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The customer avatar, a vital tool in any digital marketers toolkit. Without it who do you target? What do you target them for? Let's explore what a customer avatar is and why you need one.

What is a customer avatar?

Simply put a customer avatar a customer profile. A detailed profile of your perfect customer, one that encompasses everything you want for your business from that customer. A customer avatar isn't just "Oh, I sell WordPress plugins and want to target them to people interested in WordPress" it's much more detailed. Over the past few years, I've written multiple customer avatars myself both for user experience purposes and for the purpose of selling. Here's what mine always include:

They always include a Name. You may think it's silly giving a name to your customer avatar, but it isn't. Not only does it help with creating a more detailed profile, but it also helps if you offer multiple products and thus have multiple different customer profiles.

1. Challenges/Pain Points - What's a problem for the particular customer avatar. A challenge/pain point can be anything. Perhaps it's scaling a business, retaining customers, etc. Maybe another pain point if you are selling software could be how difficult the customer avatars current drag and drop page builder is to use. That the customer avatar can't transfer their content to another provider.
2. Sources - This is where the customer avatar gets their information before making a purchasing decision. If you aren't in the business of selling anything, you can skip this one. However, if you are it's all about what websites does the customer avatar visit, what sort of people do they follow? This all helps with marketing. If you can pinpoint specific websites, they visit. Maybe you can take out an advertisement on that website or get featured in an article.
3. Goals - Possibly the most important aspect of any Customer Avatar, what are the goals of the customer? What do they want to achieve? This is always specifically related to your market as a whole. If you sell WordPress themes this could look something like: The Customer avatar wants a lightweight business theme without multi-purpose demos and page builders that come with others in the market. Also they want a clean and simple customization options without being overwhelmed.

Others aspects you could include are:

• Salary
• Job position (are they the shot caller?)
• Values (The personal values they hold could prevent them from purchasing for various reasons)

Anything else you can think of just add it in. The more detailed the customer avatar, the more helpful it is to various departments within your company. Even if it's just you or you and one other person, once you start using customer avatars you'll wonder how you ever did without them.

More than one Customer Avatar

One common mistake people make who are new to the world of customer avatars is only creating one. You can create just the one you want, but given how detailed they should be. It's rare you'll want to be so specific by having a single customer avatar. When creating software, I usually find at least four are helpful covering a range of different skill sets and what each customer wants to get out of the particular tool itself.

Why you need a customer avatar even if you don't sell

Many think that a customer avatar is only for large businesses with multiple departments that sell products. Not true at all. You can use a customer avatar for anything from the UX of your site to helping planning your content strategy.

Using a customer avatar for user experience

You have a website, it can be anything. Maybe it's a simple blog. But have you ever considered how the end user interacts with that website? Most probably not. You can use customer avatars to help you plan out the user experience of your website.

It helps put you into the shoes of your visitors. Perhaps they are regular readers or have just stumbled upon your blog via Google.

You'll want to make sure to cover all different skill sets and technical levels in your customer avatars along with ages and genders. Once you have everything written out, you can start drilling down into the specifics and changing up your website to suit the type of visitors you get.

Don't forget you could check out your Facebook page insights if you have a Facebook page, this will give you useful information to use in your customer avatars including ages and demographics along with a percentage for each part. Maybe you thought you were targeting 24-27-year-olds, though your Facebook page insights say your page is more popular with 18-20-year-olds.

Information like this can help you focus your efforts on your website and fine tuning the website for your target customer avatars. Be careful though not to overthink things. Notice a drop in traffic for a couple of weeks or more? Check out what you changed and get out there and talk to your visitors through social media, find out what they want, what they like, what they don't like.

Using a customer avatar for planning your content

As we've already seen customer avatars are helpful in drilling down aspects you want in your software and planning your user experience. But what about using customer avatars for planning out your content strategy? This is where they are surprisingly helpful.

One of the most vital parts of a customer avatar when writing them for content strategy planning is the demographic and their likes/dislikes. Along with how often you blog yourself.

Maybe you blog three times a week and want to target a different customer avatar once a week, or maybe you have just one customer avatar that is super specific and is the only visitor you're interested in grabbing.

It's not always easy writing a customer avatar, it can be both frustrating and boring. Don't give up, though. Having customer avatars can help put you in the shoes of your users and take that step back from your business and look at it through a different lens.

Have you ever written a customer avatar? What sort of information do you use when writing one? Let us know in the comments below.