer questions which your avatar has, and which would otherwise stop them making a purchase, or signing up to your email list.

Other Demographics:

Age:

Gender:

Age Of Children:

Location:

Level Of Education:

Occupation:

Job Title:

Annual Income:

Favourite Saying/Quote:

Other:

Getting to know your avatar more personally through this section will help you understand them better. This can help when writing emails and sales copy, for example. You’re more likely to resonate with someone through your marketing messages when you have spent the time getting to know who they really are.

Customer Avatar Worksheet – Collecting Data

To know your customer avatar well, it’s important to actually do some research. Talk to existing customers and ask them what led them to you. Get to know and understand them, and they will help you get clearer on their pains and problems which your product helped them with.

If you don’t have existing customers, don’t be afraid to draft a customer avatar anyway. You can always change it later on as you get to know your best customers further down the line. By going through this process time and time again, you’ll get more familiar with what drives your customers and the type of person your products and services are a good fit for.

When you don’t understand your perfect customer avatar, you can easily fall into the trap of focusing on the product you sell instead. This is a mistake though, especially in affiliate marketing. With affiliate products you have a global audience to put your products in front of. Most of this audience won’t have any interest in your product because they don’t fit the mould of your customer avatar.

By getting very clear on who you are marketing to, you can also better understand how to communicate the value of what you are selling.

When selling anything online, it’s important to know your target market. With online marketing, you effectively have a global audience to target your products or service to. So, it will be much more efficient and effective if you know who to put your marketing message in front of.

If you use the scatter gun approach, you just run advertising to everyone and hope for the best. This isn’t the best approach, because you’ll be running paid advertising to many groups of people who aren’t at all interested in your product.

While the scatter gun approach can give you data, it’s an expensive way to gather it and there will be a lot of wasted marketing budget. If you get clear on who your “perfect” customers are, you can be more like a sniper with your marketing; and less like a battlefront soldier. It will save you a lot of money on your marketing campaigns, if you get this right.

How To Know Your Target Market

Depending on your particular product or service, a target market can be fairly broad. Coca-Cola, for example, sell to a wide range of people. People of all ages and backgrounds buy the drink. But still, there will be a sector of the market which most of their advertising is aimed at, in order to advertise more efficiently. For Coca-Cola, his is mostly younger people who are 12 years old and older. This can often be determined through looking at the bulk of the existing customers.

If you don’t already have customers, look at your product and who it’s the best fit for. A home furnishing store will have a different customer “persona” to Coca-Cola. You would expect the average customer to be in a couple and over 20 years old, for example. See this home decorating retail market plan.

So one of the best ways to determine who your target audience is, is to look closely at the criteria that makes up your existing customers:

Age range
Location geographically
Interests
pains and problems
Family situation
Salary
Etc.

How To Know Your Target Market – The Buyer “Persona”

A company’s target market can be made up of a large section of people. One way of defining your target market more specifically is through a buyer persona. A buyer persona is also called a customer avatar. It’s a fictional character which represents one of your ideal customers.

How to know your target audience – identify your perfect customer persona or “avatar”

If you’re generating a marketing campaign for an online business, it can be a good idea to target a customer avatar. Spending some time getting to know your customer avatar is a good use of your time. It can help you to speak directly to that individual, with your marketing message, through the pains and problems which your product helps them with.

If you try and sell to everyone in your marketing message, it can have the opposite effect. This is because it doesn’t speak directly to the pains and problems which your unique product helps to solve.

Your Products/Service

What pains and problems do your products solve? And who is most likely to benefit from them? Once you know this you should have already narrowed down your target audience. Consider which sub-section of your potential customers are the most likely to need and want your product. Who is it most important to and why.

What assumptions have you made about your target audience, and are these true? Have you tested these assumptions with real marketing and got the data to prove it?

Until you actually run a marketing campaign, and get the feedback to prove or disprove your assumptions, you could be barking up the wrong tree. So, one way to know your target audience is to run campaigns and gather data. You can run paid marketing campaigns to a website or a landing page. Collect data as you start making sales through an email marketing campaign. This is done through tracking and measuring your advertising and sales.

But before you run a campaign, it’s worth considering who your idea customer is, where they live, can they afford your products and what are their pains and problems which you can help to solve.

Get To Know Your Existing Customers

Your existing customers are already putting their money where there mouth is! They already purchased from you. Getting to know why they bought from you is a simple and cheap way of gathering data on your perfect customer and target audience.

Conduct market research with your customers and get to know more about them. As you do, this will tell you more about their pains and problems which your product or business helps them with.

How old are they? What are their interests and passions? How did they find your company? The more you know about your existing customers, and the larger your customer based grows, the more you will understand them and how to find more like them.

Try Different Marketing Strategies

Adwords is a popular marketing strategy for online businesses which lets the marketer target people by their search queries. If you own a hardware store in Lincoln, it’s pretty obvious that you’re a good fit for someone typing “hardware store”, who lives locally to you!

Use Google’s keyword planner to find other keywords which are a good fit for your business.

Facebook and YouTube are great platforms too, which let you target people by a number of criteria:

Age
Location
Interests
Income
Sex
Groups and connections
and so on

By targeting certain criteria which are relevant to your business, you can zone in on the type of people who are most suited to your business. Not everyone you advertise to will purchase something from you. If you’re on a budget with your advertising, you’ll want to make it go further by making it more efficient.

At first, as you’re learning marketing, you will tend to spend more because your marketing will be to a larger group of people. As you gather data, and start making sales, you can use this information to learn who is the most likely type of person to buy from you.

How To Know Your Target Market – Summary

The best way how to know your target market is through testing and measuring of your advertising campaigns. Those adverts which don’t generate sales, cut them! Those ones which work the best, keep them running. Learn from your data and test and measure advertising continually.

But before you run any advertising campaign, it’s a good idea to get to know existing customers, if you have any. The better you get to know them, the more you’ll know who to target in your marketing campaigns and this will significantly reduce your cost. You’ll be able to target these kinds of people more specifically with your marketing – saving you a lot of money.

You can also define your target audience through looking closely at your products. What problems and pains do they solve? Who is this mostly likely to impact if they choose to become a customer?

Question your assumptions about your target market. How old are they? Where do they live? Identify your buyer persona, or customer avatar and talk to this fictional character in their language when you create a marketing campaign.