Avatars: they don’t just Airbend anymore (or interact with the Na’vi on Pandora). Marketing experts are using them to define specific targets in order to inform content, traffic, and types of advertising. The idea is that the customer will have a better experience when an advertiser has a clearer definition of exactly what the customer wants. You, as an advertiser, can foster this experience by creating and analyzing a customer ‘avatar.’
Spend time thinking about who exactly you want to serve your ads towards. The more characteristics you can attribute to your target audience, the better you can serve an ad that is impactful and resonates with them. The point of avatar building is not to whittle down human complexities, nor is it to extrapolate extraneously in order to create a multi-dimensioned potential customer. By using simple consumer personas, you can understand enough about your customers to serve them a meaningful ad: essentially, every customer wants, values, and is annoyed by something; they live somewhere and consume affinity goods. Take these stats and convert them into a real customer with a real story.
In all cases, it pays to think niche when developing a customer avatar. It’s better to create one, fully-fleshed-out, ideal imaginary customer and target your ads towards them; do this rather than trying to cast a wide net by targeting based on a few simple characteristics. Think of attributions that fans of your brand do or like that no one else does (e.g., everyone uses a hairbrush, and some people really care about their hair, but customer avatar ‘Becky’ only uses fancy hairbrushes that nobody else uses).
So, sit down and make a list of what your customer does that makes them unique. Understand their daily schedule, their pain points and what else they purchase in order to create a well-rounded ‘ideal customer.’ This is your target customer — your customer avatar — and the audience you should be targeting towards in order to have maximum success in advertising. It’s not enough to know thine audience, one must know about thine audience as well in order to effectively communicate the importance of their brand.
