Do you know your target customer personas? As in the personas of the customers you would invest money in attracting more of as opposed to the people who perhaps waste time, undervalue the relationship or take ages to convert.
How can you effectively reach these target customer personas if you don’t understand their thought process? And, how can you be sure you’re putting your budget to the areas most likely to motivate them to do business with you?
You need to understand what defines the people most likely to successfully do business with you, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. We’ve written a free eBook that gives you a solid foundation in client persona creation.
Read on to discover what you’ll learn from our guide written by customer persona experts with decades of marketing experience…
Effective marketing involves targeting
So, what actually is a customer persona? We’ll explain how a customer persona is a theoretical client construed from all the information you’ve collected about the market. B2B companies have inherent queries and criteria for forming client personas, and you must know them.
Keep in mind even though you’re doing business with other organisations and not a customer in a store, there’s still a person or people running that business. Don’t imagine big corporations as dreary, featureless entities somehow entirely run by a Mr Burns from The Simpsons character.
There are real human beings behind decisions on contracts. Unless you understand them, you will likely miss the mark in your communications and pitches.
Constructing a client persona for your company is the ideal way to paint a picture of who actually wants your product or service.
When you invest in marketing but don’t know who wants your service, your only option is to knock on every door until someone shows interest. That’s called going into the market blind, a labour-intensive and costly tactic.
You have to look at the goal before you kick the ball, or you likely won’t score. Building a customer persona keeps your communications and advertising focused on the right people.
Establishing customer personas serves to streamline your digital marketing so your resources are appropriately deployed. By corresponding with and advertising to those most likely to be ideal clients, your budget is wisely spent on the right audience.
Research, review, reach out
Our free eBook breaks the customer persona creation process down into five easy steps:
1) Segment database: get insight into potential clients by looking at how they do business. What defines the people with whom they partner? You could adopt some of those attributes for your own company.
2) Conduct quantitative research: Roll out an online questionnaire to get helpful information about your ideal customer.
3) Review the data: Make sense of the intelligence you have collected and use it to create a profile of the people most likely to do business with you.
4) Communicate to understand more: reach out to potential customers and get an idea of what they really need and the pressures they face securing that.
5) Review your learnings: Put people into categories based on shared characteristics, values and behaviours. With this information, you can build a persona of value.
Get our B2B customer persona guide
Download our free eBook on customer personas to get the whole idea. When armed with insightful intelligence on the market, it’ll be much smoother producing focussed content that counts.
If you need help getting a great picture of your ideal business prospects, reach out to us and we’ll be glad to help.