Customer avatars can help your small business succeed. Read on to learn what customer avatars are and why you should create them.

Call them a target audience, a buyer persona or a customer avatar.

The fact of the matter is that one of the most important things you need to consider when you're selling things is who you're selling them to.

Building a customer avatar isn't hard but it also isn't something that should be skipped when you're putting together your marketing plan.

Let's get going and we'll show you how to build your buyer persona from scratch so that you can edge into the market confidently.

Defining Your Customer Avatar

The tighter your focus on an audience the easier you'll be able to convert potential customers.

It also makes it a lot easier on those producing your marketing content, since they'll be able to know who you're targeting.

Broad spectrum marketing is a thing of the past and if you want to stay stuck with the dinosaurs then you're also going to be stuck with their lower conversion rates.

Your customer avatar needs to be well defined. Too many people are trying to sell to everyone.

If you think everyone out there needs your service or product, then perhaps you should just make yourself the target audience. It's really not a bad idea, and it's one which a lot of internet marketers find themselves doing without really thinking about it, particularly in the making-money-online and SEO portions of the internet.

But for the rest of us, it's a good idea to begin to build a portrait. The following are some of the things you should know about your fictional buyer before you even begin building marketing material:

• Approximate age
• Rough income
• Gender
• Hobbies
• Where they hang out on the internet

Just having those in place gives you an excellent idea of where to begin marketing.

If you're targeting young women, say 18-23, for instance, then you're probably not going to want to advertise on LinkedIn. Instead, the statistics show that Instagram's user base is where you should be looking since 15% of the users are women who fall into that age range.

You should take things a step further, however, the more points that you put together, the more likely you are to hit just the right chords.

This kind of targeted marketing is about more than just finding your customers, it's about matching their frequency.

The Story of Your Persona

Fred is just a regular Joe. He's tired after work and the 9-to-5 grind. He's got two kids and a wife of seven years by his side. His income is tight, and whose isn't these days?

After he comes home from work he's looking for a side-gig. Not just anything though, he's seen how his dad's knees look after forty years of framing and even though he followed in his footsteps and the job pays well he wants something which will let him get out of the field.

He wants to spend more time with his loving family, but he's not the savviest with the internet. Not yet anyway.

But you're going to catch his attention late one night while he's looking for gigs on Facebook, and your affiliate marketing course is going to change his life because it's for guys just like him.

These stories are where your customer avatar should bring you.

Now you're not just talking to a potential customer, you're talking to a real person and you know how your product is going to change their life.

How's that sound for the basis for a content marketing campaign?

Talking to Your Buyer

When it comes to marketing your ad copy is going to be the thing which produces conversions.

To use an extreme example: you're not going to be selling much to middle-aged men with cute, pink fonts and calling them “girl” in your marketing e-mails.

You can create stories which will be common to a large portion of your user base as well, which makes it much easier to implement storytelling into your content marketing than it would be otherwise.

But the most important thing is to remember that to talk to your customer.

Engagement in content is already hyper-important for marketing but when you speak directly to the segment of the population that you've targeted you'll be able to create an emotional connection.

You want to build a relationship, not just chase leads.

That emotional connection is the key to incredible conversion rates, rather than mediocre ones.

Taking the above example a bit further: you're going to talk directly to the “Freds” of the world in their language. No one is just looking for your product, instead, they're looking for something which can change their life.

When you move your story into your content and copy you're taking things to a new level, one which most lukewarm marketers will never achieve.

Once you have the buyer persona in mind you have one goal: to always be engaging that target customer and not just a general audience.

If you still feel lost, try using a customer persona worksheet and see if that doesn't help clear things up.

Other Uses for the Customer Avatar

You don't have to stop there either.

There are a few different methods which people also use in order to take their buyer personas into the wild.

One of the least utilized, but most useful, is the negative buyer persona. This is where you form the exact person who isn't going to buy your product. Chances are they're in different corners of the internet than your favoured customers so you can avoid wasting time there.

If you really feel your product has a broader appeal, then perhaps you'll build another persona for a separate marketing campaign, just make sure they're similar enough the bulk of your copy can apply to both demographics.

Learning About Your Customers

You still need to gather data about your customers. It's the little things that count, so be flexible with your customer avatar, especially in the beginning.

Gathering as much data as possible as your business grows is important. There's even software out there which can help you ensure that you're getting the information you need about your customers.

If you're interested, then perhaps it's time to check out something which can help. Or you can keep guessing. The choice is yours.