Have you ever had a slimy feeling after interacting with a company? You can feel that you are just another number to them, and every interaction feels like they’re just digging through your pockets to find your wallet.
Awful right? Good businesses avoid this “ick factor” by getting to know their customers and treating them like actual people.
In our last installment, we talked about how to search for your ideal customers. Today, let’s dig deeper into specific strategies for getting to know our target market segment including marketing persona development.
Current Customers
Before creating a marketing persona, it’s good to look at your current customers. After all, no one knows more about your customers than your customers! Successful businesses create systems for listening to customer input so that it can inform future decision making. We will look closely at these systems in the future, but this can include:
- simple conversations
- customer surveys and interviews
- insider clubs with exclusive perks
- social media polls
- online quizzes
- social media groups
Use Customer Service Tools
You probably also have a treasure trove of information hidden in your current customer interactions. For instance, many CRMs and customer service ticketing solutions allow for tagging. Simply adding descriptive tags to customer records can help you quantify common concerns and find patterns. From their you can proactively address these concerns.
For instance, let’s say you sell t-shirts. You might receive emails for customers asking for returns. As return requests come in, you can tag the messages with the reason for return such as “Poor fit” or “Fabric quality.” Now you have solid information about what matters to your customers to adjust your strategy.
Marketing Personas
Our strategies so far have focused on current customers, but sometimes our current customers are not our ideal customers. This fact will be especially true if you have not engaged in any serious marketing yet. Marketing personas let us bridge this gap by creating a fictional person with all of the traits associated with our ideal client.
Maybe you’re wondering why we bother creating a fictional person instead of just listing out a set of traits. Let me ask you a question though. Should we treat potential customers as people or as checklists? A fictional persona helps us remember that real people are at the heart of every business interaction.
As we plan a marketing strategy, we can imagine how this persona of our target marketing audience would respond to our messaging. We can reflect on how our business fits into their daily life to reach them in the most effective ways. A well done marketing persona can change your whole approach to your business, so let’s start crafting your ideal customer.
Key Considerations for Marketing Persona Development
When selecting a target marketing audience, we mentioned that your audience should:
- Have a problem you can solve
- Be able to afford your solution
- Be large enough to sustain consistent sales
Keep these points in mind as you build your fictional ideal customer. Ultimately, you want to be able to put yourself in the customer’s position and understand:
- Goals – What are the wants and needs of the customer not being met?
- Pain Points – What problems will your customer meet when trying to get to their goals?
- Motivations – What are the underlying factors that made the customer have that goal?
- Stakes – How important is accomplishing that goal to your customer?
- Fears – What concerns does your customer have about potential solutions?
- Values – What is important to your customer in life?
- Interests – What activities and topics does your customer enjoy?
- Dislikes – What repulses your customer?
- Freedom – What outside constraints such as cost might affect your customers decision making?
Sounds like a lot, right? Well, human beings are complex creatures! Don’t worry though. We can start to uncover these major points of the marketing persona by starting small.
Creating a Marketing Persona
Mining the gems of our customer persona starts by digging into small details. First, consider whether you are primarily addressing consumers or businesses. If it’s a business, who would be the primary decision maker at that business? If it’s a consumer, what age range?
Answering one question will often lead to more questions about this person. Soon you will start making connections and discoveries about this customer that lead to important insights. Here are a few details you will want include about your fictional customer:
- Their age
- Their sex
- Their name (make it up!)
- Their hobbies and interests
- Their community
- Their occupation
- Their education level
- Their preferred style
- Their preferred entertainment
Depending on your industry, you can go even deeper. For instance, a restaurant might include their customers’ favorite foods. Even mundane details like the type of car they drive can reveal information about what motivates a person. Go as detailed as you want!
More Marketing Persona Development Tips
Creating a marketing persona can be a great team activity as well. In fact, getting multiple points of view can help you overcome your own blindspots. As a result, you will often get a more accurate understanding when creating a persona as a team. Next week, we will look at ways to use AI in your marketing persona development, too.
Once you have a detailed picture of your customer, you should return to the key considerations we discussed earlier. Use the personal details you’ve brainstorm to understand your ideal customer on a deeper level. Now you’re armed with customer insights to improve your product, create your brand, and plan your marketing.
Until next time, take care and God bless you.
