Think about two or three of your most profitable current customers – or customers you think would be a great fit for your company. Would your business be more successful if all your customers were like them? You want to attract customers who are a good fit for your products or services, who will be delighted with your solutions, who find value and are willing to pay for it, and who will recommend your business to others.
Identifying your ideal customer and using that information to create an ideal customer persona will focus your marketing efforts on attracting your best customers.
Define Your Ideal Customers
The first step to creating personas is to consider the demographics of your ideal customer. What is their age, gender, geographic location, background, and education? How do they approach gathering information to make a decision and then how to they actually make the decision? Are they likely to purchase online or go to a brick and mortar store? Do they use social networking to help make decisions? Online reviews? What is their level of comfort with the Internet, and how do they use the Internet, how often and for how long?
Take time to consider why they need your product or service and what attributes they value when considering a purchase. Do they buy by price, by functionality, by aesthetics? Is customer service important – do they need personal attention, meetings, and phone calls? What about after the sale support? Think about how your products and services meet their needs and what they value about your business.
Create An Ideal Customer Persona
Perhaps you have more than one kind of ideal customer. Especially if you have more than one type of product or service, you may need to identify an ideal customer persona for each type of product or service.
As you note the attributes of each ideal customer persona, begin to flesh them out as if they were real people. Give each persona a name, a position within a company, an age, a family, and an educational background. Anticipate or create their preferences, decision making approach and style of purchasing, their level of Internet savvy, of social media engagement, and which social networks they use and how frequently. Find a photo to represent them. What do they need? What needs aren’t currently being met?
The result should be one ideal client persona per marketing segment – a unique, distinct, nearly-real person, easily described, with enough information to allow you to determine what attributes affect their decision making and what calls to action will be effective.
An Example of an Ideal Customer Persona
Demographics
Name: Bonnie
Position: Small business owner of a 100-year-old women’s clothing store in Chicago suburb
Age: 46
Lives: Chicago, IL
Family: Married, 1 teenage daughter
Education: MBA
Career: Previous experience working retail and managing large retail chain store.
Community: Active in the local community, serves on several non-profit boards, supports local activities in store’s suburb.
Internet / Social Media: Internet time is task-oriented and limited to shopping and business news. Business marketing has been delegated to employees in the past, but Bonnie is interested in extending the store’s online marketing, and wants to outsource to a trusted consultant.
Other media: local paper, local business news
Overview: Bonnie is mostly concerned with the financial and operational aspects of the store, and delegates buying and marketing to staff or consultants. Marketing is currently mostly off-line traditional, but has a new website and is starting to use email marketing. Bonnie has a basic understanding of the value of online marketing, but little time for providing input. Bonnie values expertise, responsiveness, trustworthiness and ability to assume responsibility without a lot of direction and to deliver results and make money without a lot of overhead. She prefers personal and face-to-face communication.
Needs: Bonnie needs someone to create and market the aesthetic and experience-related aspects of her products and services and to focus on the historic and locally-owned benefits for consumers by tapping into social media, email marketing, and ongoing content creation featuring new products.
How do ideal customer personas promote effective internet marketing?
- Maintain your focus on your primary products and services.
- Identify content to educate clients as they are researching and to help potential customers view your business as the source of expertise and quality products and services.
- Think like your customers and make good decisions: your website is easier to use, your photos are more appealing, and your calls to action are more compelling.
- Use precious time and money wisely – in ways that are profitable and provide a good return on investment.
“…you have a tool to inform just about every area of your business. Anything that you would have previously asked ‘does that look right?’ about, and used gut feeling to answer, you can now ask ‘why doesn’tAlicewant to move from the basket to the checkout?’ or ‘what kind of imagery would appeal to Margery?’. It’s the nearest most of us will get to going out and speaking directly to our online customers. But perhaps the best thing is that it makes you ask these questions at all – and makes you ask them at every stage of your journey, whether you’re bringing a new product to market, optimizing an existing website, or writing copy. And you can ask these questions before any of your customers actually exist.
Ben Morel, How to Connect With your Visitors Using Personas