Never Underestimate the Power of the Persona
In business, it can be hard to part with hard-earned dollars for marketing purposes. Today, there are a million choices for where to spend marketing allocations. If you choose to support them all, you will spread your money too thin. How do you effectively narrow down the choices and reach your intended audience?
Try building a client persona. Buyer personas are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. They are generally based on research and incorporate your target audience’s needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns. By taking a deeper dive into your target and putting yourself in their shoes, you will find out what content they are looking for and where they go to find it. This proven process helps your money work smarter for you.
Before you get started, there are a few things to consider:
Be sure you get all of the right people in the room for this discussion. Representatives from all facets of your business should participate to ensure you cover all customer angles.
This exercise will take patience and effort. It’s worth it. Ideally, you’ll want to set aside a day or two for a workshop to get through the experience. Have your team focused and keep distractions to a minimum. Don’t be afraid to bring in help (that’s what we are here for!) to get the job done. Professional experience can help drive the conversation and move you forward faster.
You may have more than one target audience. That’s great! Start with the one you think will bring in the most revenue and go from there. Once you build the template, you can repeat the process as many times as necessary. Avoid having too many if you have limited dollars to spend.
You are going to get some of this information incorrect. Don’t rely on internal assumptions. Speak directly to current customers and ask them about themselves. Confirm and correct anything you misidentified.
Customer personas can change over time. Don’t just set it and forget it. Be sure that you come back to this exercise every so often. People change, times change, and marketing tools change. Make sure you are keeping up with evolving times.
When leading a persona workshop, there are some definite topics you must cover:
Demographics - Name, age, location, personal background information, include a photo
Company Information - typical place the ideal customer works
Role - Job title, responsibilities including decision-making capabilities
Standard Work Day - what are they doing, what drives them, what are their dependencies
Goals and Challenges - what are their goals and what gets in the way, what frustrates them
Experience - how long have they been in their role, this will help with content tone
Content Preferences - how do they consume content- magazines, social media, industry preferred websites, trade shows, sales calls
It’s essential to ensure your personas are well defined – the more detail, the better. Having a third party lead the discussion can produce better results. Employees may feel more comfortable in a workshop atmosphere and clients may open up more to someone that isn’t their direct contact within an organization. Also, this is what we do for a living. We have the templates, we know how to start the conversation and keep it going. Best of all, we know what to do with the information once you have it.
Reach out to schedule your persona workshop today. The sooner you identify your ideal customer, the sooner you can streamline spend and start seeing qualified leads.