Whether you are just starting out with your business or you’ve been plugging along for years now – taking the time to develop (and continually refresh) customer (or client or buyer) personas is a practice that will pay off in more focused marketing, stronger connections with your client base, and ultimately increased sales.
What Is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a tool that helps you focus your product/service offering, your marketing strategies, and the content you produce. Think of it as a detailed profile of your potential customers/clients that you can use to tap into their goals, fears, desires, and limitations.
When you create products and services to meet their goals and ease their fears PLUS make those products and services achievable considering the customers’ limitations – then you have a sustainable offering with the potential to generate strong revenue.
Why Should I Spend My Time on This?
For most of us, finding the time to work on our own businesses is hard to do. We’re so focused on taking care of clients’ needs that we don’t give ourselves the time to focus on marketing and growing our own businesses. Over the next several weeks we’ll be helping you carve out some time to work in your business and guide you through setting up a viable marketing plan and deliverables. These personas are the core of everything else we’ll do.
- Redefine for yourself who your target market really is. If you look at your current customer base do you see a pattern or an emerging trend? Do you see a group of people with not much in common except that you were able to get a sale from them? Do you like the people you do business with? This is your opportunity to model the exact type of customers you want. No, you can’t just create someone who lays awake at night dreaming of a product or service just like yours – but you can identify the people you enjoy working with, the services you love to deliver, and find the cross section.
- Focus your content and marketing strategies on the right set of people. So now you know who you want to sell to and what you prefer to sell, it’s time to align your marketing strategies. We’re going to talk quite a bit about content and marketing strategies in this series. Having a clear picture of that ideal client and their concerns, dreams, limitations, and goals will help you target them through your marketing.
- Create guidelines for content creation for anyone you work with in the future. Toward the end of the series we will look at the benefits of letting some of your work go to other people. Whether that be an agency, a contractor, or an employee – it will serve you well to have your customer personas already defined and ready to hand off. You’ll be able to “introduce” new people to your ideal clients through these personas and help them target those people with every interaction.
How the Heck Do I Get Started?
If you have strong relationships with people who represent your ideal customer base, then I suggest you interview them directly. We don’t all have that privilege though, so a strong educated guess will work for now. We can always come back and tighten up the personas by interviewing real people down the road (once you’ve won a few more clients). If you’re completing these personas by “best guess” just remember to be honest, do your best to really put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and spend some time on it. Don’t rush through this part of the process – everything else we build depends on getting this part right.
We’ve gone through this practice with most of our clients and have created a go-to template for developing personas. Luck you, we’re happy to share it! Download your template here.
We suggest creating 3 different personas to get started. If possible, just focus on one area of your business for now. Once you’ve completed them pin them to the wall near your desk, put them in a binder and keep it accessible, or find some other way to have them at your fingertips anytime you work on marketing or service and product development.
Have you created personas before? What is your experience and how have you benefitted from the exercise?
