Are you out to ‘compete’ or ‘dominate?’—if you are here to compete, please ignore this marketing piece—otherwise, let’s set new industry standards.

Ave Maria cosmetics was created in 2007 with zero clientele and zero funds to run a marketing campaign. Situated within the suburbs of Nigeria’s capital city, expectations were low.

‘Just try to sell something’ Rose {the store owner} would tell her employees daily.

‘I know expecting profitable bargains from most of the individuals walking through that door is a wild goose chase. Don’t beat yourself over it. We might not be able to make profit now, but we can get to know, understand and interact with consumers. I believe that the relationship we build will determine our profit in the long run.’

Ave Maria built its start-up customer database by interacting with consumers from a personal viewpoint. With every customer that walked into its store, it’s never business as usual, special preference, care, and in some cases, discounts were provided.

A convenience service was designed for consumers who didn’t like visiting the store. This gave Rose the opportunity to collect customer emails, addresses, and phone numbers. By the time Ave Maria created a sales website, they already had over 500 emails for an automated campaign.

Rose was right. Ave Maria didn’t make-up to $10,000 in profit in its first year. It made a little over $20,000 in its second year, but sales had tripled by the third year. Ave Maria built a substantial customer base without running a single marketing campaign.

Photo Credit SpellBrand

Being a Start-up is Quite Frustrating.

You work for over 50 hours a week, and nothing adds up. You are running out of funds, sales and prospects are far off, you are pushing, grinding and believing—still yet, no probable result.

Nobody will point the finger at you if you decide to quit, the same way no one would find you guilty if you keep pushing on. The beginning is always hard, so if you are determined to push on, keep an eye out for the valuable lessons being a start-up comes with.

A first customer is all you need. Grind till you get it. A second customer would become all you need—grind again till you get it. When you beat the odds by making at least ten customers believe that your product or service is worth their time and money, a burden is lifted.

You become familiar with your ideal clients. You know their needs and their wants. Your small client base becomes an attestation that, with the right marketing tactics, your product can bring fulfillment to billions of consumers worldwide.

Now, to the big question, how do you target clients that would be willing to pay you what your product/service is worth?

Customer Avatar—Marketing Strategically.

Relationship marketing is key to understanding consumers. Whether you have a million-dollar to your name or struggling to get by, in as far as you have made a few sales, you can enjoy its benefits.

Ave Maria grew its customer base without spending a dim on marketing campaigns in its first two years.

Optimizing Relationship Marketing in a Digitalised World

Digital marketing is quite different from the regular door to door marketing. Still, the optimization sequence is the same—you can’t become a renowned digital marketer or door to door sales expert without building an interactive relationship with your consumers.

Though the digitalized world is a bit more complex.

Every internet user is bombarded with over 2000 sales messages daily. Trying to dominate by bombarding consumers with random pitches, ads, or sales letter would keep you struggling with the competition—it wouldn’t make you the dominant brand you were designed to be.

To build a client base online via relationship marketing, a sustained ability to efficiently use a customer avatar in creating a marketing strategy is essential.

What is Customer Avatar?

A customer avatar is a graphical representation of your ideal client’s character–a sheet containing well-researched demographics, internal, external, and philosophical problems/features of an ideal client.

A customer avatar is the trusted guarantor you rely on when targeting a specific portion of the market.

You a gym instructor looking for individuals in need of your fitness service—build a customer avatar. You own a beauty store and would like to build a sustainable customer base—build a customer avatar. You are a digital marketer trying to drive traffic—build a customer avatar.

Customer avatars are used in profiling buyers. It helps you know your ideal client and how do you locate them.

“Your ideal customer avatar is a customer profile that is a best-case scenario for your business. Perhaps it’s someone who is a big spender, a regular who consistently returns, someone who speaks well of your business within their networks, or all three.”

                                                                                                                        Sampat

Building a Customer Avatar

You struggled through thick and thin to make a few sales; it’s time to make the information and expertise you acquired useful.

