Understanding who your customers are is a critical piece of understanding how to market to them effectively and how to build a relationship with them before they walk in your door.
This is also an excellent way to know who you should be marketing to in the first place. If you try to market to everyone you will lose, but if you understand the specific nuances of your market you will win!
If you think about it you can’t sell anything or develop a relationship with someone before you get to know them and if you don’t identify your ideal customers you will not be able to work to generate a relationship and specifically target the people you can ideally work to create a relationship with in the future.
In a nutshell know who your best clients are and work to understand them, who they are and what specific nuances they have. With this you will be able to target your new customer based on the exact characteristics of your current clients or customers. This way you're always looking for exactly who you want to work with!
Now the hardest part is understanding how to develop these personas and what questions you need to ask to ensure you get all the best and most important information.
Outlined below are what I think tend to be the most important questions to ask people. The best way to get these answered is sitting in front of your clients and asking them directly, asking questions based on their responses and generating a conversation around their responses. Of course this is not always possible so email, phone etc are also options.
How do you develop buyer personas?
- 1-on-1 meetings with your ideal clients
- Focus groups composed of your ideal clients
- Listening to what people are saying on social media
- Emailing out questions to your clients
What information should you include?
Who they are?
- Name
- Income level
- Address
- Phone Number
- Gender
- Married
- Education Level
- Age
- Job
- Interests
What are they all about?
- Goals
- Why they couldn’t achieve those goals
- Where did they look to achieve those goals
- What was the biggest challenge in finding a solution
- Did these feelings have an effect on friends and family?
Why did they choose you?
- How did they feel when searching for a solution
- How did they feel when they found a solution?
- What would have made the process easier?
- Why did you come to us and not a competitor or similar product?
Once you have all of this down organize it into a message that includes the specific pain points they mention in each segment and then organize it into a specific client identity based on the demographics.
Now you can give these identity names like: Shopper Sally or Business Owner Joe and from there you can use these identities to run ads on your digital platforms and specifically target these groups of people.
From there you can organize those pain points into commonalities from the people who fill out your buyer persona survey and from those commonalities you can create bullet points from the most common ones and use that to creates ads and write content on your website.
One thing I like to do when looking for commonalities is to underline the pain points they identify, write those pain points down on a list and mark how many times those specific pain points are mentioned.
This gives me a great list of items I can use for future marketing, common pain points and it helps when writing copy to help draw people into my funnel!