Most businesses are always on a scramble to pinpoint their ideal target market. Maybe if you’re big enough, then you can afford to pitch your products and services to a broader range of audiences. Until then, you’ll be trained toward polishing your own buyer’s persona.
Determining your business’s unique buyer persona can be complicated if you harbor biases. To get excellent insights that can help create the most accurate buyer’s persona, seek marketing services for your business franchise. They’ll help you learn how to identify your market, as well as the best approaches to maximize digital engagement. Here are some things you should look into when building your buyer’s persona.
Customer database
The data you need might already be in front of you. Sift through your CRM and your sales records and look into your customer base’s purchase history. Study the tangibles, such as the customer’s background. This includes their age, origin, occupation, income bracket, and life stage. Look into how fast or how gradual they took to close in on the decision to buy from you.
While you’re here, you might also want to affirm your deductions by conducting post-sales interviews. This is mainly to get context – it helps you understand how your product or service solved for their specific problem.
Social media engagement
If your customer database isn’t big enough to deduce reasonable assumptions about your persona, then look at how people are interacting with your brand instead. This is where social media analytics will figure into your efforts. Search your brand or your industry online, and look at the conversations being made around your business. Look at who’s starting and participating in them. What is their lifestyle like? What problems are they voicing out? How informed are they about your industry?
Leverage the analytics built into some of the most popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin to study these interactions.
Market research
If you’re starting from scratch and have no prior interactions or online presence to work with, then you have to conduct actionable market research that works outward rather than inward. This involves determining who your product or service is naturally for.
Simple keyword research will also help you determine how your prospective persona solves their problems. You can look up how people phrase their problems and the basic demographics of those who do.
Looking at how your competitors are performing gives you a clearer picture of your persona’s problems and approaches to their solutions.
Prospect survey
Sometimes, the easiest way to know who your prospective buyers are is just to interview them face-to-face. You can pinpoint interviewees yourself, or you can make a call for referrals or tap third-party networks for responders.
The goal of the interview is not to advertise your brand but to see where your brand can best fit into their everyday routine or how you can solve their problems. Ask questions like their frustrations in their day-to-day schedule, their regular source of news, and their most recent purchase – anything to help you understand how they get around.
The negative persona
Alongside your efforts to create a buyer’s persona, you should also exert the same in determining the negative persona to your brand. These are people who initiate unnecessary engagements with your business, which doesn’t lead to conversion or any sort of turnaround. They use up time and resources without the intention of purchasing or leveraging your brand whatsoever.
It’s important to note the distinction between your negative persona and past customers who have just had a negative experience with your brand.
Narrowing your audience to a specific segment not only helps your streamline your content. It also enables you to build better relationships with your prospective customers because you know exactly what they want and what they need a solution for.