Don’t leave out this important first step!
Every business owner knows that marketing is an important factor in creating success. The problem is figuring out what marketing strategies work, when to implement them, and how much to spend on them. Should I go online? Try social media? Stick to print and direct mail? Build my email list? All of those things might be great ways to bring customers through your doors, or to your website if that’s your aim. But how do you know which to choose?
That is the $100,000 question, but the truth is, you can’t really answer it well or with any real accuracy until you know who your marketing to. Who are your customers? And more to the point, who is your ideal customer?
You gotta know who you’re talking to!
Step one in creating any marketing plan is to understand and know your ideal customer. Why? Because to successfully facilitate any kind of conversion, you must first connect with the customer who is going to take advantage of what you have to offer. You can talk all day about the benefits of your services or products. You can list statistics, create beautiful tables and charts, and even present testimonials. If you aren’t talking to the right person, and you aren’t connecting with them on an emotional basis, then they aren’t hearing you. Connection is an emotional process, and it comes before hearing about what you’ve got to sell.
Think about this for a minute. If you remember buying something, whether it was a product or a service, your purchase was based on an emotional response to something. Either the product or service was going to give you a particular feeling, or maybe it was going to solve a problem that was weighing on you in which case it gave you relief. In both cases, the effects were emotional. You may have made good use of your intellect or cognition to review the product’s benefits, or to compare one product to another, or to examine which service provider might give you the best service, but ultimately, the decision had an emotional underpinning.
It’s a right brain thing
When you create any type of advertising, you must appeal to the right brain (the emotional, instinctual part of the brain). You must make the customer feel as though you are speaking personally to them and you understand them and what they need from you, on an emotional level. I (your company) want to help you solve your problem. I want you to feel better. I want you to be successful. I want to understand exactly what you need and give it to you.
Make that connection
You can’t begin to talk about what you have in the way of a product or service until you’ve made this connection. Without the connection, you are much more likely to be passed over, clicked off, or forgotten. Even if your ideal customer is a thinker rather than a feeler, you still have to appeal to them person-to-person before you can lay out the description of what you have to offer and what you can do
If you do that, you are no longer selling. You are connecting, and in the process you are providing something that adds to the other person’s life. You are giving, pleasing, serving and accommodating. Isn’t that easier than selling?
Marketing is about human-to-human relationships and can happen through any online or offline medium. ~Neil Patel
So, the first order of business is to know as much as you can about your customer. Here’s where the concept of “target market” comes in. Target markets are great, but often they are large in scope and consider only a few broad characteristics to create a group with a common need.
That really isn’t good enough. You need to get down to the nitty gritty and create a real human being, a single customer, that you know and to whom you can have a personal conversation. This is your ideal customer.
Keep in mind that your ideal customer isn’t the only type of customer you will attract, but by focusing on a more singular customer and getting personal with him through your advertising and marketing, you will draw in a much larger pool of people that fall somewhere in and around the range of your ideal customer. If you speak directly and personally to your ideal customer, you will reach others. The person-to-person feel of your ads and marketing will appeal to many because they too will feel that you are speaking directly to them. If you try and target a broad group, your advertising becomes more impersonal and falls flat.
If you’re talking to everybody you’re talking to nobody. ~Marie Forleo
If you have more than one type of service, or different product categories, you might want to create different ideal customer personas for those additional categories or services. That works fine too.
How to create your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)
Do some research
So how do you get started? If you are not a new business and you already have regular and repeat customers who are pleased with your products and services, then find out more about them. You can do this by surveying them, or by setting up interviews with a select group of them. Take four of your best customers out to lunch and ask them:
- How did you originally find or learn about us?
- What made you select us to provide this service over someone else?
- What part of our services or our products has been most helpful to you? What problems have they solved for you?
- What’s most important to you that you feel we have addressed?
- What about our product or service hit a chord with you?
- Is there anything that could make it better, or be more helpful to you?
Also note the demographics and concerns of your customer. Find out their:
- Age
- Education
- Industry
- Position in the company
- Authority to make decisions
- Responsibilities
- Pain points
- Barriers
- Priorities
What are their personal characteristics?
- Interests
- Family
- Values
- Are they more feeling oriented or are they thinkers?
- What’s the feel of their company and what is their business?
- Are they more business conservative or creative and artsy?
By really exploring and understanding the customers you have, you will gather some real and important information to help you create your ideal customer persona.
Now create your ideal customer persona
Create a person with basic demographics such as age, gender, family status (kids or married?), income level, worker or stay at homer, type of job or industry, psychological characteristics, interests, and values. Write this out.
Add to your list their deepest fears and pleasures, as well as their pain points.
- What keeps them up at night?
- What makes them happy?
- What do they need from you that can solve their problems?
- What is getting in the way of their success?
- What are their future aspirations?
For example, I have a parenting blog and I created an ideal customer as follows:
My ICP, whom I have named Carolyn, is a 35 year old woman who has two children and is married. She works and has a professional job. She’s very busy, works hard, cares greatly about her kids’ welfare, is intelligent, has a college degree, likes to read, researches for answers to her problems, and is open to new ideas. She is a thinker, although she feels guilty when she believes she isn’t doing the best job with her parenting. She become fearful when her children have problems and she can get into catastrophic thinking like “My kids are going to end up on drugs, or become depressed and unhappy and maybe suicidal, and hang out with the wrong crowd.” She also gets frustrated with behavior sometimes and doesn’t feel like she knows the best way to handle difficult behavior, especially arguing. This makes her feel both guilty and helpless. She’s a caretaker at heart, but an individual also. She tries to please everyone – her kids, her husband and her boss. Even with all that, she has a rebellious streak in her thinking and thinks outside the box.
When I go to write a new blog, I am thinking of Carolyn and talking directly to her, which (1) makes it easier to write, and (2) adds richness and personality to the writing that connects with the reader.
You get the idea. By creating a complete ideal customer composite that you can actually feel, you will be able to create a much more effective marketing plan that connects and attracts the customer you are seeking. Even if you are a new business and have no previous customers to research, you can and should still start by creating your ideal customer. Over time, you may change or tweak your ICP as you get feedback through your interactions with customers, but start with a definite persona in mind and make a connection in every piece of marketing or advertising you create.
I would love to hear from you about your experiences in creating ideal customer personas. Is there anything I have left out? What has worked for you? Please share so we can all benefit. Thanks so much!☺