Know Your Audience to Better Reach Them
By Ali Cornforth
In order for customers to “get” your company, you have to “get” them! Who are they? What do they do? Where do they come from? What are they searching for?
Identify the Ideal Customer
If you’ve ever written or read a short story, book, or play (who hasn’t?!), you know what character development is and how important it is to the story’s arc and ultimate success. Writers everywhere spend countless hours, months, and years investigating and creating their characters’ lives. By the time they start at chapter one, they know each character like he or she is their best friend, sister, or even him or herself. Marketing your company’s products or services is a similar playing field, presenting you with the challenge of creating buyer personas. These fictional models represent the spectrum of ideal buyers who will want to purchase your product or service. With these personas, you will learn exactly what strings to pull to attract customers. Aligning your marketing strategies with your target audience is tricky business, but the end goal will prove worthy of time investment.
Conduct Research
To begin creating a persona, you must investigate data that shows customer demographics and online behavior. With this information, you can then add speculation about customers’ personal histories, motivations, and concerns. These details will help form an actual person you are targeting. It is important to conduct research, interviews, and surveys to get a full understanding of what real customers are actually looking for.
With all of this research, you can move on to compiling organized profiles for each persona and spreading them around your company; in this way, every employee is on the same page when trying to reach a common persona. A profile must be detailed, easy to understand for all employees, and include the most pertinent information.
Add Depth
Including a picture allows your employees to know this persona through another dimension. Other information that should be included in a profile is goals, challenges, how we can help, real quotes (from interviews), common objections or worries, marketing messaging, and elevator pitch. Download a persona template now from HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/free-template-creating-buyer-personas/
Taking the time to create your own book of characters will give you access to a greater target audience who will see your ad and think, “Holy cow, they really understand me!” You will soon be well on your way to achieving leads and sales for your company. Check out this blog post about real companies, like Seventeen, Apple, and Procter & Gamble that use their understanding of buyer personas to their advantage: https://bit.ly/THYU5q
If you’re interested in reaching potential customers and growing your business, contact Dream Local Digital today to get started.
