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Avatar – Persona – Customer – Who are they?

Who is your customer and what are they wanting to buy?

When you know the answer, you’ll know what to offer.  We asked that question for our retail gallery/gift shop in a tourist-based economy.  We didn’t have a name for them, but we were constantly asking stoppers what brought them in, were they seeking a certain item, can we help you find something or someplace?

Our list of identifiers looked something like this –

• For Male or Female
• Where’s Home
• Maximum Budget
• Hobbies and/or Interests
• Occupations
• What Do You Do?
• How they travel
• Is this a gift or a remembrance of your trip?
• Thank you gift for the pet sitter

Conversations in the store helped reinforce our target customer and gave us guidelines for what our offers should be.

Online offers from a service-based business are a little more difficult.  The biggest problem is not having a direct dialog and the difficulty of getting feedback or desires.  What problem are they trying to solve?

In order to create your first customer, you’ll need to spend time thinking and writing about a type of personal that you’re either attempting to reach or who is already a customer.  You might go as far as creating e description of the person including gender, age, nationality, financial status, education, goals, what problems they are having and what objections they might have to your product.

Be as specific as you can, pretend this person is a family member and you want to help them solve a problem (that is why you’re in business.  You might need more than one persona, but focus your writing on one persona at a time.

I’m in the process of adding a shopping cart to my online store, Jana’s Journals, and I found a plug in for Woo Commerce that will allow customers to create a wish list.  I’m hoping that will allow me to know what they’re looking for that I’m not offering, because I can fix that.

Ready to create your Persona?  

P.S.  Pandemic Personas are different and require empathy if you want to catch the attention of your ideal customer.  A survey by Pepsico and reported by marketing dive indicated over half (56%) of those surveyed said that brands using their marketing to address the pandemic is an act of empathy.  The top five ways consumers say brands can be empathetic  are:

• Treating people with respect (52%)
• Treating people like human beings (50%)
• Listening to people (43%)
• Caring about people (41%)
• And acknowledging when the brand is wrong (37
  %)

However, the most valued form of brand empathy identified by Pepsico was responding to workers and the community first.

Good information you’ll want to take to heart.