You must think like your customer to understand their buying journey, and to help them solve a concern they don’t know they have yet. Some people are problem aware but, what you want is for them to be solution aware. Or, they might be solution aware but, not yet ready to admit they even have a problem. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, you must think of your target home buyers and what they would like in a home. If you’re a divorce lawyer, you must think about the problems your clients may be facing and what they want as an outcome from you. If you own a cupcake shop, you want to know if your clients are liking the traditional style of cupcakes, or if they prefer cakes instead. Despite thinking you know who your customers are, creating fictionalized customer personas can give you a better understanding of them and helps you align your team to focus on that key customer.
We all know that what we focus on grows so let’s dive in.
Understanding Why You Need To Make A Customer Persona Outline
Creating a customer persona outline is important because it helps businesses understand their target audience so that they can tailor their marketing efforts, products, and services to better meet the needs and desires of those customers. By developing detailed profiles of their ideal customers, companies can more effectively communicate with and attract those individuals. It seems like a simple idea but, it’s a lot more complicated than you might think.
Additionally, creating a customer persona can help a business identify and target new customer segments, and can also be used to improve customer service and support. Ultimately, having a clear understanding of your target audience can lead to more results you can see on your bottom line when it comes to your marketing efforts.
Isn’t that what we all want? More sales with less energy being spent to gain those sales while also increasing your customer loyalty?
So, how do you go about making a customer persona outline?
Creating a customer persona outline involves gathering and analyzing data about your target audience to develop a detailed profile of your ideal customer.
These are the first few steps you should take to get the process started.
- Gather data: Collect information about your current customers through surveys, interviews, and other forms of research. Look at demographics such as age, gender, income, and education level, as well as psychographics such as values, interests, and lifestyle.
- Analyze the data: Look for patterns and trends in the data you’ve collected. Identify common characteristics among your customers and use that information to create a detailed profile of your ideal customer — Keeping in mind that the ideal customer is the one who buys what you want, at the price point you want, as frequently as you want, within reason.
- Create the first draft of your persona outline: Use the information you’ve collected to create a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. Give them a name, age, occupation, and other details that help to make them feel like a real person. The more details you add here the better so think about how many kids they have? What company do they work at? Where do they buy their groceries? What do they do for fun? etc.
- Add details: Add information about your ideal customer’s goals, challenges, pain points, and decision-making process. This will help you understand how to best communicate with and appeal to them.
- Use it: This one sounds obvious but, time and time again we see teams invest time in creating an outline and then they forget about it. Once you have your customer persona, use it to guide your marketing efforts. When you write content ask if it speaks to your customer persona. Does it answer the questions they would have? Would they like the imagery used? Would they hear or see your message where you have displayed it? Use the information in your customer persona to create targeted campaigns, develop products and services that meet your ideal customer’s needs, and improve your customer service. Every area of your business should relate back to this outline.
- Review and update: Customer persona is a living document, review and update it regularly as your customer base and their needs change. If you service multiple customers create a persona for each of them and review it against the areas of your business that make sense.
Key things to remember about your customer personas:
- You can create a customer persona even if you don’t have customers yet. Sit down with someone that you think would be your ideal customer. Learn about their wants and needs — without making them feel like they have to buy your product or service. This isn’t a sales call it’s a research and development appointment.
- You may have multiple personas, depending on your business, products, and services. It’s also important to validate your assumptions with real data and customer feedback. Don’t overcomplicate it but, don’t oversimplify it either.
- Your persona will be different when you’re selling to businesses instead of consumers. If this is the case instead of having a customer persona, you may be looking into building a business persona to get your products into a store or to get the buyer within that company to purchase from you instead of your competitors. You’ll also need to keep in mind that the decision-maker or buyer might not necessarily be the end user of what you sell either. It takes time to build these out and you will have to tweak it depending on the business that you’re selling to but, it’s worth it in the end, we promise!
- Refer back to your customer persona outline through every business decision. Put yourself in their shoes when making decisions across sales, marketing, strategy, and new products or services. That way you do the process correctly thinking about how your target audiences would react to your business decisions. After all, business isn’t about a product or service, it’s about providing a solution to the customer. Without the customer, you would have no business.
- If you have a lead generation ad or a form to fill out on your website, make sure to ask them a question that helps you determine what persona they fit into. Depending on how capable your automation systems or CRM is you could even use decision diamond to guide them into a specific funnel based on their answers but, that’s a topic for another article. The goal is to qualify your leads early on in the process so you don’t waste your time with tire kickers.
If you need help developing your customer persona outline, book a coaching session with 3SIXTY Marketing Solutions.
Many heads are better than one. And, sometimes you just need a little nudge to get the ball rolling. Let’s get a better understanding of your customer persona(s) and start getting creative with your digital or traditional marketing strategy. That’s right increasing your conversion rates isn’t just something you do in digital advertising. Any advertising or marketing strategy can be optimized to increase your results when you look at the entire picture at once. After the initial discussion and our team’s brain fuel err… we mean the coffee pot is empty, we will write down all our ideas, plot out the plan, detail the messaging, and lay it all out on the table. After we have your approval on the overall plan, we get down to business and make it all happen. We will analyze all the data and determine what works, and what doesn’t work for your business to optimize your customers’ buying journey.
Let’s get started today — Give us a call at 705-242-8964 or 647-250-1494, or you can book a free no-obligation consultation HERE! The more you delay, the more you are holding yourself back from attaining the sales growth you want.
