The Easy Guide To Building A Relationship With Your Ideal Customers.
How do you turn leads into customers? That’s an easy one, you get to know them. Creating buyer personas is a very useful practice that can help turn your marketing efforts from shots in the dark to shooting fish in a barrel (No fish were harmed in the making of this post). Buyer personas allow you to tap into the mind of your ideal customers and directly market to them based on their goals, fears, likes, and dislikes. Buyer personas allow you to see how, where, and when customers want to be spoken to. Yes, a buyer persona is a treasure chest whether you sail a red sea or a blue one. In these following paragraphs, we will dive into the process of creating a buyer persona and by the end of it all, you should feel fully prepared to go off and create your own buyer personas.
Step 1: Gather Information
In this step, you will use all available resources for researching ideal customers. Use your current customer base, with analytic software (Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Social Mentions, etc.) find trends and common traits, take notes. Speak to your current customer base. Create relevant surveys and offer an incentive upon completion, (who can turn down 10% off their next purchase?). If you don’t mind putting in a bit more effort, for a greater reward, holding actual interviews (whether over a phone call, video call, or in-person) will allow you to follow up questions and get the in-depth interview experience. For these surveys and interviews, some relevant things to ask include questions on demographics (age, location, etc.), and psychographics (desires, challenges, etc.). With this remember to keep the questions relevant to the market you are working in. While going through these processes tap into your customer contact teams (eg. customer service, sales) they will have insight on customers but don’t forget these buyer personas should be based on factual data and not instincts or feelings.
Step 2: Comb Data
Ok so you’ve gathered all the data that you can on your ideal customers…what now? At this point, the data may make you feel like you’re further away than when you started. That’s ok, now is the time to sort through it all and find commonalities. You want to narrow your data down to the most common responses. Some questions you should be able to answer with the data you’ve collected so far are; What is the problem they are experiencing? What do they want to accomplish with their purchase? What are their pain points? And What is their motivation? If you can’t yet answer these questions get back to collecting data. If one source has led to better information than another, focus more efforts there. You want to collect as much data as possible to create a useful and lasting buyer persona.
Step 3: Create Persona Groups/Categories
Now that you’ve got your data grouped up, it’s time to nail it down. Take the most common trait groups and put these into categories. These categories will be the building blocks for your personas. Challenges and goals are important aspects to consider and should hold some weight as these directly affect a customer’s mind-state and effectively their spending habits. Once these buyer personas are created you will be selling more to who they want to be, than to who they are. Here look to create 3 to 5 personas, in the next step we’ll really get to know them.
Step 4: Humanize The Data
You’ve got your personas, now look at the data and create relevant names (eg. Bookie Brooke) Give them a family, a job, a place to live, and a life. That’s about it for this step.
Step 5: Go Get ‘Em
With a buyer persona, a marketing campaign goes from a company pushing to sell the latest product to a personalized offer of assistance from a friendly business. It’s all about knowing the customer and meeting them halfway, you have what they want and they want what you have. Your marketing campaign is the only thing standing between a beautiful relationship between the two and a buyer persona will help to bridge that gap appropriately. That’s about it for creating a buyer persona, so take this information and use it to your advantage. Leave a comment below on what your favorite way to gather information for your buyer personas was.
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