You have a sustained idea of what consumers want—a clear glimpse of their needs, wants, and desires. Get back to your desk; it’s time to research and obtain credible info on finding individuals with the same needs and pain points as your previous clients.

Suppose you deal in high-value consideration products, {providing professional services, or selling a high valued item}; we recommend you rely on the five rings of marketing to get detailed info on how you can build a sustainable customer avatar.

But if like Ave Maria stores, you sell low-value consideration products, build your customer avatar following this basic strategy.

1. Online Research

To know what your customers like and dislike, you have to be involved in their everyday life. You have to know what makes them thick, their pain points, objections, and challenges.

Since you are trying to dominate a digitalized market, your first point of contact should be groups and outlets populated by individuals similar to the few you sold to previously. Note that we are not telling you to stalk your customer’s social profile to find similar individuals—that’s no good and will only piss off potential clients.

During purchase, your customers provided you with basic information such as email, name, phone number, location, age, social media handle, etc. Using this information, find social platforms and online outlets with individuals fitting the same descriptions or interested in similar information.

Compared to Rose, you have a better shot at winning.

During Ave Maria’s first year of operation, Rose created numerous offers to build relationship with her customers, but unlike you, Rose didn’t have the luxury of accessing a customer-centric client base.

You can rely on groups from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social platforms, celebrity fan pages, magazines, blogs, and offline outlets filled with individuals similar, or more influential than the once you worked with previously.

Get into as many as possible. Try to learn and understand your customers’ pain points, needs, and challenges. Write them out and compare them with the possibilities your product is bringing to the market, then weigh the number your product is capable of solving.

2. Build a Psychographic Profile

A psychographic profile contains information about a person’s interests, values, attitude, hobbies, emotions, triggers, lifestyle choices, demographics, etc.

Through online research, we got to know your customers’ fears and wants. But since it’s impossible to build a customer avatar for every potential customer you came across, you have to study your audience and build a psychographic profile.

If your mailing list {customer database} is substantial, you can rely on its demographics to estimate the age range and location of most of your potential clients otherwise, you would have to spend more time {maybe days or weeks} studying the interest of individuals who regularly contribute to the communities and groups you joined and build a psychographic profile based on relevant data.

Endeavor to refer to your already existing customer base. It would enable you decipher some of the basic triggers that might make consumers respond or neglect your marketing message.

3. Give Your Customers a Seat at the Decision-Making Table

Hope you haven’t forgotten what a customer avatar means and why spending time to create it is necessary?

Customer avatars give consumers a seat at the decision-making table—it enables you to design marketing messages that resonate with their every need.

Let’s say you are selling a fitness drug for obese individuals. Everyone on social media is not obese, and without the right message, even those who are obese would gladly scroll past your ad.

You can’t run your email ads or social media campaigns the way you like and expect it to be effective. You have to design it focusing on consumer’s needs, wants, and desires—your message needs to be in line with problems consumers would gladly hand over a $100 bill to solve.

Your experience from online groups will help you understand how useful or useless your product is, or can be to the market {depending on your marketing strategy}.

With your psychographic profile and understanding of your customers’ needs from online research, create a graphical representation of your ideal customer using a customer avatar template.

Use your existing customers’ internal, external, and philosophical problems to checkmate your research analysis. If the pain points and desires you perceived from existing customers resonate with the once your research led you to, you can kickstart your marketing campaign knowing you are on the right track.

Note that many individuals rely on demographics and consumer information from similar businesses when creating their customer avatar. For most start-ups, such services are luxurious. If you can’t afford it, work with the client base you built over time.

In Conclusion

Winning consumers’ hearts is key to establishing brand identity and domination your market.

Just like you, your customers want to be happy. Take time to study their pain points, challenges, fears, and the triggers that can make such plights go away, and you would find them coming back for more of the same.