You’ve outlined what your product or service has to offer your customer and are ready to start making some sales. What you’re now probably thinking about is “who is my target market and how will I attract them?” Creating a target market is usually one of the initial stages in the business strategy to satisfy customer demands more efficiently and effectively. Funnelling your potential customers through demographic, psychographic, geographic and behavioural characteristics can give you a better idea, but you’re still missing that semi-fictional identity of your customer.
This is when you should look to implement buyer personas into your marketing strategy. Buyer personas give you a better understanding of your customers needs and wants, giving you the information needed to develop your product into the solution your customers are looking for. Buyer personas can help your business get better quality leads, richer closed-loop analytics, and overall consistency across your business.
Here’s how you can create buyer personas for your business and get a better understanding of both your current and prospective customers.
Collecting as much data as you can about your leads and customers is a great way to start the process. Uncover trends by using your contacts database to see how your customers find and consume your content. Create forms on your website that use form fields to collect important persona information i.e. asking the downloader of your eBook what department they work for at their company.
Your sales team’s feedback is also critical in this process, as they interact with your leads the most and can give information on the customers you serve best. These are a few ways to start gathering information for your persona internally, now let’s look at the most important method in the buyer persona process; interviews.
Conducting interviews is a great way to collect information from your customers perspective. Collecting data regarding their lives, jobs, and challenges are all great ways to better understand them. Existing customers is the best place to start because they’ve already purchased your product and have engaged with your brand. Reaching out to both “good” and “bad” customers is a great way to gather and analyze patterns from both sides.
Prospects and leads are also great as you already have their information, and you can use your data to figure out who might fit in your target personas. Referrals and third-party networks are beneficial if you’re reaching out into new markets and don’t yet have any customers or leads.
HubSpot offers a free buyer persona template to use once you’ve completed the interviewing process. You’ll know if you’ve collected enough data from interviews when you can start predicting what answers are going to be. Once you’ve organized your data you’re ready to start personalizing your marketing to the appropriate segments. Start strategically selling to your target markets with our buyer persona worksheet. Need help to nail down your target personas? The experts at H&C Inc. can help. Let's talk.