The more you know about someone – their background, their likes and dislikes, what they are passionate about; the easier it is to communicate with them. How many times have you heard people in relationships complaining that their partner doesn’t understand them and as a result they can’t get along? The evidence is overwhelming – the better you know the person you are trying to communicate with, the easier your communication and the more influential you’ll be.
In business, whilst we can’t know every customer individually, there’s great advantage in developing what is known in the trade as a marketing persona for your company. At its simplest, a persona is like an imaginary friend. It’s made up of characteristics that typify a section or segment of your market. It’s your ideal customer.
If you have a well defined persona it will help you to formulate an effective marketing plan in the longer term as you’ll be able to make your message specific to the needs of the people who you are aiming to reach. More importantly you’ll have the intelligence to tailor your product or service to match the way your ideal customer wants to experience it. So, does your ideal customer have children? If they do, how old and how many? Being able to express the benefits of your product or service in terms of how easy it is to use for parents will automatically switch on the “listen more closely” button to these prospective customers because this is important to them.
A common misconception about having a specific persona is that by speaking to one person you automatically exclude everyone else. You couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the opposite is true! It’s not possible to speak to everyone at once, unless you use extremely general language and terms, in which case most people listening will assume that the message is not for them and switch off. It’s just background noise. However, when you tailor your message to a specific person it’s easy for the listener to recognise themselves.
“Are you a divorced woman over 40 bringing up children on her own?” This will ping the attention flags of every woman in this category as well as raising the curiosity levels of people who aren’t. Those outside the category will be thinking, “what are they getting that I’m not?” In practice, you get more people’s attention by being specific than you do if you are not.
There are two aspects to developing an effective persona for your business. The first is to identify the demographic of your fictional person and the second is to profile their psychographics. Psychographic is another way of saying what goes on between the ears (yes, the brain!) of your ideal customer. To begin the psychographic process, start by giving your character a name, age and gender. The more specific the better, you can do this either by basing it on one of your existing customers or you can just make up a composite based on the data you have collected about your customer base. If you are already managing your client relationships using a CRM system, it is likely that you have already record the information you require. If not this is a great opportunity to start collecting this type of information about your customers – or even take the plunge and invest in a CRM system!
So let’s say you’re persona is called Penny, she’s 38 years old, married with three children. In order to transform Penny into a fully rounded character, you should ask and answer the following series of questions based on your research about your customers. Use your existing market research and customer data to ensure that your answers are typical for customers in your niche. Remember to describe as many demographic and psychographic features as you can….
- Where do they live?
- How much do they earn?
- If you had a magic wand and could give them anything that they want… what do they most desire?
- With regard to your goods and services, what do they want?
- What do they need?
- What are they afraid of?
- What frustrates them?
- What do they lose sleep over at night?
- What will be their biggest objections to doing business with you?
- Where do these people gather in groups?
- Who has these clients before you?
- What do they read?
- What other media do they digest?
- What are their biggest pain points?
- What’s their level of expertise in relation to your product or service and industry in general?
- How much time do they typically spend on the web?
- When looking for advice, where do they go?
- How big is their social and professional network?
- What are their preferred social media channels?
- How do they manage their inbox?
- What devices do they primarily use when interacting on the web?
- Do they prefer written or verbal communication?
Creating a marking persona for your business is as straightforward as answering this short list of questions. Once you have your ideal customer you can optimize your marketing, sales and service strategy to target them in a more effective manner. Remember the list isn’t exhaustive – what other question would you need to ask and answer in order to create your ideal marketing persona?
