You see, in general, we know customer avatars are vital to a successful promotional strategy but few also understand how they work in practice.
And this results in pages posting chaotically, trying to reach everyone with the same message.
No good results.
And it makes sense that they won’t as long as no change takes place.
So today we’re taking you step-by-step through how to use customer avatars to promote your business online in Social Media: on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
What do you get when you do this?
You get to the categories of profitable public with potential, stop wasting time and money on content that doesn’t work and you can get the maximum of your paid campaign budget in social media.
Contents: How to promote yourself on social media with customer avatars
- Your customers stay on different channels, where they have different behaviors
- What customer avatars look like for social media
- How to build customer avatars for social media
- How to promote yourself in social media based on customer avatars
1. Your customers stay on different channels, where they have different behaviors
It’s not news that every customer, lead or user your business interacts with is a unique person.
With different needs, challenges, qualities and desires.
Targeting them personally, each individually, through social media channels I mean, is impossible.
In posts or ads you also don’t have such advanced personalization opportunities as in email or in the customer account, for example.
And this is where customer avatars come in.
Basically, these are fictional representations of a group of people with similar demographics, interests, habits, needs or problems in relation to your business.
They are portraits of your ideal customers.
Maybe you want to target young people. Or maybe millennials. Or both.
Regardless of your target audience, making customer avatars specific to each category will help you improve your promotion strategy, on the channels where each avatar is used to consume content.
For example:
- Target millenials On Instagram, reels, story and TikTok.
- Target baby boomers on Facebook and Facebook Watch with posts and videos.
- Target Generation Z with videos on TikTok or campaigns on Twitch.
- Target loyal customers with posts, giveaways and dedicated campaigns in the Facebook group or on Discord.
Or, depending on your interests, you can identify those channels where your audience lives:
- DIY, pets, cosmetics – Instagram Reels, YouTube, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Watch
- Reading, comics, art – Instagram posts
- Mechanics, construction, design – YouTube, IG Reels, TikTok
Social media client avatars help you find and push exactly the right content to get a reaction from your targeted user category.
For example, you can use a humorous approach on TikTok to deliver a message. But you can deliver the same message with sincerity and seriousness on Facebook to a different type of customer.
When you realize that your posts and ads don’t have a “universal size” – doesn’t fit the same approach for everyone in your audience – only then do you begin to get the results you want.
2. What customer avatars for social media look like
There is no exact formula for what customer avatars should look like in general or for social media.
However, the more detailed information you have about your customers, the more real, not on assumptions, the better.
Below you can see one of the popular templates for creating a client avatar:
Each of the customer groups you target is extremely nuanced.
The fact that you note and keep track of common characteristics helps you create more persuasive marketing messages and high-impact campaigns.
If you don’t know which audience you’re investing your money in, you’re basically throwing it out the window.
On top of that, if you don’t go by audience needs and characteristics, how will you know what marketing to do?
You have no choice but to copy your competitors… which will end badly.
So, I recommend that you periodically look at your customers and leads and create/update customer avatars with details like:
- Age
- Sex
- Marital status
- Financial power
- Location
- Interests
- Habits
- Favorite channels
- Favourite brands
- Problems and needs
- Goals
Okay, now the question that remains is: how do you find the information you need to create social media avatars?
Exactly, you look at the channels you use and take the data from there. Let’s see how.
3. How to build customer avatars for social media
If you’ve already had an online store for a while, surely you have at least an idea of what your ideal customer avatars look like.
Maybe you’ve even already made one, but in which you’ve incorporated several avatars without realizing it.
The advice you are about to receive will help you, whether you are now making your first customer avatars, or if you identify mistakes in existing avatars and want to correct them.
#1. View customer and sales reports in the platform
In your shop, section reports, you find statistics and data specific to your store and audience from which you can draw a lot of information:
- Sales report by region
- Sales report by cities
- Discount Orders Report
- Voucher Orders Report
- Recurring Customers Report
- Top products report
- Report Products in Wishlist
- Report Top Categories
And more, depending on your type of business. Also look in Google Analytics & Google Search Console.
You may notice that a particular blog post is attracting a high volume of traffic to your site.
Ask yourself: What customer need or challenge affects that content performing very well?
That’s valuable information to add to your customer avatar.
Also look at the social media channels through which traffic is coming into the site in a large proportion.
Helps you prioritize channels so that you invest your resources where you get results.
#2. Check the statistics of your social media pages
Your own social media channel pages (pretty much all platforms) provide you with valuable audience data.
From insights and analytics you can learn specific things for each channel, starting from demographics, top pages your audience follows, best time to post for performance, impact of posts, engagement etc.
And better? You get access to them for free and they are customized specifically for the page – they are not approximations resulting from general statistics.
See, for example, the difference in reactions to the same post between FB and IG (keep in mind that you can’t draw any conclusions yet, as long as you don’t see the results in the insights from a transactional point of view):
#3. Use dedicated analytics tools for social media
There are tools, both free (or partially free) and premium that you can use to analyse your audience on your social media pages.
For example:
Use them and at least take information from the free demo period to strengthen your customer avatars.
#4. Invite people to answer your questions directly
Once you’ve got the data from all possible sources, interact directly with your customers and ask them:
- What kind of content would they like to see on your page?
- What do they like about your products/shop?
- What would you improve about your products / shop?
- What challenges do you face?
Don’t underestimate the importance of this process.
Ask surveys, posts, polls, etc., and you’ll find out more quickly and easily important things to note in your customer avatars.
4. How to promote yourself on social media based on customer avatars
Let’s say that, based on the steps we developed above, you managed to sketch your customer avatars.
Good.
From that point on, the next step is to start using the data you’ve accumulated as part of your paid social media posts and ads strategy.
- Adapt your content strategy based on customer avatars – Are you producing content and marketing materials that respond to the information in your avatars? Does the content help solve the problem or meet the identified need? Make sure you have useful and relevant content, don’t do it just for the sake of it.
- Segment your audience for posts and ads – Take information from avatars to set the right audiences for each type of approach in your marketing materials.
- Adapt your brand voice to your channels based on avatars – it’s quite possible that one channel’s approach won’t work for another, even if you’re delivering the same message. It will take a while to find the right formulas, but once that happens, it becomes routine.
The moral of the article?
The more information you have about your customers, the better.
Social media customer insights help you keep track of everything you need to have a posting and advertising strategy that works and has the best chance of getting the results you want: interactions, posts, subscriptions, sales and retention.
You can make content that your audience will resonate with. And from there, the possibilities are endless.
