Getting to know your perfect customer is a critical step in the development of your marketing strategy and is based on the premise that knowing your audience is the CORNERSTONE of all of your marketing efforts.

Yet only 5% of small and mid-market companies spend enough time, attention, and effort to understand their customers and those that do enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage.

An Ideal Customer Avatar or Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal prospect.

When complete, it helps you understand the motivating beliefs, fears and secret desires that influence your customer’s buying decisions.

Your customer avatars will help you fine tune your marketing efforts and help you understand why some products sell better than others. It also helps expose important gaps or conflicts in your marketing messages of which you may be unaware.

This one exercise can lead to a dramatic transformation in your business.

– Laura Kinoshita

These Fictional characters are used to understand the needs, values, aspirations, abilities, limitations and character traits of customers and users for the purposes of marketing and creating a better user experience.

In this day and age where people crave personalization from businesses online, it pays to get as specific as possible when defining your target audience.

Any part of the marketing and sales process that “touches” the customer (which is pretty much everything) will improve when you get clear on your customer avatar.