How to Design Your Own Client Avatar
For Wellness Practitioners
Ideal Client Avatars – also called “Ideal Client Personas” – are key components to any successful business strategy and marketing plans. Clearly understanding who your ideal audience is and being able to identify what they need and want is fundamental to you being able to provide them with the appropriate content, product or service.
An Ideal client avatar is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. Although you may end up using an actual client/customer as inspiration while building your persona(s), these avatars are not real people but rather fictitious representations of an ideal group you wish to market to. They carry specific characteristics that represent your ideal audience you wish to target.
Creating client avatar is a very straightforward process and is worth the time to do it right. Build your client personas, while making sure you cover all the important information you’ll want to include such as demographic, interests, goals, pain points and buying habits to name a few.
If you’re just starting out, you will need to take time to reflect on who you want to serve and what characteristics your audience will have. At this stage, you may be doing a lot of guesswork but it is still extremely useful to clearly identify who you’re going to market to. It can be helpful to begin with identifying people in your circle who may fit your ideal client profile and send them a short survey to gather some of the data you may need.
If you already have a following or a business going, you can draw from your existing client data-base for the answers to who your ideal client(s) is/are. Using online metric tools, analytics software, client surveys or your personal observations, you can create a detailed list and outline key characteristics your clientele possess, helping you clearly and accurately create your persona.
It helps to give your persona a name and a face, which you can do using free stock photography from sites like pexels.com or unsplash.com. The idea is to think about and talk to this persona like it’s a real person. Use language they would use, colours they would like, communicate on platforms they frequent or create content the way you know they like to consume it.
Since different groups of people might buy your product or service, you may need more than one persona. Personally, I recommend creating at least three different personas, representing 3 different potential client groups. This helps you broaden your reach so you can cater your marketing materials to these specific groups of people your personas represent. You can even create an “anti-persona” who will represent those who you absolutely do not serve as this can be helpful too in building your communications and content.
You’ve created your avatar, now what?
- Create your content from your audience’s perspective.
- Put yourself in their shoes and speak to them in a format and manner that resonates with them. Use your personas to help shape your content. Everything from how it’s presented (is it written? Audio? Video? Combination of these?) to the words and voice used in delivery all matter and can help you better communicate with the people you want to work with. Make sure your marketing campaign addresses the pain points you identified in your personas and highlight your possible solutions to their challenges. Build your marketing strategy around meeting your audience’s needs and goals, and you’ll connect deeper with your client-base, creating relationships based on trust.
- Target your ideal clients more effectively by curating content and marketing materials catered specifically for each of your personas.
- This helps you reach each persona group more effectively and helps draw attention from people who are already seeking the product, service or solution you already have to offer. Let them know you understand their challenge and you’re able to help by being specific and deliberate in your messaging. Use your personas to help guide your content or marketing strategy effectively and help attract clients/customers to your business!
- Increase your ROI and maintain momentum by continually updating your personas and maintaining consistency in your marketing content and delivery channels.
- As you curate more refined and specialized content and offerings based on your personas, make sure to take time to analyze the data you receive to notice what’s working, what is not and maintain your momentum. As you progress, you may need to adapt your personas or create new ones to better represent the data or your discoveries throughout the process. Be open to change and willing to continually refine and test your personas.
If you need help with your digital marketing strategy or marketing, get in touch and let’s explore options on helping you optimize your efforts and see tangible results!