Businesses have found that their customers are demanding more and more personalization. This, of course, extends to the Amazon Marketplace. Customers want to feel that Amazon sellers understand their needs.

So, today we’re going to discuss how to create listings that sell by keeping the customer in mind. 

Who is Your Ideal Customer? 

Where most businesses go wrong is that they believe that their product is for everyone. They think that they can market to a broad audience with even broader appeal. However, this only creates bland marketing campaigns. Then they’re left wondering why their marketing ROI is so low. 

That is why businesses have to identify their ideal customer. The ideal customer represents who values their product the most. For example, a business that sells an array of baby products may find that its ideal customer is middle-class mothers with either their first or only child. This customer, arguably, values high-quality, educational toys.

This example business, therefore, gains little to nothing from casting a wide marketing net that includes customers without children. The better they understand this ideal customer, the better their targeted marketing campaigns become.

Identifying Your Ideal Customer 

So, how do businesses identify this ideal customer? The answer to that question is complex and varies based on the business. However, the first step will always be understanding your purpose as a brand.

Your ideal customer will always be the one that resonates with your brand’s purpose. Continuing with our previous example, the purpose of this children’s toy brand may be to provide educational toys that nurture child development based on scientific research. Their ideal customer is then someone who values that same purpose. 

From there, the mission is to get to know that customer better. There are several options to perform this research, but perhaps the most powerful is researching your ideal customer through the lens of a Customer Avatar. 

Your Ideal Customer’s Avatar

A customer avatar is a hypothetical profile of the best-case scenario customer for your brand. If you’re feeling fun, you can even name this avatar as if it was a real customer who you were individually targeting with your listing. Orienting your listings and marketing campaigns as if you were speaking to this hypothetical persona then allows you to hyperfocus on your ideal customer base. 

The more specific your customer avatar, the easier it will become to market to similar customers. Let’s take a look at how to create this Avatar and how to better use it to understand your customers.

How to Create a Customer Avatar

To create this Avatar, we must determine what are the ideal characteristics you want in a customer. To do this, we must answer several questions. The more questions you can answer, the stronger your customer avatar will become. 

So, let’s take a look at some of the personal questions and prompts you can use to make this Avatar. 

• What’s their name? 
• What is their gender? 
• How old are they? 
• What is their personality like? 
• Are they single, married, or separated? 
• What is their lifestyle? 
• Where do they live?

Once we’ve established a view of this person, we can begin asking what they are looking for. 

• What are they looking to buy? Is the product they’re looking for pleasure, skill-building, time-saving, or otherwise? 
• Are they trying to solve a problem? If so, what is that problem? How does your product solve that problem? 
• What do they care about? Are they family-oriented? Are they worried about their self-image? Determine what they value as a person. 
• What stops them from making a purchase? Are they worried about saving money? Have they been burned by Amazon sellers before? 
• What does your product do for them? 

And these are only a few of the questions you can ask to create your customer Avatar. The only limit is your, or your marketing team’s, imagination and intuition. 

Using Your Customer Avatar for Research  

So, you’ve made this customer avatar. What do you do now? Play the most boring role-playing game of all time? 

Not quite, but you are going to pretend you are this imaginary person. Go to Amazon, and search for a product as your customer avatar would. What does the competition look like? Study their marketplaces as your avatar. What does your customer avatar find appealing about this listing or that listing?

Most importantly, consider the review section of these listings. 

Product Reviews 

Reviews offer a treasure trove of information on what customers think of a product. Take note of both the positive and negative remarks people make in the reviews. These will offer insights into what they are looking for in the kind of product.

Additionally, examine the wording they use in their reviews. If you can speak their language, you can create copy that they are familiar with.

And as your customer avatar, you can take this a step further by determining which reviews speak to them. Which reviews might make or break the sale for them? This exercise will help you determine what your ideal customer is looking for in a given product.

The insights gained through this method are only compounded when you take this method off Amazon. 

Research Off Amazon

Once again, through the lens of your customer avatar, take your product search to your avatar’s favorite search engine. Take your customer review research to other online retailers like eBay and Walmart. Repeat the process we discussed for Amazon. 

For additional insights, take your research to forums and Facebook groups your customer avatar would engage. There’s a lot of information in these communities. Take the time to study your ideal customer in their natural digital habitat. 

After this, you’re finally ready to optimize and personalize your Amazon Listings. 

Design Your Listing Around Your Findings

Armed with this information, every section of your listing becomes an opportunity. 

Everyone has different preferences as to how they process information. With the knowledge you gained from extensive research as your customer avatar, you will understand how to design each for your customer. 

Images

Your images should match the tone and style of your copy. They also need to contain as much visual information as you can muster. From what you learned as your customer avatar, you will also be able to determine how this information is best presented.

Your customer may, for example, be looking for infographics that outline the extensive technical aspects of your products. On the other hand, they may prefer videos demonstrating the product in action. This all depends on the information you gathered on your customer base. 

Copy

Use the buyer language you learned in your research to tell your customers why your product is better than your competitors. Lead with the strongest, most relevant benefits that appeal to your ideal customer. 

For better organic search results, be sure to include long-tail keywords in your bullets. 

Keywords

More on keywords, always be sure to include the most important keywords in the first five words of your listing title. Amazon uses these to create the URL for your listing which is how it will appear in google searches. 

For more information on optimizing the anatomy of your Amazon listings, consult our guide on making your product stand out on Amazon.

What More Can You do? 

Customer research can be a daunting task. With so much information available, a seller can spend hours upon hours studying their customers. Which can be hard when you have a marketplace to manage. 

Thankfully, at Anata, we offer innovative services to help handle and improve your Amazon Marketplace. Contact us today so we can help you handle as many of these elements as you need so you can focus on the big picture. 

What does your ideal customer profile look like?