In this week’s article I break down what is an audience avatar, why audience avatars are beneficial for your business. I also dive into some best practices to get the most out of the avatars without the burn out!
This is a lengthier article, so feel free to jump around using the menu!
What Is An Audience Avatar?
An audience avatar is a snapshot of what an individual member of your audience or ideal client might look like. It’s a way to brainstorm audience insights that will be helpful to your design process.
You can include information on their learning preferences (online or in person, self-paced or directed), goals, why they are seeking what you offer, what motivates them, and what might they need to overcome.
Why Use An Audience Avatar?
While this information can also be created as spreadsheet, or list of audience characteristics the audience avatar give you the additional benefit of feeling like you are working with an individual. Adding personal demographic information, stock photos, quotes reminds us that we are working with diverse group of individuals, not just a faceless, homogenous group.
Creating courses and workshops for the virtual world can lead to us losing site of the fact we are building products for living, breathing, individuals.
Audience avatars help realign our perspective. They remind us that we are developing projects for others, not ourselves. And that our audience, our clients are unique individuals with their own goals, challenges, and motivations.
Audience Avatar Best Practices
Make 3 Avatar Profiles
The purpose of audience avatars is to give you a view of your audience. And each member of your audience is unique, they have their own needs, goals, challenges, etc. So only if you only create one profile, you won’t get the representation that you need to inform your design. Three profiles will get you more variability. And make sure that you are create three unique profiles. Make the characters diverse: give them different backgrounds, experience, motivations, and pain points. Even if you have a very specific niche, there will still be diversity amongst your audience!
So if three is good, is more better? No! Any more than three could lead you to become overwhelmed and confused. Not to mention you would be taking time away from creating and designing! If you’re like me and enjoy creating audience avatars make sure you give yourself a firm cut off of three profiles (and maybe set a timer!).
Don’t get hung up on minor details
I recently did a training on best practices inside my group and I gave this example:
Your potential client likes to go to coffee shops when going through self directed courses. They order their favorite drink, iced latte with hazelnut, while they are there.
Which piece is relevant to include in your audience avatar? The fact that they go to coffee shops while learning or the exact drink that they order?
While the drink info might be interesting, it’s not going to help you design and won’t give you any useful insight into your audience. However, knowing that some of your clients will be in public places when using your course or attending your workshop will. Possible design tips based on this would be to provide transcripts or closed captions – also necessary for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
One detail that I do like to use and suggest others use as well is a personal quote that speaks a bit about their personality or personal life and their “why” for seeking what you offer. Here’s an example from one of my audience avatars, Sue: “My ‘why’ for starting my business is to provide the means for creating family experiences.”
If you have trouble coming up with a quote, use AI to help. Try a prompt that looks something like this:
Please provide a personal quote for an audience avatar. The product I am creating the avatar for is a _________ that ___________. The avatar has a background in _______, and [personal detail or challenge].
Or if the AI isn’t helping or not something you like to use come up with your own way of giving your avatar more individuality. Just remember to keep to high level insights rather than minor details! The whole purpose the personal quote and insights is to make the avatars seem like real people who might be a member of your group or potential client!
Keep the profile on hand!
Keep them on hand once you have created them! Don’t just toss them in a folder and forget them. Make sure to use your avatars once you’ve made them. We don’t want to agonize or overthink because of the avatars but we do want to use them as a reference. Think of the avatars as data – how would you use market research to inform your product design or content creation. The avatars are another tool.
Here’s some tips for after you’ve created your avatars:
- Print them out and keep on your desk. – This is my preference.
- Save them to your desktop
- Give them their own folder
- Ask them questions, or ask questions for them. “Would Susie Avatar be able to use this product?” “What would be the best way for Allen Avatar to access this information? A one hour video? Or would six, 10 minute videos be better?”
- Pull them out and read them over when you get stuck!
- Refer back to them if you’ve gotten carried away in the amount of content or information you are including and need to decide what to keep and what to use in a later project!
Audience Avatar Resources
Audience Centered Design Bootcamp
Want to work through your audience avatar with others?
The Audience Centered Design Bootcamp is happening next month, July 8th-11th at 4pm EST. We will spend Day 2 working together to develop our avatars.
You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions, brainstorm, and share ideas. This bootcamp is designed to be a cooperative experience so you’ll also have the opportunity to meet new people and share a bit about what you do!
For more information and to register:
Empathizing With Your Audience Workbook
Let Audience Insights Lead to Lasting Client Relationships
This workbook is designed to help you uncover and connect to your audience member’s motivations, goals, challenges, and needs. Part two of the workbook contains avatar templates and an example.
Creative Learning and Design Collective Facebook Group
In the Creative Learning and Design Collective I help coaches who want to build engaging instructional materials that will sell by sharing easy to implement actions and tips for an audience-centered approach to design.
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