They May Look the Same, But…
Many CEOs and marketers know that targeting your best (most profitable, most frequent, most referring, etc.) prospects can make you more effective and your company more profitable.
Customer personas, (also known as buyer personas), are a great way of identifying and then creating marketing messages tailored to your ideal buyer(s). In a nutshell, personas are the characters that represent the various people who need and will use your products and services. For instance, you can create a persona named “Charlene” who would represent a senior product buyer and another persona named “Max” that represents the characteristics of your best small business buyer, etc.
Creating accurate personas is a technique that, as part of your content marketing and social media initiatives, helps you target qualified buyers.
Developing Your Client Personas
While the concept is simple, it’s not as simple as just imagining who you think might be your ideal customers. To create accurate customer personas, you need to ask yourself some specific questions for each type of your best prospects:
1. What are this person’s job responsibilities and activities?
2. How is this person’s success measured within their company and by the people they report to?
3. What are his or her greatest challenges and pain points in their job?
4. How does she or he make purchasing decisions? What are the driving factors?
5. What would prevent this person from purchasing from you or your company?
6. Where does this person go to get their information?
7. Is he or she the decision maker? If not, what do they need to present to the decision makers?
8. What groups of professional and social networks do they belong to? How big are these networks?
9. What is her current level of interest in working with your company?
10. Generally, how can you help them?
What Is the Message?
Once you have this information, you can begin to create content marketing messages and other content that is tailored to each of them. The true value in customer personas lies in the fact that they help your company create a content marketing initiative that is not “one size fits all”. Your personas steer you toward someone rather than everyone.
This is important, especially in a marketing environment characterized by tight budgets and limited resources. Companies can no longer afford to waste precious dollars and manpower on untargeted campaigns that cast a wide net, looking for anything that happens to fall into it.
For best results in developing your customer personas, remember the following tips:
Create ideal customer profiles. What problems do you solve and who has these problems?
- Identify industries and titles. Which industries, and which people in those industries, will be interested?
- Ask the right questions. See above.
- Get information from other sources. Use tools to help you gather information about your ideal customers. Ask your social networks, create surveys and utilize inside sales calls to get a 360 degree view.
- Always tweak. Once you’re created your personas, revisit them periodically to make adjustments. Your business is always evolving—and so are your customers!
Always remember—what may motivate the marketing manager is probably not what motivates the head of the purchasing department. Everyone from the gatekeeper to the CEO may well be involved in the buying process. You may need to develop a customer persona for each one, and ensure that none of them fall through the cracks during the sales process.
Don’t let a lack of clarity about your customers’ buying process hamper your content marketing efforts and limit your success. Use these tips to develop customer personas that accurately represent the people you want to reach, and you’ll get better results with your content marketing campaign– and spend a lot less time, effort and marketing resources doing it!
