What is a Customer Avatar?
If you haven’t already guessed, a customer avatar is your ideal customer - not your average customer - but the perfect customer who will want to purchase from you again and again.

Once you have discovered your customer avatar you can build a strong marketing strategy and improve your user experience.

Why you need a Customer Avatar

• Tailor your marketing - email marketing will be so much easier once you know ‘who’ you are writing to. No more generic, soulless chit chat - you will be able to adjust your tone and voice to engage with your customer and create campaigns that they can’t resist!
• Improve user experience - Whether that means a slick app for shopping at your store or choosing different social media platforms.
• Product development - Once you know what makes your Custom Avatar tick, you can develop products and services that they need.
• Write relevant content - Coming up with interesting content is always a challenge if you are blindly targeting the masses but once you’ve established your target customer you should be able to come up with plenty of insightful, helpful and engaging content.
• Paid Advertisements - Your customer avatar will help you decide where you should run paid adverts. You will also know which demographics you need to be targeting which will tell you what wording you need in order to get the best return of investment.

How to Create Your Customer Avatar

Do your research - If you are an established business then you have a great starting point as you can ask your customers for feedback:

• Set up polls
• Send out surveys or questionnaires
• Interviews
• Analyse data from third party analytics

Build Your Customer Avatar - Give your fictional customer a name and try to get a picture of them in your mind. Think about their demographics ie age, gender, income etc.

• Try to envision where they get their information - Online search? Word of mouth? Instore? Books?
• What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve?
• What are their values?
• What are their pain points?
• What challenges are they trying to overcome?
• Why do they buy from you?
• What might stop them from making a purchase?

It’s likely your business will have more than one ideal customer, depending on the services and products you offer. If this is the case you will need to repeat the steps and create an avatar for each one.

Short Term Pain for Long Term Gain!
If you are willing to put in the hard work now and create your customer avatar(s) you will have much higher success with your marketing and sales. You will be able to focus your marketing spend to the right areas, improve engagement and build a strong, loyal customer base.

Need help building your avatar? Contact Creative Remedy for more information.

When creating a mobile-friendly site you have three options:

• Responsive Design - Google recommends Responsive Web Design because it's the easiest to set up and maintain.
• Dynamic serving - Uses the same URL regardless of device.
• Separate URLs - Serves different HTML to each device, and on separate URLs.

Because most of the indexing on your site comes from the mobile site it’s important you ensure that both versions of your website contain the same content! You also need to remember to put the same metadata (title and meta description) on your mobile version and desktop version of your site.

The use of video content on the internet is becoming more and more popular and Google indexes videos from millions of sites. Videos can appear in several different places on Google, including the main search results page, Video mode, Google Images, and Discover.

Best Practices for Images on your Website

To help Google find and index your images:

• Use HTML image elements to embed images
• Use an image sitemap
• Responsive images
• Use supported image formats
• Optimise for speed and quality

To optimise the image landing pages:

• Check your page title and description - avoid vague descriptives such as ‘home’ for homepage, don’t make titles unnecessarily long and avoid using too many keywords.
• Add structured data
• Use descriptive filenames, titles, and alt text
• Opt out of Google Images inline linking
• Optimise for SafeSearch

Best Practices for Videos on your Website:

• Ensure your video can be found by Google by making sure they are available on public web pages. Include an HTML tag and create a video sitemap.
• Make sure your videos can be indexed.
• Include a high quality thumbnail - BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG and minimum 60 x 30 pixels (larger is preferred).
• Describe your video using structured data.
• Use stable URLs.

Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design ensures your site is optimised to work across all devices. It automatically adjusts to fit on the device and browser, ensuring all the content is displayed properly. For most businesses, a responsive website is the perfect solution to ensure your site can be accessed on all devices. It’s a cost effective solution and easy to maintain.

• Save your business money long term
• Positive user experience
• Increased visibility in search results
• Faster site loading

It makes most sense to opt for a responsive web site from the outset - Google favours responsive websites in search rankings as they provide a better user experience than sites that are not mobile friendly. More importantly, you will be less likely to miss out on potential leads - visitors to your optimised site will be able to view all the content regardless of the device they are using.

