Do you know who your customers are, where they live, what they like, and how they interact with your product or service? It’s critical to make sure you have identified who your customers are so that you can effectively seek out more.
Historically, a business might send out a single marketing message en-masse and hope for the best, but in today’s competitive online marketplace, well-researched customer profiling can be the difference between success and failure. Customers have come to expect relevancy, personalisation and a better level of service, One size no longer fits all.
Customer profiling
Do you know who your ideal customer is and how to target them effectively?
Start by grouping your existing customers into segments using common traits, behaviours and characteristics. Their backgrounds, their goals, their challenges. You can take advantage of a wide range of online analytics and research tools, read reviews, conduct surveys, focus groups and hold face-to-face interviews to help build a picture of your customer base.
Who are your best customers and what similarities do they have? Look at demographics, purchasing processes, problems and needs, and include questions like...
How did you find our company?
Why did you originally buy from us?
Why do you continue to buy from us?
What do we do that others don’t?
Once you know who’s doing what, where, and how, you can start to put together customer personas that will drive your marketing communications across all channels: website; direct mail; press advertising; email marketing and social media.
What is a customer persona?
Personas are fictional representations of real people. Your ideal customers. Whether you have just one or two, or many, you can use them to inform everything from content writing for your website to ongoing product development.
Base your personas on your most successful customers. Start with one and build up from there. Make sure they are believable. Give them a name and include an image. Print them out, stick them to your wall and share them with every member of your team.
Everyone should know who “James” and “Anna” are, which target audience they represent and what motivates them to buy from you. Keep researching, reviewing and updating as your business develops.
Tip: Because each persona represents a segment of related data, the differences between your personas should be clear. If you don’t have enough information to complete a particular persona, remove it and focus on the ones you can complete.
We particularly like this video on how to create personas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B23iWg0koi8
The next step
Once you have built your personas and know what type of customers your business should be targeting, create a strategy. You might choose to tailor your marketing towards the persona of your best customers (attempting to attract similar customers) whilst including some bespoke campaigns for personas that offer your business the greatest opportunity moving forward.
Either way, building customer personas can help reduce time and resources wasted on unsuccessful marketing efforts.
If you would like a little support in fine tuning your customer personas or you’re taking the first steps towards creating them, pop in for a chat and a brew. We can help you take your marketing strategy to the next level.