Use Target Personas to personalize your content to the right customers and gain new clients.
Do you feel like you’re spending limited resources on gaining new clients, but always with minimal results? Then begin creating Target Personas to segment your customers into different behavioural groups and engage with them on a more personal level. In this blog we show you how.
What is a ‘Target Persona’ You Ask?
Simply put – a target persona is a specific customer you want to attract. Although it’s somewhat similar to a ‘target audience’ – a target persona differs in that it goes beyond behavioural data into lead generation details such as: buying needs, pain points and buying cycle behaviours.
Behavioural Data – the What Behind the Who
Behavioural data is an excellent starting point to narrowing down your target persona. This data includes the psychographics, geographic, demographics and behavioural buying cycles to help streamline your content and platforms and appeal to the right audience. This creates a lead generation strategy that pertains to your target persona.
Pain Points and Why They Matter
A pain point is basically a problem your customers are likely to have that your business aims to solve, and understanding your customers’ pain points is another way to narrow the funnel on your inbound marketing initiatives while uncovering your target persona.
Pinpointing these pain points puts you in the drivers seat of attracting the right prospects, spearheading your content in a way that results in a return on your investment.
Unpack Your Target Audience to Create a Target Persona
Narrowing down your target audience also plays a role in creating a target persona.
So get granular with your details, including such graphics as:
- Gender
- Age
- Marital Status
- Location
- Career and Title
- Buying Needs
Create a Snapshot: Meet Sarah: she’s 45 and from the Metro Vancouver area. She’s single with a teenage son, and is self-employed within her own vintage clothing company. Her basic buying needs pertain to making life easier without foregoing meaning, and more affordable without compromising on quality.
Dig Deeper – Target Persona’s Are All About the Details
Once you narrow down the basics about your target audience, you can then drill deeper into pain points and how your products or services can alleviate your customers concerns.
Go back to your Snapshot: As a single mom, Sarah is always looking for ways to provide her teenage son with a stimulating environment away from excessive screen time. Although she’s the decisions maker in the home, her son is a big influence on her buying decisions such as – where to eat, what to do and how the products coming into their home serve a greater purpose.
Core Insights to Creating a Target Persona
Consider these questions when connecting your company to your buyer:
- Buyers Priorities: what motivates your buying audience to use your product or service – what is their WHY?
- Personal Satisfaction: what personal satisfaction does/will your buyers receive by utilizing your company
- Buying Barriers: what might your target persona perceive as a buying barrier if they choose your company? What is critical for their call to action?
How To Source Your Customers to Create a Target Persona
Don’t rely on just your website and social media insights to create a Target Persona. You need to speak face-to-face with potential customers to. Use these tactics to do so:
- Real-Time Phone Interviews – although this might be initially perceived by company owners as invasive, people enjoy talking about what makes their world a better place. And if your business plays a part in that, digging deeper to discover why is a goldmine!
- Survey Says – asking your customers to take a quick survey, whether online or at your checkout, is another great way to get vital feedback, which will share the deeper buying needs and satisfaction of your customers.
- Rewards Work Like a Charm – offering your customers a “reward” for their time, is another great way to prompt feedback. Time is money, so offering a percentage off, or some other form of incentive, means a lot to people taking the time to share their insights, and will likely garner you a more legitimate response.
Insights to Include In Your Review Data
Express Writers had some great tips on how to ‘figure out how your persona accesses and consumes content’, some of which included:
- Where your customers heard about you
- How you customers prefer to shop (online/in-person)
- Which social media platforms they’re most likely to use
- What hours of the day they tend to shop
- If they enjoy reading blog content that helps them understand products or services better
- If online influencers influence their buying decisions
- What matters to them most when making a buying decision
- What is their call to action or trigger to get them from window shopper to an actual point of purchase
Why Content is Queen When it Comes to Your Target Persona
In the digital marketing realm, content is Queen. But it’s not the squeaky wheel methodology that attracts key customers – quite the opposite actually. Rather than having endless reams of rhetoric style content, it is important to create and deliver the right content to the right platforms if you are going capitalize on your target persona.
Shares, likes, click-throughs and a call to action are the analytics you want to be pulling from your digital marketing reports, uncovering if your content efforts are paying off with actual interest and a return on your investment (ROI).
Target Persona Created – Now It’s Time to Put a Bow On It!
Now that you’ve gathered all the data, you get to wrap this package up baby!
Altogether, your data collection compiles the type of content your buyers are looking for in order to create your target persona. This includes the platforms they are most likely to use and the pain points you can readily address.
Overall, you’re looking to take static digital content and make it as human as possible. Buying decisions are not about duty, they are most often about desire. It’s your privilege to uncover your customers’ desires and help turn a window shopper into a beautifully adopted Target Persona.
Looking to better understand your customer’s buying decisions and begin creating a target persona? Our Digital Marketing Essentials course will provide you with an overview of all of the elements of Digital Marketing, helping you to understand…
- Target Personas
- Role of the Website
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Calls to Action (CTA)
- Social Media
- …and more!
At myBusinessSkills.com, we offer a greater understanding on how your website, social media and email marketing can work together to achieve your business goals, and look forward to assisting you in narrowing down your target persona with our online Digital Marketing Essentials Course!