Discover how you can identify your ideal clients online and convert them into paying customers.
A marketing persona is a profile that represents your ideal client.
Salespeople always say that it is important to not sell your products and services to your clients but rather solutions to their problems.My first question to all new entrepreneurs and start-ups out there is "whom do you want to sell to?"
A lot of times they respond, "everyone!"
Everyone is not a reasonable target. No two people are the same and no two people want the same thing. That is the beauty of life. However, knowing your niche means intrinsically knowing who your potential clients are.
Marketing personas will allow you to develop your messaging, create content, design your web site, plan sales strategies as well as to adapt your products and services to your clients' markets and needs.
Maybe not all of your clients will be in the same country, or even on the same continent. Cultural specific differences hold their weight in these situations and strategic marketers, product designers, and salespeople know that you can not always sell the same product in Sweden, the US, and Japan. Laws and regulations account for some of the product differentiation; however, cultural underlying differences are the reason why Coca-Cola has a different taste all over the world and not all BMW car models are the same throughout Europe.
Aarna, Peter and Kate are three of my marketing personas. I created these three personas to help myself, marketing & business coach for @commsanalyst, to properly develop and best market my service offer. Being able to visualize these three marketing personas and identify their potential issues and pain spots allow me to best engage with my audience in a way that is meaningful for them.Marketing personas are especially crucial in the digital sales space because your messaging and product/service offer arrives directly in the IG feed, LinkedIn posts, Twitter feed, or emailing list of such people as Aarna, Peter, and Kate. When you are in a face-to-face situation and actively are meeting with potential clients, the art of conversation and adaption through acute listening skills can help smooth out and convert targets into clients. We can not underestimate the power of traditional sales methods.
However, when we enter into the digital sales space where our marketing personas are confronted with hundreds if not thousands of product and service offers on a daily basis, it is crucial that your messaging, content, and approach be aligned with exactly what they need, and, be said in a way that they want to hear it.
Sometimes you only get one chance to get your message across.
Social media platforms are very competitive. Likewise, bounce rates on websites can tend to be quite high if you don't reel in those targets with strong content. In this high-paced world, targets want to comprehend who you are, what you are offering, and how you can help them in under 30 seconds.
In this article, I have broken down, in very simple terms, my three marketing personas. You can see who they are, what they do, and what their pain spot or issue is.
When creating your marketing persona, you need to put yourself into their shoes and imagine what they could be dealing with. Once you have identified their issues, you then know what you can clearly offer them as a viable solution. Use this solution as a basis for your messaging and content. Let this solution be a guide for you as you develop your sales pitch.
In my personal situation, I chose three very different marketing personas with three very different issues. I will not be offering the same solution to Aarna that I am to Peter, nor will I be offering the same solution to Kate as the other two. There will be obvious areas of conversion between the three marketing personas because I am, after all, a marketing & business coach who will guide them in growing their business. I will use my own toolset and tweak my service offer to provide a bespoke solution to all three.
According to a study from Mark W. Schaefer, social media expert, consultant, and respected author, three to four buyer personas usually account for over 90% of a company's sales.
If you were not interested in my marketing personas before, maybe with this information, you will be enticed into hearing me out.
Before you get started in building your 3-4 marketing personas, you need to plan on a two-step process.
1- Conducting Research
When creating a marketing/buying persona, you're creating a virtual personality that represents a key segment of your audience. To get a gauge on who your customers are, what they want, and what they're looking for you to solve, you can hold surveys and polls via your social media channels; interview current customers on a one-to-one basis as well as analyze competitor activity which is very easy to do nowadays through social media and see how they interact with their customers online.
2- Use Analytics
Please use and analyze your web site and social media statistics. This will allow you to glean useful information as to who is interested in you and/or your company. If you want to go a step further, online social media listening tools such as #Awario #Hootsuite #Talkwalker to name a few can provide you with essential social media analysis which means that you will be able to know who is saying what about you anywhere in the world on any platform at any given time and the importance of that person's influence. Likewise, you can use some of these tools to also centralize content management to render your efforts more efficient and time-effective.
Once you have gone through steps #1 and #2, you can now start preparing your marketing persona templates.
How to go about creating your marketing persona templates?
I kept mine very simple here and included images, names, businesses, pain points (issues), solutions, and my corporate response. However, I could dig deeper into Peter, Aarna, and Kate's personas and indicate variables such as demographics, age, hobbies, marital situations, interests. I am offering marketing & business coaching in both the virtual online space as well as operating a physical consultancy in Luxembourg and France. However, for the sake of this article, I have assumed they are all virtual and remote marketing personas. In that sense, demographics are not as important and would only come into play when setting up calls and online meetings due to the difference in time zones.
I could also dig deeper into the potential fears that Kate has. Here is an example:
After developing and implementing a well-oiled marketing strategy that translates into a strong online presence, increased brand authority, and an increase in sales in distribution partnerships, Kate could be worried about the after-effects. The daily effort that Kate would need to put into content creation and partner relationship development could set her mind into a tailspin and leave her with no time and a lack of control. That is a valid fear and it is something that many small business owners confront. Recognizing such fear in advance would allow me, for example, to offer Kate monthly strategic content coaching and an additional offer to modify her website to allow for extranet access with distributors to centralize, document, and streamline all exchanges.
Once you have decided upon your marketing persona template you should go ahead and see how this exercise will truly benefit you. I know that this seems tedious but, believe me, the positive aspects outweigh the chore.
Let me know how this works out for you. I would love to see your marketing persona templates and find out more about your business.
If you have any questions or need advice on this subject or any other marketing and business queries please do not hesitate to reach out to me at
alethia@commsanalyst.com or via DM on Instagram @commsanalyst.
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