As a marketing manager you'll know the importance of understanding your audience, but how well do you really know them?
Do you know your potential customers?
So many marketing professionals overlook this part of their marketing strategy despite the fact that customer intelligence should inform all their decisions. And if you don't really understand your audience, how can you effectively market to them, let alone sell.
In today's blog I'm going to show you how to create detailed buyer personas. I'll detail the type of information you should seek, how to find it and then what you should do with it.
What's in a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona tells you what your prospective customers think and do when they're looking to solve a problem. It gives you insights into your buyer's attitudes, concerns and decision making journey. It details where they go for information, how they search for it, what obstacles stand between them and purchasing a solution and their typical spend. Basically a buyer persona is a fictional character (based on actual data) and is your ideal customer.
How do You Find the Ideal Customer?
The best place to start is with the information you already have. Research and analyse any data you have on your existing customer base. Look at your buyers' behaviour patterns, motivations, goals and social positioning.
A great marketing research tool we find useful is surveys. As long as they are quick and easy to respond to, we find that customers don't mind taking a few minutes to click the boxes in an online survey.
Your sales team will also have invaluable customer insights. Not only can they tell you which types of people are more suited to your product/service but they'll also know how and when they like to be contacted, where they heard about your company and even in some cases how they like their coffee!
Consider interviewing your current customers either in person (which is preferable) or over the phone. Ask them to be as open and honest as possible about what they like (or dislike) about your product/service. Most people like their opinions to be heard, especially when they know that it will be valued and will impact the product/service that they buy from you.
When compiling your research try not to be too introspective. While the information you gain from existing customers and internal data is hugely valuable, try to research your potential clients. Your approach here needs to be subtle otherwise you risk putting your potential leads off. Use smart online forms to alter the data you capture on each subsequent visit, also look to Google Analytics and email marketing opening stats to enrich your data.
Saving You Time and Money
After a while you will start to see patterns and repetitions emerging in your research and will even be able to start predicting the answers to survey/interview questions. This is great, it means you're really getting to know your ideal customer like the back of your hand!
So now you have detailed buyer personas you can organise your activity, time and budget and effectively target your marketing only on specific business prospects. This will ensure that you attract the most valuable traffic, leads and buyers to your company.
How to Create Template Buyer Personas
When you analyse your customer insights and see the correlations between them you can collate your personas into groups. O.K. so they might not all be male/female, own a dog and drink tea but in marketing terms you can section your personas under 2 to 20 headings (depending on the type and size of business you have.) At Quattro we like to use either 'job title' as a heading or if we're doing a more detailed persona, we list by 'industry'.
TIP: Persona insights are also a great way of organising your customer data, for example we put every email received from our customers into a relevant 'buyer persona file'. This ensures that when we contact clients from a specific file we know what information to send and only send them information that we know they would like to receive.
How Important is Customer Insight?
Customer insights are important to ALL the areas within your organisation not solely the marketing team. Once the sales, services, design and production teams know your company's ideal customer and align their activities with potential customers then everything falls into place.
At Quattro, audience research and persona mapping is where all our work begins, it’s the reference point that we check everything against and it’s what underpins all our work. Start working on your buyer personas today and see how it changes the way you think and market your company.
If you've found the steps I've detailed above helpful, download our FREE inbound checklist to see how persona mapping fits into the wider scope of inbound marketing. The checklist details all the steps you need to take to create your first inbound campaign, so I encourage you to give it a try.
There are very few companies in the Midlands using inbound, which makes it a fantastic opportunity for those that do, to not only stand out from the pack but also to clean up on sales.
Inbound Marketing Stratford upon Avon
Based in Stratford upon Avon Quattro is uniquely placed to help businesses across the Midlands with intelligent websites and inbound methodologies that attract visitors and generate enquiries. Call us on 01789 608015 for advice on creating your buyer personas or for help marketing your business online.
