All the marketing in the world won’t produce results if you don’t follow this crucial step first and that is understanding who you are marketing to.

Does your business have a client avatar? If not read on to find out why you need one and how to create your own.

Why

Marketing experts will tell you that you need to know who your message is being sent to before you begin to market, yet so many businesses waste time and money marketing to everyone instead of just their target client.

Your message won’t be heard, if you are speaking to everyone who has a pulse, instead you need to understand exactly who your customer is, in order to talk to them, and only them.

Take a look at a regular coke ad. You generally see, fit, healthy young adults, sharing a coke with friends in Summer. Who do you think they are marketing to?

Likewise, a Huggies nappy ad, they aren’t advertising to everyone.

These big guys know what they are doing because for each of their products, they have a client avatar, or in other words, they know everything they can about their target market.

You do too! To avoid your message being lost in the crowd, you have to talk to the one person you are targeting and in doing so all the people that fit your avatar will be able to hear the message you are sending.

How

Creating a marketing avatar is simple, firstly you need to know who it is you are targeting, for example in our building business, we were targeting homeowners looking to extend their home.

Further from this, we understood that we work to a particular financial bracket for the best margin for our business and with these two pieces of information we were able to create our avatar.

Now you can do this exercise looking forward, ie. to who you’d like your ideal client to be or looking backwards ie. Who your ideal clients have been.

But now you need to begin to get specific. Take time to list out your ideal customer’s traits. For example, age, income bracket, gender, marital status, industry, family, values, beliefs and hobbies to name a few.

Now that you have this basic understanding you can really nut it down to your exact client, that single person you will be speaking to. Create their name, age, gender, hair colour/style, marital status, home and who lives there, income, occupation, life beliefs, favourite books, tv shows, websites they look at, and what social media they use.

Once you’ve got this information you can begin to understand how they may think and feel and from this you can understand how to speak to the ideal client you are trying to find.

In our case, we were speaking to Claire. Claire was a stay at home Mum, who’s husband earned $150k a year in a demanding office job. Claire had 2 kids in a local private middle school and a lot of free time. She was a lover of Hamptons style décor and shopped at boutique local shops to create a home for her family. Claire and her family would holiday overseas at Christmas each year. She played social tennis, and her daughter attended dancing lessons, her son played rugby. Claire drove an Audi Q5 and her husband drove a BMW 5 series. Claire was 42 and has a degree. Claire and the family would attend church on a regular basis.

You get the idea, and now you can (hopefully) see how we were able to target all our advertising to Claire. We knew what she did each day, where she spent her time, and we could ensure that our advertising hit where our client was.

This exercise worked so well for us, we spent 12 months targeting this ideal client and still reap work some 4 years later from that initial campaign.

So in short, before you spend a bunch of money marketing your business, be sure you know who you are marketing to.