Building Your Customer Avatar: The 1st Step in a Powerful Marketing Strategy
Let me ask you a question.
“Do you know who your ideal customer is?”
A worrying amount of aesthetic business owners don’t give any serious thought to this question. They assume their ideal customer or “patient” is anyone willing to walk through the door and have a treatment, but that’s just not the case.
Meet your customer avatar.
Also known as a customer profile or persona, your customer avatar is – put simply – a profile of your perfect patient. In order to develop a Marketing Strategy that will produce real results, you need to find, diagnose and target all of your efforts towards this customer avatar.
If you’re not talking to the right audience, using the correct tone of voice, in the right media spots or at the right time – you’ll miss them. Suddenly, your Marketing campaigns are falling on deaf ears and the Marketing budget you’ve worked so hard to secure is slowly seeping down the drain.
Understanding your customer avatar goes beyond just their age and gender, though. We need to get to know these profiles inside out. Without this, it becomes incredibly difficult to target your marketing in a strategic and accurate way, and you’re back to those deaf ears.
So, what information do you need to know about your avatar?
- Demographics
These details are the belt and braces of every avatar. Here, you need to flesh out the basics of a person, like:
- Geographic Location
- Age
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Marital Status
Why this is important: Talking to a single 25-year-old living in Central London with a Fitzpatrick Skin Type of V is going to be extremely different to talking to a married 60-year-old living in the Countryside with a Fitzpatrick Type of I.
- Working Life
Where does your avatar work? We need to establish their work status and ethic. Are they working full-time, perhaps they work for themselves. What industry are they in?
Why this is important: if we can establish their likely disposable income and downtime, we can make strategic decisions on what treatments may be of interest and when they are able to enjoy these.
- Goals & Values
Next, we need to get to the bottom of what motivates somebody. Whilst some avatars will be motivated by money, others will be more family-driven, or appreciate a nice holiday each year. Let’s find out what’s valuable to them.
Why this is important: By getting to the heart of what matters to them, you can target your Marketing messages around these topics.
- Pain-Points
Now we know the motivators and positives in their lives, we need to consider the flipside. What do they find challenging in their lives? Pain-points could be anything like a lack of confidence or time for themselves.
Why this is important: If we know what each avatars pain-points are, then we can develop Marketing messages that help them to overcome these.
- Information Sources
In a world full of media and advertising, we all have spaces where we are more open to consuming this. For some, TV reins strong where-as others prefer to go digital. Where are your patients going online and what media are they consuming offline too?
Why this is important: There’s no good in creating innovative Marketing campaigns that speak to our audiences’ goals and challenges if we are positioning them in the wrong channels. We need to make sure these messages reach them fast and consistently.
- Objections
The final step is helping our avatars to overcome any potential objections they may have to becoming your customer. These may be financial, location-based, anxiety-driven or something else entirely. How can you overcome this in your Marketing messaging?
Why this is important: Objection tends to be the final step in a buyer’s purchasing journey. Even if they are sold on the product or service, people often talk themselves out of things. If you can anticipate these objections in advance, you can overcome them before they even begin.
How do I create my first Avatar?
I really believe in the importance of customer avatars, so I have developed a free eBook and template to walk you through creating these. Follow this link to read the eBook and follow the guide on page 4 to complete each of the personality sections discussed here.
Before you know it, you’ll have built your first, second and potentially third avatar!
Email sara@clinicsuccess.com for more information or help with customers avatars for your aesthetic business.
