Understanding your customer helps you to connect to them, it helps you understand their purpose and their paint points and how your business can meet their needs, combined with your strategic direction gives you a winning combination to really help to drive your growth. This blog is going to look at who your target customers are, buyer personas and how this information can improve the efficiency of your activity.
“If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” – Dr. Stephen R. Covey
Who is your target customer?
We need to think about who your target customer is, if you are an existing business, it makes sense to look internally to find the answers. We are going to take a look at how you can use sales data, team data, business strategy and your customers to build a picture of your customers.
Sales data
Look at your sales data, is there a pattern to your sales that jump out at you? I find these KPIs useful as a starting point –
- Revenue
- Number of orders
- Average order value
- Frequency of orders placed
Working with a customer recently we were able to identify segments of their customer database that were performing badly, they had a low quote to order conversion rate, they required a lot of assistance from the team when placing their order and their AOV was considerably lower than the rest of the database. It was clear that these were not the type of customers that they wanted to invest time and effort into.
Team data
Ask the business who they think your customers are, they will have a lot of experience dealing with your customers, they will be able to help you build a picture, it is really important that you get your wider business team involved especially your sales and customer service teams.
Business strategy
Does your business strategy already have a customer group that they would like to target? For example, Think Hatch a brand communications agency recently felt that they would like to focus their business strategy on the Healthcare sector with a particular focus on Medtech, this enabled them to focus their customer insight into the market in more detail.
Ask your customers
Your customers or potential customers will be able to provide you with great insight. There are lots of ways of getting feedback from customers such as reviews, surveys, polls or interviews. You would be surprised, your customers are happy to give feedback especially if there is an incentive for them.
By exploring these areas, you can start to build a picture of the types of customers to target and those to avoid.
You can have multiple target customers, but don’t go too far, if you have too many your approach won’t be targeted. Have too few and you may be going too niche.
Personas
Armed with the customer insight you can start to build out your buyer persons. Buyer personas help to humanise your customers, to understand what your customer wants from you and what makes them tick, by understanding these you can be more relevant to your customers and potential customers by turning up in the right places with the right messages. Companies using buyer personas are 2-5 times more likely to exceed lead and revenue goals, as reported by Aberdeen Research.
Building your personas
The types of things to consider are –
- Age
- Gender
- Social economic group
- Motivation – why do they want to buy your product?
- Objections – what will stop them from buying your product?
- Where they can be found
This will vary slightly if you are looking at B2B or B2C business, for example for a B2B you will want to consider –
- Business type – for example are they a SME
- Industry
- Industry challenges
- Job title
- Their purchasing authority
Here is an example of a B2C buyer persona for Pokita. Pokita are an Eco conscious women’s tennis wear ecommerce retailer whose range is made from ethically recycled plastic, providing luxury tennis wear that is functional and stylish.
You may not have all of the answers but you can make assumptions, they can be proved later.
With this information you understand what makes your customer tick, you understand why they want to buy, why they may not want to buy from you and how much that customer is worth to you.
How customer insight drives your brand and messaging
Once you understand your buyer personas you can tailor your brand, tone of voice and messaging. Using the above example, Pokita now understand how their customer ticks they can tailor their messaging to fit their personas. Using the Tennis lover persona as an example of how they can tailor their messaging to suit the Tennis lovers requirements.
The more relevant the message to your persona the more likely the customers you want will engage with your marketing activity.
How personas help to build your campaign targeting
With the information that the team have they know where they can find their potential and exciting customers, tennis club, tennis events, specialist websites, Instagram, Facebook (they will be active in tennis based groups) , TikTok and search engines. These would be good places to talk to them.
We also have their demographic information and interests, you can use this information to target in more detail. Personalising your campaigns targeting make your activity more relevant as a result it will increase engagement and ROI.
Testing your new messaging
As will all activity we want to understand if our approach is working and how we can refine it to improve our ROI.
There are lots of ways to test your new approach before it is fully rolled out. For example A/B test a paid social ad, PPC campaign or an email subject line, which can all be done via the platforms. Alternatively get your ideal customers involved with a focus group or survey to get hold of some qualitative insight.
There is the chance that even though we have done lots of research we have missed something and the changes can damage your activity. Carrying out a test will help to reduce a negative impact of your changes as well as the positive impact.
Don’t forget the importance of continuous testing and making iterations to your campaigns to adapt to the changing customer preferences and marketing dynamics.
Tracking your personas
Tying your personas into your CRM will enable you to continue to not only track their performance but tie this intelligence into your customer nurturing program and retention program, providing really personalised messaging via the website and triggered marketing campaigns around things like onboarding, cross sells and abandoned baskets. A study by Infosys found that 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalised, and 59% of shoppers believe that personalisation influences their purchasing decision which underlines the importance of personalisation.
Once these elements have been set up they can happily run in the back ground helping to improve your conversion rate and ultimately your revenue. They will need to be reviewed from time to time to make sure your personas are still relevant.
Enrich your customer data
The more we understand the more you are able to refine your messaging and improve your efficiencies. Review what data you are capturing about your customers, is there a way to capture data that can give us more insight into the customer to help to match it against your personas.
Summary
We have discussed how understanding your customers can lead to business growth, by understanding you are able to personalise your activity towards your key personas, the more personalised and relevant the more engaged users and customers will be. Increasing click through rates, conversion rates and average order value which all lead to improved ROI and greater growth. Understanding your customer is not a one-off project, you need to focus on continuous improvement, continuously reviewing and refining.
If you have started your customer insight journey, I would love to hear how you are getting on.