Knowing your buyers personas and customer profiles is one of the most crucial components of any successful sales and marketing strategy. As the name suggests, buyers personas help marketers go well beyond the quantitative descriptions provided by simple demographics to a much more detailed level. Knowing your buyers personas helps us get personal with the customers. Buyers Personas help us understand who are customers are as emotional human beings, thus taken us from from quantitative to qualitative segmentation.
For any successful marketing campaigns, it’s critical to understand the overall preferences,goals and concerns of each of your buyers personas and to then tailor your message and content accordingly. When done correctly, the target audiences will feel captivated by your message, as if you are speaking directly to them, answering all their questions,using their language thus significantly increasing the likelihood that they will want to buy from or engage with your services or products.
How Can I Find My Perfect Customer? Build a Customer Avatar !
To help personalize your buyers personas and profiles, i often give my “ideal” personas distinct names, traits and photos. Creating visuals helps compartmentalize these archetypal people and will help direct a very refined message to them.
Get to know your customers – Buyer Personas Exposed
There are several steps you can take to help build a useful buyer persona. What you’re really trying to do is get to know your customers and buyers. How can we do this? Simple…Go out there and talk to them!
One short conversation with a customer is more valuable than a 1000 brainstorming sessions inside a vacuum.
If your product and/or service already have a customer base then Inceva recommends:
• Speaking to your customers in person. Ask them about their overall experiences with your product/service and about their regular lives.
• Listen in or record customer service calls (Phone analytics) to your sales or service departments
• Conduct simple customer surveys with rewards if needed ( Gather information)
• Read the customer comments on your website,blog or social media channels such as Facebook,HI5, forums etc. (Don’t have a social media marketing presence? contact us)
• Interview your gate keeps,sales team and other employees that interact with clients to see what they’ve learned from your customers.
If you a start-up or new business and don’t have customers then Inceva recommends:
• Reading the websites,blogs,newspapers and publications that your customers read. What do these channels write about? How do these news outlets present information to their readers?
• Read trade journals and industry blogs. What are they writing about? What are popular trends?
• Scan the social media networks for relevant groups and forums where your potential customers can be found. What are these groups talking about/sharing with each other? How are they sharing this information?
• Do keyword research of specific terms and phrases that are used to describe what you offering (Google keywords search is great and Free!). What are the most relevant and popular terms? High competition vs Low?
• Read research reports about your new market segment. What are some key legal and market trends in your industry?
• Are there other companies/products or serves already in your market? Read their brochures,websites,white papers,annual reports and case studies. How are they addressing their customers needs?
Once you have asked the right questions and carefully sifted through the mountain of answers and data you should start seeing patterns emerge that allow you to easily segment your ideal customers into very specific groups based on their buyers personas. I find that giving each specific group a unique and personal name, like “Opinionated Orm” or “Indecisive Ittiporn.”
Try to build a list the qualitative characteristics of each “persona.” Describe that ideal person/customer in terms like the ones i have outlined in this post, that is tailored specifically to your ideal customer.
Experiment – Experiment – Experiment
Facts and statistics are available to everyone; it’s interpretation & implementation that is key. Try to distribute these created personas to your marketing, sales and customer service departments so everyone can get to know who your buyers are.
You can now start to craft a very targeted message that will resonate with each type of persona you have identified, like you are talking directly to and only to them.
For more information about gathering your buyers personas for for a customized advertising campaign please contact us.
