What You Need For Your Customer Avatar
⌛ By Kaylin R. Staten ⌛
Meet Lana.
She is an early-30-something from Medium Town, USA. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree and is an integrated communications professional at a local marketing agency. She wants to learn more about communications strategies and tactics without breaking the bank (she has other debt, like school loans, after all). She loves listening to motivational podcasts that fire her up and finding new ideas on Instagram and industry trade publications. She doesn’t have a lot of extra time to level up her skill sets, so she wants to find efficient and inexpensive ways to reach her career goals and objectives.
Lana is one of Hourglass Media’s primary customer avatars. In fact, she was the first one we ever created.
Now, here’s Margaret. She is out more public “example” avatar: a younger millennial single mom who has a full-time job doing something she doesn’t really love. You can learn more about her below.
Download our *free* eBook, The Top 5 Things You Should Know Before Starting A Communications Business, to learn more about starting a communications business or side hustle.
Lana and Margaret could be like you or someone you know. One of them could be who you aspire to be. Or maybe they aren’t like you at all. That’s why we have multiple personalities (no, really) of avatars. Our bottom line is that we want to help unveil the hearts of stories. Any story at any time, whether it’s through public relations assistance, writing or learning opportunities. We want to give you the confidence to create your own Lana or an enhanced version of you and your narrative.
First off, why do customer avatars help us in public relations? We use them to carefully construct who we want to outreach to, or our publics. A public is a group of people who are tied together by some commonality. Our publics are a primary focus of PR efforts. Without them, we wouldn’t have the knowledge and results to back up PR and business-related goals and objectives. As communicators, we use insights behind the scenes to cultivate our PR messages and undergo the RPIE (Research, Planning, Implementation, Evaluation) process.
At Hourglass Media, we focus on five stages of our Customer Avatar that help us probably identify our publics through Research. This avatar complements our social media insights and other analytics to help us identify our target publics.
We construct our customer avatars in the following five categories:
Basic demographic information, such as age, occupation, location, etc.;
Goals and values;
Sources of information;
Challenges and pain points; and
The purchasing process.
Use these five items to help you get started on your own customer avatar!
About our *free* eBook: This FREE eBook was designed for the current (and new!) entrepreneur and the communications professional who may want to start his or her own business, whether it’s freelancing as a side hustle or a full-fledged company started from the ground up. If you’re not sure where to start but know you need to start somewhere, this eBook will give you a beginner’s toolkit. How do you weed through your own aspirations to achieve success? How can you be yourself in the spotlight when you’re used to being behind-the-scenes? You will get the answers to all of this and more when you read through this eBook. I hope you can learn from my missteps and successes #behindthehourglass!
This eBook includes strategies and tactics — as well as a workbook — to help you get started!
Kaylin R. Staten, APR, is an award-winning public relations practitioner and writer based in Huntington, WV with nearly 16 years of professional communications experience. As CEO and founder of Hourglass Media, she uses her compassionate spirit and expertise to delve into the heart of clients’ stories. She is a recovering perfectionist, mental health advocate, wife, cat mom and Leia Organa aficionado. Connect with Kaylin on LinkedIn.