Create a customer avatar profile using empathy
20 September 2018 | Marketing
Who is your customer?
Creating a customer avatar has been widely practiced by many marketers to understand deeply who their ideal customer are. This is include demographics, behavior & psychographic to name few variables.
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Demographic : Name, age, jobs, address and etc.
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Behavior : Likes, interest and so on
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Psychographic : Lifestyle, life stage, personality, attitudes, opinions
To go even deeper, understanding our ideal customer pain points, desire and aspiration will help us serve our customer better than the competitors. However, it's a bit challenging for some marketers who do not know how to identify human behaviors and emotions in general. This prevents them from identifying their customer wants and needs which can delay executing marketing strategies.
In this article, we're going to look at empathy and its advantage for marketers in understanding more about their ideal customer. In addition, you will know how to use empathy to identify your ideal customer pain points and how to answer questions about your ideal customer based on available templates.
Empathy
According to Psychology Today, empathy is the experience of understanding another person's thoughts, feelings, and condition from their point of view, rather than from your own.
For example: your colleague is upset with you for not telling her about the project and including her in the decision making.
You may take this situation lightly because:
a) Your her senior and you don't need to report anything to her.
b) You have so many things to do and you don't have the time to think about her feelings.
c) She should not get upset at all. She just has to do what she is told.
The problem with this situation is as a leader you are not even considering how she felt when you excluded her from the working activities. This shows that her role is invaluable making her like she is not a part of the team. This will result her resenting you, not putting so much effort in her work and finding ways to sabotage your position so she get promoted or worst get you fired.
What good will come out of this situation? Nothing!
This situation occurs because you failed to notice her emotional state and did not handle the situation properly.
This is an example of a human being who lacks empathy.
Now how does empathy applies to marketing?
Well first of all, if you're building a new business, chances are you don't have any customers. How are you supposed to serve your customer if you don't know who they are? What product / services they need? Why they need your product / services in the first place?
The answer is of course "You don't know", hence for creating a customer avatar profile before any marketing activities should take place.
Customer avatar
Infusionsoft defines customer avatar like this:
A fictional, generalized representations of the buyer persona most likely to purchase from you.
Before you even begin creating a customer avatar, many available templates online require you to answer abstract questions which involved deep level of thinking. For example questions like:
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What are their concerns related to your product/ services?
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What happened in the past that let them to this point ?
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What about the product or services matter to this person?
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How does it make their life better?
How are you supposed to answer these questions, when you have never met him or her?
That's when using an empathetic skill comes in handy.
The dangerous of not creating a customer avatar
Loosing money
According to one Entrepreneur Asia writer, not having a clearly defined customer avatar can result in a business losing money. When you're trying to attract everyone, you're attracting no one.
This is because your message doesn't stands out in the crowd. You're ideal customer don't understand your message because you're too busy trying to attract everyone that your ideal customer ends up not seeing your message at all.
How to use empathy when creating a customer avatar profile
First of all, you need to understand their pain points. To do this, try putting yourself in their shoes. If you were them, how would you feel or act in relation to your product offerings?
For the sake of imagination, you need to stop being you and be your ideal customer for a moment. Once you're him or her, you'll find answering the customer avatar questions on the template easily.
Your main job as a marketer
Your job is to understand you customer inside and out. His pain, desire, aspiration, wants, needs, short term and long term goals and so on.
If you failed to do this, your product or services may have no value in the market. It is best to attract the early adopter and let them (your ideal customer) do the marketing for you willingly.
Get started
Now, if you want to learn how to create customer avatar profile, these websites offer free templates for you to get started:
Need examples
If you want examples, Optinmonster Contrete offers well define customer avatar back story that you can adopt in your customer avatar write up.
Next step
Creating a customer avatar profile is crucial for new businesses and the survival of your business. If you take this lightly, you may find hiccups in the future and by that time it will be too late and you have lost thousands.
To create a clear and defined customer avatar profile, it starts with understanding your ideal customer by being in their shoes.
If you find empathy challenging, I recommend you watch movies that trigger strong and painful emotion such as:
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The pursuit of happineess (2006)
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Into the wild (2007)
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My sister's Keeper (2009)
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Django Unchained (2012)
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Les Miserables (2012)
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The impossible (2012)
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12 years of slave (2013)
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Still Alice (2014)
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Unbroken (2014)
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Lion (2016)
These are some movies that I've watched that triggered my emotional pain points. I used that pain point to understand my target readers so I can write content of value for them.
You can do the same.
Moving Forward
Creating a customer avatar can be challenging especially if it’s your first time. The only way to create with ease is to put yourself in your ideal customer shoes.
Without judgement, try to think like them. What are they like? What do they like? What are their pain points?
Chances are you and your ideal customer shares the same value. So don’t be afraid to confront your ideal customer by confronting yourself first.