When you are thinking about market research methods to find new products, most people start with a customer avatar. The customer avatar is a description of your ideal customer in detail, from their demographics to psychographics, and might even tell a story. There is much more to marketing to your audience than developing a customer avatar. The avatar is part of the process of getting to know who your customer is, but there is much more to ensure that your marketing gets results.

- Analyze Your Data – Creating avatars is never going to compete with actual data. You have data regarding your audience and your customers inside your email marketing software, your social media platforms, and analytics on your website. You can use google analytics to find out the demographics of people who come to your website and google search console to find out what keywords they used to find you. Tools like Tower Data can tell you the demographics and more of your email subscribers. Knowing the details can help you find the right words and product pricing to sell your product.
- Listen to Your Customers – Find more ways to hear what your customers have to say. Conduct more surveys, host more Q and A sessions, and find more ways to listen to and answer their concerns and questions openly. If you email your customers, you can ask them to reply to a question and the ones that do you can have more in-depth conversations with to find out what they are thinking about. These types of market research methods will give you words and phrases that your ideal customers are using to describe their needs.
- Build Rapport with Your Customers – When you engage more with your customers, it helps with building that affinity that you need. If your customers feel as if they can relate to each other and you, it really builds the community and trust. Having a way to contact you on the website is a great start – this can guide you with what is missing on your site or what people are looking for but cannot find. You can also connect outside of email or your website through videos on social media.
- Learn Your Customers’ Language – The voice you choose for your brand should be in the language the customer speaks. This is not about UK English versus US English; this is about using the tone of voice and personality that will resonate most with your customers. This is how your customers communicate with each other and talk about your product. You want to know this so that you can talk about your product the way that they do. If you call it a soda but your customer calls it a coke, then you won’t be speaking their language and have a barrier to connection.
- Understand What Your Customers’ Values Are – When you truly get to know your customers, you’ll also get to know what their morals, values, and principles are. The more you can match your brand with theirs, the better. Market research methods that give you more insight into this are things like Facebook groups and other forums where your customers hang out. Knowing your mission and values for your company goes a long way to communicate to your customers that your values as a company and brand align with theirs.
- Conduct Regular Client Research – Don’t research just once and think you know everything. Keep checking the data on a regular basis so that you are always up to date about what they want and how they express it. Market research methods like google analytics can be reviewed on a weekly or monthly basis to see what is changing and reviewing your ad spend data and keyword information will keep you from wasting money.
- Put Yourself in Your Customers’ Place – This can be difficult to do sometimes, even if you are technically a member of your audience. The reason is that your thoughts and opinions are very subjective and may not relate to your customers at all. Try to put yourself in their place, but don’t assume you know. As a matter of fact, it can be difficult to understand what it’s like to be on the outside or a new person in your business space, so when you write your customer avatar, make sure you describe their problem in detail so everyone knows and remembers what it’s like to be looking for the solution that you provide with your product.
- Study Your Competitors – Continuing to study your competition can give you more insight into your customers too. The more inside information you can get about your competitors, the better. Look at their work and watch closely what they do. Pay attention to their ads and what they are driving traffic to, as well as what social media is getting attention. You might think of this as spying, but it’s just one of the market research methods you can implement, and as long as you don’t just copy them, you are helping your business by staying on top of the current environment.
- Learn Your Customers’ Buying Journey – One way to look at your customers is via their buying journey. In fact, if you do create avatars, it’s important to create more than one because a customer in the awareness stage is completely different from a customer in the decision stage or delight stage. So think through what problems and issues lead to them searching for the solution you provide, but also focus on what they might be trying before finding your solution. This can help you to bring awareness to your product sooner in the process and build your company’s reputation as an expert in the field.
- Create an Ideal Customer Avatar – Ok, so I said there is more to market research methods than just doing a customer avatar, but you need to have one as part of your process. You also need to know exactly who your ideal customer is, so it helps to create a description of a fictitious ideal customer profile. Who exactly is the person who will get the most from your products or services? What are they thinking and doing that lead them to your product? Describe that person and adjust it as you get access to data once you make sales.
Researching your target audience is one of the most important ways you can inform your overall marketing strategy, the content you develop, the products you create, and so much more. Take the time to incorporate more of these ideas in your market research methods so that your avatars and customer profiles become even more effective.
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