Need help developing your business website that is responsive and mobile friendly? Contact Creative Remedy for a free consultation.

​Building the right strategy now will help your business through the year. It’s particularly important to plan and allocate budgets to the right place- creating a marketing plan can help you to do this.

​The main points to consider when creating a marketing strategy are:

• SWOT - identify your business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

• Decide what you want to achieve - your marketing plan should be linked to your business goals, both short and long term. Have your business objectives in mind when writing your marketing plan.

• Know your customers - to gain an insight into your business and where it stands try asking your customers their opinions.
  
• Research the competition - find out who your competitors are, look at their strengths and weaknesses. It’s always worth knowing what your competitors offer that you don’t.
• Strategies - determine how you can best reach your target customers covering all marketing channels to achieve your plan.

• Budget - it’s important to have a budget set aside for your marketing and you need to stick to it.
  
  
  

There are a number of marketing channels you can cover in your strategy including:

• Email Marketing - newsletters/e-bulletins
• Website Content - Home page design, landing pages, products & services
• Blogs - Case studies and blogs
• Social Media - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc
• Print Collateral - Stationery, folded leaflets, flyers
• Vehicle livery and exhibitions stands
  
  
  

If you’re pressed for time, a 12 month plan seems like too much to tackle, then you can try a 3 month plan. Here you would focus on short term goals and then branch out from this once you’ve completed it.

You could also consider hiring a marketing team- they will be able to advise you on the right strategy for your business and come up with creative solutions for your business marketing. Read our blog ‘Digital Marketing - Why you need a Marketing Team’ to find out more.

If you need any help or advice Creative Remedy are here to support you, so please get in touch if you have any questions.

We’ve avoided saying it for as long as we could, but it can’t be denied any longer - get ready, Christmas is coming!

It comes around so fast every year, I won’t even tell you how many shopping days you have left. But don’t panic, you still have plenty of time to get your business ready for the festivities, but you need to act now! Christmas is a great time to make meaningful connections with your customers and clients as well as a fantastic opportunity to show off your amazing brand with some top-notch Christmas inspired marketing.

We’ve done some of the hard work for you (we can’t help with the Christmas shopping, sadly) and put together a festive filled guide to get your business in the Christmas spirit!
 
Christmas 2023 Marketing Strategy
If you haven't already reviewed your marketing strategy for Christmas then you need to act now:

• Think about how your customers have changed the way they do business with you. If you’re finding they are more likely to interact with your business online then focus your marketing on those online platforms. However, if you’re finding your customers are embracing being able to do more face-face business then you should turn your attention to printed festive marketing materials that will entice your customers.
• Don’t forget to set a budget when you’re devising your plan. It’s so easy to get carried away but be realistic and stick to your budget.
• Market Research - what are your competitors doing? What do your customers expect and how do you plan to meet those needs?
• If you sell products, do you want to provide a wrapping service? Will you need branded/promotional wrapping paper?

Dec the Halls...
If your business has a physical premises where customers visit then you need to be thinking about festive marketing materials such as boards, banners, posters and decals for the windows. Don’t forget twinkly lights, Christmas tree and, if appropriate, music inside.
 
…and the Virtual Halls
Don’t forget the online window dressing:

• If you have a website with an online shop, then make sure you have a Christmas themed online shop front. You could temporarily change your colour scheme to more festive colours, add a Christmas banner to your landing page or some festive decorations to your brand logo.
• Give your newsletter/email marketing campaign a festive flourish. Include lots of details of any Christmas offers/sales you have planned, consider a Christmas countdown and make sure you include links to your social media channels.
• Run a series of Christmas themed social media posts (don’t forget the appropriate Christmas hashtags!)
• Change your profile pictures/backgrounds to a Christmas themed image.
• Create Christmas inspired content.

 
Get Personal
To say thank you to your customers and to wish them well for the new year, why not send a branded calendar, stationary or Christmas card? Handwritten for that extra personal touch.
 
As always Creative Remedy are on hand to help with any of your branded printing materials including calendars and cards as well as your Christmas digital marketing. Don’t forget the more notice the better, we can’t change print lead times unfortunately!