How to Identify Your Client Avatar and Attract More Qualified Leads

In today’s digital world, your client avatar says a lot more about your business than you may realize. It’s gone beyond creating a target audience and a target customer to generating an actual client avatar, or fictional person that represents the customer that you want to serve. 

A lot of companies are tempted to jump right into marketing without any planning. They want to start writing blogs, creating landing pages, and doing all that other fun marketing stuff that needs attention. The problem is, of course, that if you don’t take the time to define an audience and create your client avatar, you’re going to seriously hurt your chances of success. 

Here’s how you can ensure that you’ve got a great client avatar in place without spending a lot of time on research and planning. If you do it right, it should only take about five simple steps. 

To assist, we’ve created our own avatar—Carol Client—to showcase how this process works. 

Step one: Identify the goals and values of your ideal client 

Remember, these aren’t your goals, but the goals of your target customer or client. Think about the goals first—what does Carol Client want to achieve by working with your company? For example, if you are in the business of insurance, you might find clients that want to save money on insurance products and services but still get the coverage that they deserve. 

That’s a standard, but effective goal to have. 

Then, you have to look at their values. This is where you’ll need to look at what your clients are focused on and what elements they use most in business. For example, Carol might appreciate the value of personal service and be budget-minded in her efforts, but willing to pay for what matters. 

These two elements can help you drive the creation of your product, as well as create valuable marketing copy and more. 

Step two: Find their information sources

You can’t reach out to Carol and market to her directly if you don’t know where she gets her information and marketing messages. You have to market to your audience where they are. Do they like blogs? Are they big on social media? Who and what do they look to for expert advice and assistance? 

This can help you figure out exactly how you can approach Carol and deliver the best advertising possible. Consider doing this using “but no one else would” as a statement to define what Carol would do. 

Step three: Write down the demographics 

You might think that this is one of those lame exercises where you aren’t going to gain anything. However, you’d be sorely wrong. Using Carol Client, write out all of the baseline data that you have:

• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Kids
• Occupation
• Education
• Etc.

Essentially, you’re creating a “picture” of your client that will help you get into their head and market to them better. 

It’s the difference between saying “we market to middle-class vehicle owners” and saying “Carol is a 45-year-old woman who is single and has two kids. She has a Ph.D. in marketing and earns around $85,000 per year. When she shops for products, she likes to ensure that she’s getting the best deal and working with the best company.”

Step four: List challenges and pain points

Now that you know more about Carol Client, it’s time to dig into the challenges, pain points, and issues that she has that your product or service could solve. While you could explore all of the client’s pain points, it’s best to stick to the ones that you can solve. 

This ensures that you can create better copy and fill in holes in your pitches and marketing so that you can let clients know that you will solve their problems, regardless of what those might be. You should make sure that you classify and categorize pain points when you can to help narrow down your client avatar even further. 

Step five: Identify potential objections 

It’s important to take the time to find potential objections. There’s no way that you will create a product or service that is so great that people will just use it. Therefore, you have to think like a consumer. Common objections include things like:

• Price
• Service delivery format
• Difficulty purchasing (make the sale easy!)
• Does it solve all the pain points?
• How much work does the purchase process take?

Sometimes it helps if you can put yourself in the shoes of your competition. Make sure that you anticipate all of the potential objections and define why your customer wants to work with you right now. Doing this will help you create better marketing materials and overcome objections all at once. 

And remember, throughout the entire process, you should be making notes and writing all of this down. By the time you’re done, you’ll have a well-defined client avatar for Carol Client or any other client that you choose to market to. 

Partner with Smith.ai to create effective outreach campaigns for your client avatars

Now that you have a better idea of who your ideal client is, you can market to them more effectively. Of course, you are only one person, and you may not have the means to reach your audience in the ways that you had hoped. When you partner with the team at Smith.ai, we can help with outreach campaigns that target your client avatar and more.

We’ll even offer assistance with lead intake and qualification once they start coming in, along with 24/7 phone answering services, live website chat, and more. We can also take care of scheduling and other admin needs, and create a custom strategy to help you manage it all. 

Schedule a consultation to learn more about how the virtual receptionists at Smith.ai can help you reach your target audience and manage the new leads. You can also reach us at hello@smith.ai or (650) 727-6484.