Creating a Customer Avatar

Why do your customers chose to shop with you? If you don’t know the answer to this question, practice the below exercise to keep differentiating yourself from the pack.

What is a customer avatar?

A customer avatar represents your ideal customer. Creating a customer avatar is important because they are the type of person that purchases your products.

To design your company’s avatar, consider your customer’s demographics, characteristics, hopes, and fears.

• Demographics: What is your customers age, location, gender, job status, education level, economic status, etc.
• Characteristics: What are your customers habits, skills, and skill level? Are they in the market for bulk fabric at low costs, or artisanal fabrics for a range of crafts? These are two very different types of customers.
• Hopes: Your customers hopes are the benefits they receive from your business. Are your customers experienced quilters, or wanting to learn?
• Fears: Your customers fears intersect with your business’s solutions. How can you address your avatars pain points?

Customer data points

We already have demographic information on over 29,000 quilters thanks to the 2021 Quilter’s Survey. The average quilter is a retired female in her 60’s. She already knows how to quilt and starts nine to 11 quilts a year, working on them about 6 hours a week. She shops based off fabric choices and location (around 30 minutes away) and has increased her online shopping about 30%.

To get your business’s demographics, check out your social media analytics, or consider adding Google analytics to your website for additional data points.

Inspiration for this post came from “Customer Avatars and Generosity Marketing” by Flossie Arend published in the October 2022 issues of American Quilt Retailer. Next week we’ll cover the second part of this post: marketing to your avatar.

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