This has already been happening in a traditional business setting for many years. For example, the golf course and club is renowned as a social setting for meeting business contacts and new clients with a mutual interest.

So if your marketing avatar were to include someone who likes to play golf, it would be logical to use the setting of the golf course and its clubhouse as the ideal social setting to connect with new clients.

However, updating this method of attracting clients and making business connections can be a much more effective means if we take a more determined approach.

If we can define our Avatar not so much in terms of their social habits (such as whether they play golf or not), but in terms of their life values and what they really care about, then we are able to forge much more valuable connections.

This will result in realising that the avatar we seek to identify is in many ways a mirror image of ourselves, with similar values. We can then attract clients who will approach us because they are a reflection of ourselves and have a similar purpose in life.

Therefore, when we develop an avatar for marketing purposes, we may well end up developing a picture that is very similar to ourselves. If we include in our avatar those quite profound values that we expect to find in our clients this will ensure that the clients we attract are those that that we can work best with and who will gain most value from our products and services. This will result in a client base who will respond positively to us because they see us as a reflection of themselves.

In order to identify an Avatar, many aspects need to be considered, including:

• Demographic and geographical information such as where they live, how old they are, their family size and status.
• Their work and professional networks.
• Their hobbies and leisure interests - what they enjoy doing and what they don’t like to do, the sports they play, where they like to eat out, where they go on holiday.
• Psychographic characteristics – what makes them tick, what their social and moral values are, their aspirations and needs, who they socialise with and a wide range of other behavioural characteristics.

A good starting point in developing an Avatar is to look at existing clients in order to identify those that we consider our “best clients” – the ones that we enjoy working with. Use these “ideal” clients as a basis for developing an Avatar.

We then need to think of some more qualities that we would consider in an ideal client and add these to the Avatar in order to make it specific to the business or service that we offer.

This should result in gaining a clear and specific concept of the person that we sell our goods/services to and enable us to target potential clients with key messages.

We will know their hopes and desires, the needs and their problems and address these matters by designing a solution that offers the “perfect service” for the “perfect client”.

We will be able to identify who to target as clients and concentrate our efforts on developing relationships with those people. This should also result in gaining an insight into whether some people are really not worth the effort of targeting if they are unlikely to become somebody that we can have a mutually agreeable long-term business relationship with.

This in turn will result in powerful business relationships with clients/customers.

Furthermore, having a deeper understanding of our clients/customers will allow marketing messages to be tailored to a specific client base, making them more effective, both in terms of cost and in terms of success rates.